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Rebirth-A Philosophical Study
ofton metaphorical language has been used As a caterpiller crawls from one loaf to another, and as goldsmith melts the gold of an ornamcot and pre paros a new ornament, so does a soul, create a new body in the new birth The soul creates its new body out of its existing element just as the potter ahapes his vessels from the existing clay As we change an old garment and put on a new one, so does a soul change the old body to a new one in the next birth The Jainas explain the process of transmigration on the basis of the five bodies At death, the soul surrounded only by fiery (taujaso) and Karma body, sets out in a few minutes, still in the form it has 10 the last existence, to the acode of a new birth Having reached there, it assimilates matter and the structure of the new body According to the Buddhists of the aggregates which form the self, the paychophysical component of the individual aro destroyed Only the Aana remains Vilang is projected with all its disposition, formed due to the Karma, in the next form it forms the genesis of a new individual and the dispositions in the form of Karmic process samskara produced by avidya (ignorance) are fixed in vijana The new formed acts produce Karma and become the cause of another birth The Jainas and some Buddhists believe that new births directly follow death Sarvastıvadıns assume an intermediate existence between deaths and births duo to Karma The intermediate being is gifted with the higher faculty of Vla1on and the capacity for peactrating space without resistance It becomes & nucleus for a new birth Vagabandbu says that the intermediate being has the size of a five or six year old child and the form of being 11 which it will be later reborn The idea of intermediate being and the idea of the soul furnished with a suitable body are analogous, but with a difference that intermediate belog is newly created only for the span between death and birth The theosophists have described the passage of the soul from birth to oxlatence on the basis of the five shells of the self
the form of delicture of the common se types of local
In Indian thoaght there has been a harmonious blending, as we mentoned earller, of the philosophical conception of soul, the peychological process of disintegration and relategration in the concept of sobule bodies and the mythological ideas in the form of description of the journey of the soul after death, In order to give a coherent plcture of the transmigration into various forms of existence which would appeal to the common mon also. For Instance, regarding the journey of the soul to now life three types of Idou hevo been presented (1) the idea of pruta, (2) of the judgement of the dond asociated with the function aod field of Yama and (3) the idea of the asconsion of the soul to heaven It la believed that the spirits of the dead roaldo for sometimo round about their old abode Gifts are offered to pacify
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Byahadaranyaka Upani sad 4 4,9 Yalaavalkya Samhita III 146
