Karma and Rebirth

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: Albemarle Street London

Page 57

SOME DIFFICULTIES CONSIDERED necessary illusions of manifestation. It would be impossible, at least to our conception, to guide an incoming ‘soul’to a body and set of circumstances which exactly accord with its needs and deserts, and all that did not do so, pleasant or unpleasant, would presumably be the subject of later adjustment by the all-embracing and utterly just Law. Karma and Duty
There are some who find difficulty in reconciling Karma and duty. If all that we do is what we are, and according as we are so we act, what, they ask, is the place of duty in the Law's machinery ? The answer imports a new term, Dharma (in Pali, Dhamma), which, like most key-words in Oriental philosophy, is untranslatable. Many words have been suggested in translation, among them Law, Duty, the Good, the True, Righteousness, the Norm, the Ideal and even the Way, but it is the symbol of a concept of too complex a nature to admit of translation by any one English term. ... It may be described as the outward manifestation of a body of Teaching, Moral Law, Doctrine or system of philosophy which has existed for all time, in the abstract world of thought, which is Plato's 'Noumenal Realm'. Hence the meaning of Norm, or Ideal Form, as the clothing of a vast idea. ...1
Considering the word as duty, that which in ‘rightness' should be done, it has been said that the Dharma of one life is that portion of the individual's Karma due to be discharged or worked out in that life. As such, it is one's ' duty' to face it, accept it and so be rid of it, whether it be 'good' or 'evil'. Hence the insistence in nearly every occult work on the due performance of all duty, from the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible to The Voice of the Silence and the Dhammapada. To quote from the last, “ By oneself evil is done ; by oneself one suffers. By oneself evil is left undone ; by oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself; no one can purify another "
1 What is Buddhism ? The Buddhist Lodge, London.
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