Karma and Rebirth

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

Page 60

THE REINCARNATING ENTITY share in the Absolute, as it were, but by the Buddha's time this spiritual conception had been debased, as in modern Christianity, to that of an immortal soul. Against this degradation of a mighty truth the Buddha taught the doctrine of An-attanot-(immortal) Soulmdestroying the wrong conception of the positive by stressing the negative. In the well-known story of Vacchagotta the Wanderer, there is a passage on the nature of self which explains the Buddhist and therefore the true Brahmin point of view. Vacchagotta asked the Buddha what he had to say about the Self, but the Blessed One refused to answer. When the questioner had departed in disgust, the Venerable Ananda enquired the reason for his silence. “If I had answered that the Self exists," the Buddha said, “ that would be to side with those who are eternalists. But if, Ananda, I had replied that the Self does not exist, that would be to side with those who are annihilationists." The answer is further elaborated, but the point is already clear. The Self is and is not. That which is reborn is the old man and yet a new. The soul is immortal, but it is changing every hour. As an immortal entity there is no soul, even, as a personal deity, there is no God.
Analogics sometimes help, and a favourite theme of Buddhist exegesis is the flame. Life is a flame, and transmigration, new becoming, is the transmitting of the flame from one combustible aggregate to another; just that, and nothing more. If we light one candle from another, the communicated flame is one and the same, in the sense of an observed continuity, but the candle is not the same. Note that each candle perishes, but the flame lives on, and note that the flame, though in a way a particular flame, is in essence Light, and as such common to all.
The proximate force or energy which out of the past material produces a new being' is Trishna, the thirst for sentient existence, the libido of modern psychology, but Karma is the
1 Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, Coomaraswamy.
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