The Tibetan Book of the Dead — ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz

When thus directed by the ‘Guardians of the Great Law’, the earth-returning one is said to reincarnate out of compassion, to assist human kind; he comes as a Teacher, as a Divine Missionary, as a Nirmdana-K ayap. 59 incarnate. Normally, however, rebirth is of the lower or ordinary sort, unendowed—because of the lack of enlightenment of the one undergoing it—with consciousness of the process. Even as a child knowing not the higher mathematics cannot measure the velocity of light, so the animal-man cannot profit by the higher law governing the rebirth of the divine-man; and, drinking of the River of Forgetfulness, he enters the door of the womb and is reborn, direct from the desire-world called the Bardo. This lower rebirth, almost brutish in many instances, because controlled chiefly by animal propensities such as sub-human and human creatures have in common, differs, however, from that of brutes in virtue of the functional activity of the purely human element of the consciousness, which in all sub-human creatures is latent and not active; and for this element, even in the lowest of mankind, to become latent instead of active requires approximately as long a period of cyclic time as it does for the sub-human consciousnesss to evolve its latent human element into full human activity. The popular misunderstanding of this aspect of the higher or esoteric Doctrine of Rebirth thus appears to have assisted in no small measure to give rise to the obviously irrational belief, found almost everywhere throughout the Scriptures of both Buddhism and Hinduism, that the brute principle of consciousness in its entirety and the human principle of consciousness in its entirety are capable of alternately exchanging places with one another.

It was the late Dr. E. B. Tylor, father of the modern science of Anthropology, who after a very careful examination of the data pronounced the higher doctrine of rebirth to be the more reasonable:

‘So it may seem that the original idea of transmigration was the straightforward and reasonable one of human souls being reborn in new human bodies.... The beast is the very incarnation of familiar qualities of man; and such names as lion, bear, fox, owl, parrot, viper, worm, when we apply them as epithets to men, condense into a word some leading feature of a human life.’?

1 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1891), ii. 17.

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That this is the true interpretation is confirmed—so far as Europe is concerned—by the teachings of the Druids, the learned Brahmin-like priests of Europe’s scientific pre-Christian religion, held by the Celtic nations.

1 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1891), ii. 17.

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That this is the true interpretation is confirmed—so far as Europe is concerned—by the teachings of the Druids, the learned Brahmin-like priests of Europe’s scientific pre-Christian religion, held by the Celtic nations.

In The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, in the year 1911, I suggested that the rebirth doctrine, in its straightforward, Druidic form, accords, in its essentials, with the psychological science of the West—that the subconscious mind is the storehouse of all latent memories; that these memories are not limited to one lifetime; that these memory-records, being recoverable, prove the doctrine to be based upon demonstrable facts. Since the year 1911 the whole trend of Western psychological research in the realm of the subconscious and in psycho-analysis has tended to confirm that view.

I was unaware when I wrote The Fairy-Faith that Huxley held—as he did—the theory of human reincarnation to offer the best explanation of even ordinary physiological and biological phenomena. And since the testimony of Huxley, as one of the greatest biologists, coincides with that, as above given, of the late Dr. Tylor, the foremost of modern anthropologists, and also confirms from the standpoint of our own Western Science the higher or esoteric interpretation of the Rebirth Doctrine as offered by the Occult Sciences of the East, we here record it as a fitting conclusion to this Section :

‘Everyday experience familiarizes us with the facts which are grouped under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks of his parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we call “ character”, is often to be traced through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this “character”—this moral and intellectual essence of a man—does veritably pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another, and does really transmigrate

* Cf. Caesar, De B. G. vi. 14.5; 18. 1; Diodorus Siculus, v. 31. 4; Pomponius Mela, De Situ Orbts, iii, c.2; Lucan, Pharsalia, i. 449-62; Barddas (Llandovery, 1862), i. 177, 189-91; and W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (Oxford 1911), Chaps. VII, XII.

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from generation to generation. In the new-born infant, the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is little more than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early, these become actualities; from childhood to age they manifest themselves in dullness or brightness,—weakness or strength, viciousness or uprightness ; and with each feature modified by confluence with another character, if by nothing else, the character passes on to its incarnation in new bodies. The Indian philosophers called character, as thus defined, “ karma”....

The Indian philosophers called character, as thus defined, “ karma”....

‘In the theory of evolution, the tendency of a germ to develop according to a certain specific type, e.g. of the kidneybean seed to grow into a plant having all the characters of Phaseolus vulgaris, is its “Karma”. It is the “last inheritor and the last result” of all the conditions that have affected a line of ancestry which goes back for many millions of years, to the time when life first appeared on the earth....

‘As Prof. Rhys-Davids aptly says [in Hzdbert Lectures, ‘p. 114], the snowdrop “is a snowdrop and not an oak, and just that kind of snowdrop, because it is the outcome of the Karma of an endless series of past existences ”.’ 1

XI. THE COSMOGRAPHY

Buddhist cosmography as understood by the /amas, and continually referred to throughout our text, more especially in connexion with the Doctrine of Rebirth, is a very vast and complex subject ; and to consider it here in any detail would involve the esoteric as well as the exoteric interpretation of an enormous mass of doctrines, more or less of Brahmanic origin, concerning the many states of sentient existence within the Sangsara, of cosmos—some planetary as in this world, some

1 T, H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London, 1894), pp. 61-2, 95.

The late William James, the well-known American psychologist, independently arrived at substantially the same conclusion as Huxley; for, after explaining his ‘ own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism’, he says, ‘I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order the better to describe my general point of view ; but, as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that ’.—( The Varieties of Religious Experiences, pp. 521-2.)

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in the many heavens and paradises, and others in the numerous states of purgation called hells. Generalizing, it may be said that when the Brahmanic and Buddhist teachings concerning cosmography are carefully examined from the standpoint of the initiated Oriental, and not from the too-oft prejudiced standpoint of the Christian philologist, it seems to suggest far-reaching knowledge, handed down from very ancient times, of astronomy, of the shape and motion of planetary bodies, and of the interpenetration of worlds and systems of worlds, some solid and visible (such as are alone known to Western Science) and some ethereal and invisible existing in what we may perhaps call a fourth dimension of space.