Overwhelmed with grief and pity, his heart moved to its inmost depths, Arjuna drops his bow on the ground and thus addresses his Teacher, the divine Krishna:
"Seeing these my kinsmen arrayed, O Krishna, eager to fight,
"My limbs fail and my mouth is parched, my body quivers and my hair stands on end.
"Gandiva (Arjuna"s bow) slips from my hand, and my skin burns all over; I am not able to stand, and my mind is whirling.
"And I see adverse omens, O Keshava (hairy one). Nor do I foresee advantage by slaying kinsmen in battle.
"For I desire not victory, O Krishna, nor kingship nor pleasures; what is kingship to us, O Govinda (Thou who knowest all that is done by our senses and organs), what enjoyment or even life?
"Those for whose sake we desire kingship, enjoyments, and pleasures, they stand here in battle, abandoning life and riches.
"Teachers, fathers, sons, as well as grandfathers, mothers" brothers, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law, and other relatives.
"These I do not wish to kill, though (myself) slain, O Madhusudana (slayer of Madhu, a demon), even for the sake of the kingship of the three worlds (the habitations of men, G.o.ds, and semi-divine beings); how then for earth?
... "I will not do battle."
The divine Krishna then smiled upon his well-beloved disciple, and said to him:
"Thou grievest for those that should not be grieved for, and speakest words of wisdom (words that sound wise but miss the deeper sense of wisdom). The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.
"Nor at any time verily was I not, nor thou, nor these princes of men, nor verily shall we ever cease to be hereafter.
"As the Dweller in the body seeketh in the body childhood, youth, and old age, so pa.s.seth he on to another body; the well-balanced grieve not thereat....
"These bodies of the Embodied One, who is eternal, indestructible, and boundless, are known as finite. Therefore fight, O Bharata.
"He who regardeth This (the Dweller in the body) as a slayer, and he who thinketh it is slain, both of them are ignorant. It slayeth not, nor is it slain....
"Who knoweth It indestructible, perpetual, unborn, undiminishing; how can that man slay, O Partha, or cause to be slain?
"As a man casting off worn-out garments, taketh new ones, so the Dweller in the body, casting off worn-out bodies, entereth into others that are new.
"Weapons cleave It not, nor fire burneth It, nor waters wet It, nor wind drieth It away....
"Further, looking upon thine own Dharma,[98] thou shouldst not tremble, for there is nothing more welcome to a Kshattriya than righteous war."
Here are other extracts of this wonderful teaching:
"Many births have been left behind by Me and by thee, O Arjuna. I know them all, but thou knowest not thine, Parantapa."
"He who thus knoweth My divine birth and action, in its essence, is not born again, having abandoned the body, but he cometh unto Me, O Arjuna."
"Having attained to the worlds of the pure-doing, and having dwelt there for eternal years, he who fell from Yoga is reborn in a pure and blessed house.... There he obtaineth the complete yogic wisdom belonging to his former body, and then again laboureth for perfection, O joy of the Kurus!"
"But the Yogi, verily, labouring with a.s.siduity, purified from sin, fully perfected through manifold births, he treadeth the supreme Path.... He who cometh unto Me, O Kaunteya, verily he knoweth birth no more."
The daily life of Hindu and Buddhist is so entirely based on Reincarnation and on its foundation, the law of Causality, that this faith gives them patience in the present and hope for the future; for it teaches that man, every moment he lives, is subject to the circ.u.mstances he has created, and that, though bound by the past, he is yet master of the future.
Why cannot we, in this troubled Europe of ours, accept this belief as the solution of the distressing problem of the inequality of conditions, for to the weak in rebellion against oppression it would come as a soothing balm, whilst the strong would find in it a stimulus to devoted pity such as wealth owes to poverty and happiness to misfortune? Herein lies the solution of the whole social problem.
EGYPT.
If we pa.s.s from India to Egypt, the land of mystery, we again find the world-wide doctrine of palingenesis hidden beneath the same veil.
According to Egyptian teaching, the theory of the "fall of the angels"
was accepted; the fallen angels were human souls[99] who had to become reincarnated till they reached a state of purification; fallen into the flesh, subjected to its vicissitudes and pa.s.sions, these souls had to evolve, in successive rebirths, until they had developed all their faculties, obtained complete control over the lower nature, and won back their original purity; then this latter would no longer be the unconscious purity of youthful innocence, but the conscious purity of mature age, _i.e._, of the soul that has known both good and evil in the course of its experiences, has overcome the serpent of matter, the tempter, and voluntarily chosen the life of virtue.
The "Judgment" of the after-life is determined by the degree of purity that has been attained; if insufficient, the soul returns to earth, there to inhabit a human, an animal, or a vegetable form, in accordance with its merits or demerits.
These lines prove that Egyptian teaching has come down to us, covered with gross dross and slag, as it were, which must be subjected to careful sifting; when this is done, we see that it also sets forth the transmigrations to which the elements of the various vehicles are subjected,[100] the physical ternary[101] rises from the dead, the animal man[102] transmigrates; and man, properly so-called,[103]
reincarnates, but the details of these processes have been so confused in such fragments of Egyptian palingenesis as we possess that it is no easy matter to find the traces of this cla.s.sification.
For instance. Herodotus tells us:
"The Egyptians were the first to hold the opinion that the soul of man is immortal and that when the body dies it enters into the form of an animal which is born at the moment, thence, pa.s.sing on from one animal into another until it has circled through the forms of all the creatures which tenant the earth, the water, and the air, after which it enters again into a human form and is born anew. The whole period of the transmigration is (they say) three thousand years."[104]
This pa.s.sage evidently refers to the resurrection of the "life atoms."
H. P. Blavatsky, in the _Theosophist_, vol. 4, pages 244, 286, confirms this in the following words:
"We are taught that for 3000 years, at least, the "mummy,"
notwithstanding all the chemical preparations, goes on throwing off to the last invisible atoms, which, from the hour of death, re-entering the various vortices of being, go indeed "through every variety of organised life forms." But it is not the soul, the fifth,[105] least of all, the sixth[106] principle, but the life atoms of the Jiva,[107]
the second principle. At the end of the three thousand years, sometimes more, sometimes less, after endless transmigrations, all these atoms are once more drawn together, and are made to form the new outer clothing or the body of the same monad (the real soul) which they had already been clothed with two or three thousands of years before. Even in the worst case, that of the annihilation of the conscious personal principle,[108] the monad, or individual soul,[109] is ever the same, as are also the atoms of the lower principles,[110] which, regenerated and renewed in this ever-flowing river of being, are magnetically drawn together owing to their affinity and are once more reincarnated together...."
Certain authors have stated that belief in Resurrection was the origin of embalming, because it was thought that after three thousand years the soul returned to the same body, that it immediately rose again, when the body had been preserved, whereas if such had not been the case, it entered wherever it could, sometimes even into the body of a lower creature. Herodotus, however, says that after the cycle of three thousand years the soul enters a new body, not the mummified one,[111] and this would lead one to imagine that there were other reasons for the process of embalming. Indeed, it became general only during the decline of Egypt; at the beginning, it was reserved for the hierophants alone, with the object of allowing their physical molecular elements to pa.s.s into the still coa.r.s.e bodies of the ma.s.ses and help forward ordinary souls by the powerful influence of the magnetic potency with which they were charged. It is also for this reason that the body of a Yogi, in India, is interred, whilst in the case of other men cremation is the rule.
On the other hand, among the mult.i.tude of beliefs left in Egypt by degenerate traditions, there were found some which hinted, more or less clearly, at occult truths, and which might have perpetuated or generalised this practice. It was supposed, according to Servius, that the transmigrations[112] began only when the magnetic bond between the soul and its remains had been broken by the complete disintegration of the corpse; consequently they did all in their power to preserve this latter.
This belief may readily be connected with theosophic teaching which says that the affinity existing between the visible corpse and the soul clad in its kamic (astral) body, the animal soul in Kamaloka (Purgatory), is capable, in certain cases, of detaining this soul on earth, after its disincarnation, and thus delaying, for a longer or shorter period, the disintegration of the elements of the pa.s.sional body. It is these elements, not the soul, that pa.s.s over into animal bodies, and, contrary to the opinions set forth in Egyptian exotericism, it is to the interest of the soul to free itself from terrestrial attraction and from its kamic (astral) vehicle, and not to remain bound down to earth. Consequently, embalming was a mistaken action, the result of an error of doctrine, or at all events of teachings that were incomplete, imperfectly transmitted, and misunderstood.
Egypt multiplied her symbols of palingenesis. Resurrection--in the sense of re-birth in general--was symbolised by the toad which then became the G.o.ddess Hiquet. This animal was chosen because it lives in air and in water,[113] because it can remain imprisoned a very great number of years without either air or food[114] and afterwards come back to life. G. Maspero, in his _Guide du Visiteur au Musee de Boulac_, tells us that the early Christians in Egypt had adopted this symbolism, and that the lamps in their churches were formed in the shape of a toad, and bore the inscription, "I am the Resurrection," in the Greek language. This G.o.ddess-toad may still be seen in the museum of Boulac.
The Scarabeus, or beetle,[115] symbolised the "personality," the expansion of the mental substance, projected, so to speak, by the higher mental body, at each incarnation, into the new kamic (astral) body; a certain number of them were always deposited with the mummies, and the beetle was represented standing on an ear of corn, a symbol of the attainments acquired during the past earth life. Indeed, the development of the Ego is effected by that of the personality it sends on to the earth each incarnation; it is the new mental body which controls the new astral and physical bodies of each incarnation, and which is, in very truth, the flower and the fruit of the labour of life.
Sacred Egyptology tells us that the scarabeus requires to be "osirified," united to its "living soul," or Ego, which sent it forth.
I will now give the reason for this emanation.
When, after disincarnation, the purgatorial life begins, the Ego endeavours to throw off the kamic (astral) body, to pa.s.s into the higher world--the mental plane--which is its home, there to enjoy the delights of heaven. Thereupon a veritable battle begins. On the one hand, the Ego endeavours to withdraw the mental body, which, at the beginning of the incarnation, it sent into the kamic body, and to take it to itself; on the other hand, the pa.s.sional body[116]--which instinctively feels its life bound to that of the mental element, which gives it its strength, vital activity, and personal characteristics--tries to keep back this centre of individual life, and generally succeeds in doing so up to a certain point. When desire, during incarnation, has regularly gained the victory over the will, the pa.s.sional body, or Kama, maintains the supremacy beyond the grave, and the Ego, in endeavouring to rescue its mental projection from the kamic bonds, yields up a more or less considerable fragment thereof, and this fragment is restored to liberty only when the pa.s.sional body of the deceased has become disintegrated by the forces of the astral world. This has been called the _fire_ of purgatory.
On the other hand, when the Ego, during life, has always refused the appeals of the lower nature, it easily withdraws, after death, from the net of pa.s.sion, the substance it has infused therein, and pa.s.ses with this substance into that part of the mental plane which is called "heaven."
Such is the struggle that Egypt committed to her annals when she inscribed upon papyrus or engraved upon stone the journeyings of the soul into the world of shades. The soul--the mental personality--which demands "osirification," and invokes the Ego, its G.o.d and projector, beseeching him to draw it to himself that it may live with him, is the lower "I." This "I" has not exhausted the "desire to live" on earth; its desire is impressed on the germs it has left in the causal body, and brings the Ego back to incarnation; this is the reason it prays and desires the resurrection[117] of its "living soul," the Ego.
Denon, in his _Journeyings in Egypt_, has made known to us the Sha-En (the book of metamorphoses), written in hieratic signs and republished in Berlin, by Brugsch, in the year 1851. Explicit mention is here made of reincarnations, and it is stated that they are very numerous.
The third part of the _Book of the Dead_ sets forth a detailed account of the resurrection of an Osiris; the identification of the departed one with Osiris, G.o.d of Light, and his sharing in the life, deeds, and power of the G.o.d; in a word, it is the final reintegration of the human soul with G.o.d.