Indian Antiquary Vol 60

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 44

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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ FEBRUARY, 1931
There follows a passage in which the translations of Vambéry and Diez differ materially, ending with the statement that the Khushab and Nilab rivers were both crossed by boat. By the KhushAb can only be meant the Jhelum,79 Khushåb being a town on its bank some 40 miles below Bhers: but why the passage of this river should be mentioned twice is not understood. By the Nilab is meant the Indus.80
In the beginning of Jumada I, or in the middle of March, 1556, Sidi 'Ali and his companions moved on westwards through the Khaibar Pass towards Kabul: and here we must leave them to continue their extraordinary journey and win through even greater difficulties and dangers before they reached the Bosphorus more than a year later. Enough has been written perhaps to show the great interest that attaches to this early travel story, and how well it merits study and efficient editing from a reliable text, illustrated by full historical and geographioal notes.
SCRAPS OF TIBETO-BURMAN FOLKLORE.
BY SIR RICHARD C. TEMPLE, Br. (Continued from vol. LIX, page 187.)
5. Rebirth. "We were overtaken by one or two of our village friends who were on the way (p. 106) to the monastery, which lay in the direction of Kampa Dzong. .... We learned that they were carrying a new flag to present to the monastery on behalf of a poor man, who was dying of pneumonia. He was hoping that the present might enable him to acquire enough merit to secure a longer span of life, or if fate was against him and he was destined for death, that he might have a felicitous rebirth, for it seemed he had led a somewhat gay and merry life and had dreamed that as a punishment he was to be reborn as a louse."
In Shway Yoe [Sir George Scott], The Burman, we read: "It is written that more hardly will a needle cast from the summit of Mt. Myinmo [Meru) across the wide Thamoddaya [Samudra] Seamore hardly will it touch with its point, as it falls, another needle, standing point upwards in the great Southern Island-than will any given creature become a human being," at the next birth.
The doctrine of rebirth was introduoed into Tibet with Buddhism and is typical of Hindu philosophy generally. It is a very early fundamental belief of Hinduism, including Buddhism and Jainism. The doctrines set up by the early Brahmanic Schools of Philosophy (see my Word of Lalla the Prophetess) "were based on the Aryan instinct of the godhead and were dominated by contact with the ideas of totemistic aborigines, believing man's spirit-soul to be a separate entity, able to leave the body at will and after death to live in other human bodies and even in animate things thought to be capable of harbouring a soul." The idea arose that there was a repetition of death and rebirth for ever as the fate of mankind, and "this led eventually to seeking after release from such a prospect..... The general argument ran thus : 'this world is an illusion: the one reality is the Absolute, unchanging, inert, unknowable. The varying fortunes, characteristics and experiences of individual human beings were explained by transmigration and reincarnation of personal souls expiating the action of former lives, with a final release at last by reabsorption into the universal soul, of which they were held to be but emanations. So the merit of actionless, introspective, ascetic life, in this life, became the passport to release from rebirth. The necessity of a recurring rebirth before sufficient merit can be accumulated to obtain release led to the idea of cyclio destruction and recreation of the whole earth.” At p. 29 of the same work we read: “The dread of rebirth in a humbler sphere than the present is the bugbear of a guilty conscience in all countries dominated by Hinduism."
79 It will have been noticed how many of the rivers were called after places on their banks, cf. also the wo of the ChenAb, which was called the Sodhara or Sadhara from a town of that name on its left bank.
80 This name (Nilab) seems originally to have been the name of a forry across the Indus, somo 18 milo below Attook, but it came to be applied to the river itself,