Accordingly, the animal symbols in the Szdpa Bardo— despite evident corruptions of the text and of the esoteric rebirth doctrine denoted by these symbols—should rightly be taken to imply that, in accordance with its karma, a human principle of consciousness, unless winning Emancipation, will, under the normal karmic conditions of gradual progression which govern the majority of mankind, continue to be born in a human form in this creation-period, with the mental traits or characteristics symbolized by animals. Under ex- ceptional or abnormal armze conditions of retrogression, it may, on the other hand, during the course of ages, gradually lose its human nature and fall back into sub-human kingdoms.
As the translator explained, we need but look round us in the human world to find the bloodthirsty tiger-man, the murderer; the lustful swine-man; the deceitful fox-man; the thieving and imitating monkey-man; the grovelling worm-man; the industrious and oft-times miserly ant-man ;
58 Introduction
the ephemeral—sometimes professedly aesthetic—butterfly- man; the strong ox-man; or the fearless lion-man. Human life is far richer in possibilities for the workings out of evil Zarma—no matter how animal-like the karma may be—than any sub-human species could possibly be. The illiterate folk-beliefs so common in Buddhist and Hindu lands, that a human murderer must inevitably be reborn as a ferocious beast of prey, or a sensualist as a pig or dog, or a miser as an ant, are, therefore, like many other popular beliefs, evidently based upon false analogies—some of which have crept into Oriental Scriptures—and upon an unduly limited view of the innumerable conditions offered by human embodiment, from the saint to the criminal, from the King-Emperor to the slum-dweller, or from the man of culture to the lowest savage.
In accordance with our findings, that higher and rational teaching concerning rebirth, which in the Bardo Thodol is, perhaps, confused because of corruptions of text, may now be summarized. If, on the Plane of Uncertainty, the in- fluence of innate or karmic propensities of desire for the grosser sensations of sangsdric existence, such as govern life in a human body, can be dominated through the exercise of the more powerful influence of Right Knowledge, that part of the consciousness-principle capable of realizing Buddahood triumphs, and the deceased, instead of being obsessed with the frightful hallucinatory spectres of his lower or animal nature, passes the interval between human death and rebirth in one of the paradise realms instead of in the Bardo. If such a more enlightened one be very unusually developed spiritually, that is to say if he be a great yogic saint, he may gain even the highest of the paradises and be reborn among mankind under the guiding power of the ‘Lords of Karma’, who, though still sangsaric beings, are described by the Jamas as being immeasurably higher in evolution than man. 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 aya
The Higher Rebirth Doctrine 59
incarnate. Normally, however, rebirth is of the lower or ordinary sort, unendowed—because of the lack of enlighten- ment 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 con- trolled 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 mis- understanding 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.
60 Introduction
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 store- house 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 bio- logical 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 anthro- pologists, 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; Pom- ponius 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.
Thesscience of Rebirth 61
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”....
‘In the theory of evolution, the tendency of a germ to develop according to a certain specific type, e.g. of the kidney- bean 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, indepen- dently 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 appre- hend the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that ’.—( The Varieties of Religious Experiences, pp. 521-2.)
62 Introduction
in the many heavens and paradises, and others in the nume- rous states of purgation called hells. Generalizing, it may be said that when the Brahmanic and Buddhist teachings con- cerning cosmography are carefully examined from the stand- point 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.
Esoterically explained, Mt. Meru (Tib. R2z-vad), the central mountain of Hindu and Buddhist cosmography, round which our cosmos is disposed in seven concentric circles of oceans separated by seven intervening concentric circles of golden mountains, is the universal hub, the support of all the worlds. We may possibly regard it, like the Central Sun of Western astronomy, as the gravitational centre of the known universe. Outside the seven circles of oceans and the intervening seven circles of golden mountains lies the circle of continents.
In illustration, an onion of fifteen layers may be taken to represent roughly the /amazc conception of our universe. The core, to which the fifteen layers cohere, is Mt. Meru. Below, are the various hells ; above, supported by Mt. Meru, are the heavens of the gods, the more sensuous, like the thirty-three heavens ruled by Indra, and those under the sway of Mara, being ranged in their own regular gradation beneath the less sensuous heavens of Brahma. As apex over all, is the final heaven, called ‘The Supreme’ (Tib. ‘Og-mz). Being the last outpost of our universe, ‘Og-min, as the vestibule to Wir- vana, is the transitional state leading from the mundanc to the supramundane; and thus there presides over it the divine influence of ‘The Best of All’ (Tib. Kzntu-zang- po: Skt. Samanta-Bhadra), the lamaic personification of Nirvana.
On a level with Indra’s realm dwell, in their own heaven-
The Cosmography 63
worlds, the eight Mother Goddesses (Tib. H/amo), all of whom
appear in our text. They are the Mother Goddesses of the
early Hindus, called in Sanskrit the AZa¢ris.
Within Mt. Meru itself, upon which the Heavens rest, there are four realms, one above another. Of these, the three lower are inhabited by various orders of genii; and in the fourth, immediately beneath the Heavens, from which, like the fallen angels of Christian belief, they were expelled on account of their pride, dwell the ‘Ungodly Spirits’, the Asuras (Tib. Lha-ma-yin), or Titans, who, as rebels, live and die waging unending war with the gods above.
The innermost layer of the onion is the Ocean surrounding Mt. Meru. The next layer, outwardly expanding, is that of the Golden Mountains; the next beyond is another Ocean; and so on, a circle of Golden Mountains always coming after a circle of Ocean until the fifteenth layer containing the outermost Ocean, in which float the Continents and their satellites. The skin of the onion is a wall of iron enclosing the one universe.