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REBIRTH - A PHILOSOPHICAL STUDY
Karma and transmigration of soul are closely linked principles. They are the basal presuppositions of Indian thought. Indian philosophers have not tried to prove them as they have taken them as postulates of their philosophies and objects of intuitive experience. Transmigration of soul is a corollary of the principle of Karma. If Karma is to be exhausted, a series of births have to be taken, as it is not possible to exhaust all the accumulated Karma in one single life. The prophets, like the Buddha, had to take successive lives for exhausting the Karma accumulated in the past, after getting a glimpse of enlightenment about the highest truth, The first tirthankara Rsabha had to go through ten lives to become a tīrihankara after the enlightenment. Vardhamana Mahavira, the twenty-fourth tīrthankara went through thirty-six lives after getting a glimpse of truth, to attain the state of tirthankara, At the time of Rşabha, Mahāvira was Marici who was preaching KapilaSiddhānta, Rsabha had predicted that Marici would be the twenty-fourth tirthankara. These principles of Karma and rebirth are universal principles accepted by all, although the advancement of knowledge in the empirical sciences has given rise to fashionable agnosticism in respect of these principles. Yet there is something very impressive in the unanimity with which man, from the beginning of his planetary existence, has refused to see in death the end of his being and activities. In a still remoter past, the cave. men of the Paleolithic age, laid their dead reverently to rest with the same belief as a further life. Explorations in France, recently made, have brought to light a number of instances of ceremonial interament, exhibiting the excavated grave, the carefully disposed skeleton with offerings of food and implements laid beside the body for use in the life beyond.
Justification for the principle cannot be established on purely logical ground. But the belief is widespread from the primitive times and has also been held in the philosophical world in the West, with the Orphics and the Pythagorean, and in ancient Indian religious thought. Apart from prevalence of the belief in the primitive races of the world, the modern minds have been trying to find out justification in the fields of extrasensory perception and parapsychological phenomena. The Universality of this widespread belief points to the fact that there must be some truth implied in it. Indian seers have mentioned it as an act of faith and as an intuitive knowledge of the enlightened men.
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