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ideas of the indigenes, or vice versa? tary on the Hindu working out of the conception of plantsouls is to be found in a passage in a 17th century work, which describes certain Brahmans of the Coromandel Coast as eating fruits, but being careful not to pull the plants up by the roots, lest they should dislodge a soul; but few, it is remarked, are so scrupulous as this, and the consideration has occurred to them that souls in roots and herbs are in most vile and abject bodies, so that if dislodged they may become better off by entering into the bodies of men or beasts. Moreover, the Brahmanic doctrine of souls transmigrating into inert things has in like manner a bearing on the savage theory of object-souls.2

Buddhism, like the Brahmanism from which it seceded, habitually recognized transmigration between superhuman and human beings and the lower animals, and in an exceptional way recognized a degradation even into a plant or a thing. How the Buddhist mind elaborated the doctrine of metempsychosis, may be seen in the endless legends of Gautama himself undergoing his 550 births, suffering pain and misery through countless ages to gain the power of freeing sentient beings from the misery inherent in all existence. Four times he became Maha Brahma, twenty times the dewa Sekra, and many times or few he passed through such stages as a hermit, a king, a rich man, a slave, a potter, a gambler, a curer of snake bites, an ape, an elephant, a bull, a serpent, a snipe, a fish, a frog, the dewa or genius of a tree. At last, when he became the supreme Buddha, his mind, like a vessel overflowing with honey, overflowed with the ambrosia of truth, and he proclaimed his triumph over life :

1 Abraham Roger, 'La Porte Ouverte,' Amst. 1670, p. 107.

2 Manu, xii. 9: "çarirajaih karmmadoshaih yâti sthâvaratâm narah ""for crimes done in the body, the man goes to the inert (motionless) state;” xii. 42, "sthâvarâh krimakîtâçcha matsyah sarpâh sakachhapâh paçavaçcha mrigaschaiva jaghanyâ tâmasî gatih "—"inert (motionless) things, worms and insects, fish, serpents, tortoises and beasts and deer also are the last dark form."

"Painful are repeated births.

O house-builder! I have seen thee,

Thou canst not build again a house for me.

Thy rafters are broken

Thy roof-timbers are shattered,

My mind is detached,

I have attained to the extinction of desire."

Whether the Buddhists receive the full Hindu doctrine of the migration of the individual soul from birth to birth, or whether they refine away into metaphysical subtleties the notion of continued personality, they do consistently and systematically hold that a man's life in former existences is the cause of his now being what he is, while at this moment he is accumulating merit or demerit whose result will determine his fate in future lives. Memory, it is true, fails generally to recal these past births, but memory, as we know, stops short of the beginning even of this present life. When King Bimsara's feet were burned and rubbed with salt by command of his cruel son that he might not walk, why was this torture inflicted on a man so holy? Because in a previous birth he had walked near a dagoba with his slippers on, and had trodden on a priest's carpet without washing his feet. A man may be prosperous for a time on account of the merit he has received in former births, but if he does not continue to keep the precepts, his next birth will be in one of the hells, he will then be born in this world as a beast, afterwards as a preta or sprite; a proud man may be born again ugly with large lips, or as a demon or a The Buddhist theory of "karma" or "action," which controls the destiny of all sentient beings, not by judicial reward and punishment, but by the inflexible result of cause into effect, wherein the present is ever determined by the past in an unbroken line of causation, is indeed one of the world's most remarkable developments of ethical speculation.1

worm.

1 Köppen, 'Religion des Buddha,' vol. i. pp. 35, 289, etc., 318; Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, 'Le Bouddha et sa Religion,' p. 122; Hardy, 'Manual of Buddhism,' pp. 98, etc., 180, 318, 445, etc.

Within the classic world, the ancient Egyptians are described as maintaining a doctrine of migration, whether by successive embodiments in a "cycle of necessity" through creatures of earth, sea, and air, and back again to man, or by the simpler judicial penalty which sent back the wicked dead to earth as unclean beasts. The pictures and hieroglyphic sentences of the Book of the Dead are still preserved, and though the ambiguity of its formulas and the difficulty of distinguishing material from mystical meaning in its doctrine make it of little use as a check upon the classic accounts, yet it shows at least that notions of metamorphosis of the soul did hold a large place in the Egyptian religion.' In Greek philosophy, great teachers stood forth to proclaim it. Plato had mythic knowledge to convey of souls entering such new incarnations as their glimpse of real existence had made them fit for, from the body of a philosopher or a lover down to the body of a tyrant and usurper; of souls transmigrating into beasts and rising again to man according to the lives they led; of birds that were light-minded souls; of oysters suffering in banishment the penalty of utter ignorance. Pythagoras is made to illustrate in his own person his doctrine of metempsychosis, by recognizing where it hung in Here's temple the shield he had carried in a former birth, when he was that Euphorbos whom Menelaus slew at the siege of Troy. Afterwards he was Hermotimos, the Klazomenian prophet whose funeral rites were so prematurely celebrated while his soul was out, and after that, as Lucian tells the story, his prophetic soul passed into the body of a cock. Mikyllos asks this cock to tell him about Troy-were things there really as Homer said? But the cock. replies, "How should Homer have known, O Mikyllos? When the Trojan war was going on, he was a camel in Baktria ! " 2

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1 Herod. ii. 123, see Rawlinson's Tr.; Plutarch. De Iside 31, 72; Wilkinson, Ancient Eg.' vol. ii. ch. xvi.; Bunsen, Egypt's Place in Univ. Hist.' vols. iv. and v.

2 Plat. Phædo, Timæus, Phædrus, Repub. Pindar. Olymp. ii. antistr. 4;

In the later Jewish philosophy, the Kabbalists took up the doctrine of migration, the gilgul or "rolling on" of souls, and maintained it by that characteristic method of Biblical interpretation which it is good to hold up from time to time for a warning to the mystical interpreters of our own day. The soul of Adam passed into David, and shall pass into the Messiah, for are not these initials in the very name of Ad(a)m, and does not Ezekiel say that "my servant David shall be their prince for ever." Cain's soul passed into Jethro, and Abel's into Moses, and therefore it was that Jethro gave Moses his daughter to wife. Souls migrate into beasts and birds and vermin, for is not Jehovah "the lord of the spirits of all flesh?" and he who has done one sin beyond his good works shall pass into a brute. He who gives a Jew unclean meat to eat, his soul shall enter into a leaf, blown to and fro by the wind; "for ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth;" and he who speaks ill words, his soul shall pass into a dumb stone, as did Nabal's, "and he became a stone." "Within the range of Christian influence, the Manichæans appear as the most remarkable exponents of the metempsychosis. We hear of their ideas of sinners' souls transmigrating into beasts, the viler according to their crimes; that he who kills a fowl or rat will become a fowl or rat himself; that souls can pass into plants rooted in the ground, which thus have not only life but sense; that the souls of reapers pass into beans and barley, to be cut down in their turn, and thus the elect were careful to explain to the bread when they ate it, that it was not they who reaped the corn it was made of; that the souls of the auditors, that is, the spiritually low commonalty who lived a married life, would pass into melons and cucumbers, to finish their purification by being eaten by the elect. But these details come to us from the accounts of bitter theological adversaries, and

For re

Ovid. Metam. xv. 160; Lucian. Somn. 17, etc. Philostr. Vit. Apollon. Tyran. See also Meyer's Conversations-Lexicon, art. 'Seelenwanderung.' birth in old Scandinavia, see Helgaqvidha, iii., in ‘Edda.'

1 Eisenmenger, part ii. p. 23, etc.

the question is, how much of them did the Manichæans really and soberly believe? Allowing for exaggeration and constructive imputation, there is reason to consider the account at least founded on fact. It seems clear that the Manichæan sect, when they fused together Zarathustrism, Buddhism, and Christianity, into a transcendental ascetic faith, adopted the Hindu theory of penance and purification of souls by migration into animals and plants, probably elaborating it meanwhile into fresh and fanciful details.1 In later times, the doctrine of metempsychosis has been again and again noticed in a district of South-western Asia. William of Ruysbroek speaks of the notion of souls passing from body to body as general among the medieval Nestorians, even a somewhat intelligent priest consulting him as to the souls of brutes, whether they could find refuge elsewhere so as not to be compelled to labour after death. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela records in the 12th century of the Druses of Mount Hermon : "They say that the soul of a virtuous man is transferred to the body of a new-born child, whereas that of the vicious transmigrates into a dog, or some other animal." Such ideas indeed, seem not yet extinct in the modern Druse nation. Among the Nassairi, also, transmigration is believed in as a penance and purification: we hear of migration of unbelievers into camels, asses, dogs, or sheep, of disobedient Nassairi into Jews, Sunnis, or Christians, of the faithful into new bodies of their own people, a few such changes of "shirt" (i.e. body), bringing them to enter paradise or become stars.2 An instance of the belief within the limits of modern Christian Europe may be found among the Bulgarians, whose superstition is that Turks who have never eaten pork in life will become wild boars after death. A party assembled to feast on a boar has been known to throw

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1 Beausobre, Hist. de Manichée,' etc., vol. i. pp. 245—6, vol. ii. pp. 496–9. See Augustin. Contra Faust.; De Hæres. ; De Quantitate Animæ.

2 Gul. de Rubruquis in Rec. des Voy. Soc. de Géographie de Paris,' vol. iv. p. 356. Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and tr. by Asher, Hebrew 22, Eng. p. 62. Niebuhr, Reisebeschr. nach Arabien,' etc. vol. ii. pp. 438-443; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 796.

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