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Perhaps the idea which has had the widest and most penetrating influence on Indian thought is that conception
of the Universe which is known as Samsara, the world of change and transmigration. The idea of rebirth and
the wandering of souls from one body to another exists in a fragmentary form among savage tribes in many
countries, but in India it makes its appearance as a product of ripening metaphysics rather than as a survival. It
plays no part in the Vedic hymns: it first acquires importance in the older Upanishads but more as a mystery
to be communicated to the elect than as a popular belief and to some extent as the special doctrine of the
military class rather than of the Brahmans. At the time of the Buddha, however, it had passed beyond this
stage and was as integral a part of popular theology as is the immortality of the soul in Europe.
Such expressions as the transmigration of souls or metempsychosis imperfectly represent Indian ideas. They
are incorrect as descriptions of Buddhist dogmas, which start by denying the existence of a soul, and they are
not entirely suitable to those Vedantic schools which regard transmigration as part of the illusory phenomenal
world. The thought underlying the doctrine is rather that as a child grows into youth and age, so the soul
passes from life to life in continuity if not in identity. Whatever the origin of the idea may have been, its root
in post-Vedic times is a sense of the transitoriness but continuity of everything. Nothing is eternal or even
permanent: not even the gods, for they must die, not even death, for it must turn into new life.
This view of life is ingrained in Indian nature. It is not merely a scientific or philosophical speculation, but it
summarizes the outlook of ordinary humanity. In Europe the average religious man thanks or at least
remembers his Creator. But in India the Creator has less place in popular thought. There is a disinclination to
make him responsible for the sufferings of the world, and speculation, though continually occupied with the
origins of things, rarely adopts the idea familiar to Christians and Mohammedans alike, that something was
produced out of nothing by the divine fiat. Hindu cosmogonies are various and discordant in details, but
usually start with the evolution or emanation of living beings from the Divinity and often a reproductive act
forms part of the process, such as the hatching of an egg or the division of a Divinity into male and female
halves. In many accounts the Deity brings into being personages who continue the work of world-making and
such entities as mind, time and desire are produced before the material world. But everything in these creation
stories is figurative. The faithful are not perplexed by the discrepancies in the inspired narratives, and one can
hardly imagine an Indian sect agitated by the question whether God made the world in six literal days.
All religious doctrines, especially theories about the soul, are matters of temperament. A race with more
power of will and more delight in life might have held that the soul is the one agent that can stand firm and
unshaken midst the flux of circumstance. The intelligent but passive Hindu sees clearly that whatever illusions
the soul may have, it really passes on like everything else and continueth not in one stay. He is disposed to
think of it not as created with the birth of the body, but as a drop drawn from some ocean to which it is
destined to return. As a rule he considers it to be immortal but he does not emphasize or value personality in
our sense. In previous births he has already been a great many persons and he will be a great many more.
Whatever may be the thread between these existences it is not individuality. And what he craves is not eternal
personal activity, but unbroken rest in which personality, even if supposed to continue, can have little
meaning.
The character of the successive appearances or tenements of the soul is determined by the law of Karma,
which even more than metempsychosis is the basis of Indian ideas about the universe. Karma is best known as
a term of the Buddhists, who are largely responsible both for the definition and wide diffusion of the doctrine.
But the idea is Brahmanic as well as Buddhist and occurs in well-known passages of the Upanishads, where it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]