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Rebirth-A Philosophical Study
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often metaphorical language has been used. As a caterpiller crawls from one leaf to another, and as goldsmith melts the gold of an ornament and prepares a new ornament, so does a soul, create a new body in the new birth 59 The soul creates its new body out of its existing element just as the potter shapes his vessels from the existing clay.60 As we change an old garment and put on a new one, so does a soul change the old body to a new one in the next birth. The Jainas explain the process of transmigration on the basis of the five bodies. At death, the soul surrounded only by fiery (taijasa) and Karma body, sets out in a few minutes, still in the form it has in the last existence, to the abode of a new birth. Having reached there, it assimilates matter and the structure of the new body. According to the Buddhists of the aggregates which form the self, the psychophysical component of the individual are destroyed. Only the vijñāna remains. Vijñāna is projected with all its dispositions, formed due to the Karma, in the next form. It forms the genesis of a new individual and the dispositions in the form of Karmic process samskära produced by avidya (ignorance) are fixed in vijñāna. The new formed acts produce Karma and become the cause of another birth. The Jainas and some Buddhists believe that new births directly follow death. Sarvāstivādins assume an intermediate existence between deaths and births due to Karma. The intermediate being is gifted with the higher faculty of vision and the capacity for penetratiog space without resistance. It becomes a nucleus for a new birth. Vasubandhu says that the intermediate being has the size of a five or six year old child and the form of being in which it will be later reborn. The idea of intermediate being and the idea of the soul furnished with a suitable body are analogous, but with a difference that intermediate being is newly created only for the span between death and birth. The theosophists have described the passage of the soul from birth to existence on the basis of the five shells of the self.
In Indian thought there has been a harmonious blending, as we mentioned earlier, of the philosophical conception of soul, the psychological process of disintegration and reintegration in the concept of subtle bodies and the mythological ideas in the form of description of the journey of the soul after death, in order to give a coherent picture of the transmigration into various forms of existence which would appeal to the common men also. For instance, regarding the journey of the soul to new life three types of ideas have been presented. (1) the idea of prēta, (2) of the judgement of the dead associated with the function and field of Yama and (3) the idea of the ascension of the soul to heaven. It is believed that the spirits of the dead reside for sometime round about their old abode. Gifts are offered to pacify
59. Byahadāranyaka Upani şad, 4. 4, 3. 60. Yājñavalk ya Samhitā. III. 146.
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