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Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
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reap the consequences of the actions of the present life, it is necessary to postulate some sort of existence even after death. After death, the body perishes but something must remain. That entity which remains even after death is called soul by the thinkers. Naturally one may ask, rebirth of what? Obviously, as the body perishes at the time of death, the soul which is immortal, evolves after death of the body. Hence, in rebirth, the soul is the same because the same soul has to reap the fruits of its own actions, but the body is different. It gets the body according to its actions performed in previous life. So, Immortality of Soul and Rebirth, are the two main assumptions of the Law of Karma.
In the hymns of the Rg Veda, we have the conception of Rța as a moral law. “It is the universal essence of things. It is the Satya or the truth of things. Disorder or Anti Rta is falsehood, the opposite of truth."89
According to this law, the good are those, who follow the path of Rța. Rebirth is related to this moral law. Good men will be born in good and affluent families. The Vedic Aryans do not appear to have special doctrine of life after death. They were convinced that death was not the end of life. After night the day comes and after death, the life comes. So the gerins of belief in the concept of rebirth can be traced in the Rg Veda itself.
In Buddhistic Philosophy also, we have the reference of the concept of rebirth. Though the conception of a soul as a permanent substance has been denied by the Buddhists, they believe in rebirth. For Buddha, the life is an unbroken series of states. The continuity of life depends on its causal connection. As from one flame another may be lighted, in the same way one life is connected with the other on a causal basis. Rebirth is therefore not transmigration, i.e., the migration of the same soul into another body.
Pythagoreans themselves were injuenced by Vedāntism. They believed in an entity which existed even after death, which they saw in the form of number. Plato afterwards took it as Idea.
According to Herodotus, the Egyptians also taught it. But some scholars now point out that in Greece it was taught by
