Kathakoca or Treasury of Stories

Author(s): C H Tawney
Publisher: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation New Delhi

Page 12

thinkers of India with a weight of gloomy foreboding. * The operation of this doctrine has, in my opinión, never been better described than by Professor Gough. I quote from p. 21 of his 'Philosophy of the Upanishads,' a book which seems to me to set forth, in a way intelligible to Europeans, the main ideas which underlie the religions and philosophies of India :
..The doctrine of metempsychosis, a belief widely spread among the lower races of men, coming slowly and surely to lay hold of the Hindu mind, this penal retributiont came to be expected in a series of embodiments in vegetal, animal, human, and extra-human shapes. Each living soul was to pass from body to body, from grade to grade, from sphere to sphere of life in obedience to a retributive operation, by which suffering followed evil-doing with the blind and fatal movement of a natural law. As the life has been, such will the next embodiment be in the series of lives; the present and the future, with their pains and transitory pleasures, being the outcome of what the soul has done in its anterior embodiments. The series of lives has had no beginning, and shall have no end, save to the perfected sage finally resolved into the fontal essence of the universe. A life of such and such experiences follows from works of such and such a nature, good works sending the soul upwards in the scale of embodiments into a life human, superhuman, or divine, and evil works sending the soul downwards into bestial, insect, vegetal, penal embodiments in this world, or in a nether world of torture. In this world, above, below, there is no place of rest; paradises and purgatories are but stages in the endless journey. In
* The doctrine of metempsychosis, as applied by the Jains, accounts in a very simple way for the inequality of human conditions. It would appear, also, that it must have a very beneficial effect on the morality of the votaries of that religion. This will, I think, strike everyone who peruses the tales contained in the Kathákoca,' though sometimes the crimes of one birth seem to be selected for punishment in an arbitrary way. It is only in human births that any advance can be made on the road to liberation. This doctrine is clearly enunciated in the Kathakoça.'
† Professor Gough has been speaking of the doctrine of penal retri. bution as we find it in the later period of Vedic religion.