'Painful are repeated births.
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 recall 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 worm. 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]
- ↑ Köppen, 'Religion des Buddha,' vol. i. pp. 35, 289, &c., 318; Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, 'Le Bouddha et sa Religion,' p. 122; Hardy, 'Manual of Budhism,' pp. 98, &c., 180, 318, 445, &c.
