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SANKHYA AND YOGA
and not only underlies its system of psychology but also gives the key to its interpretation of the mystery of metempsychosis. Within the gross body, which suffers dissolution after death, every living being possesses an inner subtle body, which is formed of the sense-faculties, vital breaths, and inner organ. This is the body that goes on and on, from birth to birth, as the basis and vehicle of the reincarnated personality.18 It departs from the sheath of the gross body at the time of death, and then determines the nature of the new existence; for within it are left the traces-like scars or furrows--of all the perceptions, acts, desires, and movements of will of the past, all the propensities and trends, the heritage of habits and inclinations, and the peculiar readinesses to react this way or that, or not to react at all.
The technical terms used to denote these reminders of the past are vāsanā and samskāra. The former word (from the root vas, “to dwell in, to abide") can be used to refer to the smell that clings to a cloth that has been perfumed with fragrant smoke. A vessel of unbaked clay retains the smell of whatever it first contained, and in the same way the subtle body is pervaded by the vāsanās ("fragrances, perfumes, the subtlc residues") of all its earlier karma. These vāsanās tend to cause sainskāras, permanent scars that go from life to life.
The noun saīskāra, signifying “impression, influence, operation, form, and mold,” is one of the basic terms of Indian philosophy. It is derived from the verbal root kr, “to make." Saṁskļ means "to make ready, to fashion to some use, to change or transform"; the opposite idea being pra-kr-cf. praksti: matter as it is at hand, presented in its raw or virgin state.
48 This reincarnating subtle body deserves the name of "soul" much more than the life-monad, though the latter is what has been constantly translated "soul" (by Garbe and others). And yet "soul" is not quite correct here either; for the material of the subtle body is essentially lifeless, senseless (ada); it is rather a body than a soul.-Better, when translating from the Sanskrit, not to use our animistic Occidental term.
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