Part 11 (1/2)

CHAPTER XVIII

INDIAN TRANSMIGRATION AND THE CHRISTIAN HERE AND HEREAFTER

”The dew is on the lotus. Rise, good sun!

And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave.

The sunrise comes!

The dewdrop slips into the s.h.i.+ning sea.

If any teach Nirvana is to cease, Say unto such they lie.

If any teach Nirvana is to live, Say unto such they err.”

(Buddha's teaching in Arnold's _Light of Asia_.)

[Sidenote: Over against Transmigration, Christian immortality is continuity of the individual's memory.]

To appreciate the impact of the Christian idea of the Here and Hereafter upon the Hindu idea of Transmigration and Absorption, the two ideas must be more fully examined. Stated briefly, the Christian idea is that after this life on earth comes an Eternity, whose character has been determined by the life on earth. The crisis of death terminates our bodily activities and renders impossible any further action, either virtuous or sinful, and ushers the soul, its ledger closed, its earthy limitations cast off, into some more immediate presence of G.o.d. If in communion with G.o.d, through its faith in Jesus Christ, the soul is in a state of blessedness; if still alien from G.o.d, the soul is in a state of utter misery, for its spiritual perception and its recollection of itself are now clear. That, at all events, seems a fair statement of the belief of many Protestants, so far as their belief is definite at all.

But over against transmigration, what are the essential and distinctive features of that Christian belief? Its essentially distinctive feature, both in the case of the blessed and of the miserable, is a _continuity_ of the consciousness in the life that now is with that which is to come.

The soul in bliss or misery is able to a.s.sociate its existing state with its past. Even on earth, as the modern preacher tells us, heaven and h.e.l.l are already begun. Over against the Hindu idea of transmigration, accordingly, we define the Christian idea of immortality as the continuity of our consciousness, or the immortality of the individual consciousness.

[Sidenote: Transmigration is essentially dissolution of the individual's memory.]

Per contra, the distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of the Hindu doctrine of transmigration or rebirth is the interruption of consciousness, the dissolution of memory, at the close of the present existence. In the next existence there is no memory of the present.

”The draught of Lethe” does ”await The slipping through from state to state.”

The present life is a member of a series of lives; there are said to be 8,400,000 of them, each member of which is as unconscious of the preceding as you are of being I. As a seed develops into plant and flower and seed again, so the soul in each new member of the series develops a conscious life, lapses from consciousness, and hands on a germinal soul for a new beginning again. As the seed transmits the type, and also some variation from the type, so is the germinal soul transmitted through unconsciousness, enn.o.bled or degraded by each conscious existence it has lived. At each stage the germinal soul represents the totality, the net outcome of its existences, as in each generation of a plant the seed may be said to do. So far, the doctrine of transmigration is a doctrine of the evolution of a soul, a declaration that in a sense we are all that we have been, that virtue and vice will have their reward, that in a sense ”men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves.” It does not leave hard cases of heathen or of reprobates to the discernment and mercy of G.o.d; it offers them, instead, other chances in subsequent lives. A not unattractive doctrine it is, even although the attractive a.n.a.logy of the evolution of a plant breaks down. For in the scientific doctrine of evolution, individuals have no immortality _at all_; it is only the species that lives and moves on. But in Hinduism, as in Christianity, we are thinking of the continuity of the _individual_ souls.

[Sidenote: The end of transmigration is absorption into Deity.]

[Sidenote: The saint Ramkrishna's obliviousness of self.]

To proceed with the statement of the doctrine of transmigration. The climax of the transmigrations is Nirvana or extinction of the individual soul, according to the Buddhist, and union with or absorption into Deity, according to the Hindu.[111] Buddhism has gone from the land of its birth, as Christianity and even Judaism from Palestine, and I pa.s.s from the Buddhist doctrine. The Hindu climax, of absorption into Deity, is reached when by self-mastery personal desire is gone, and by profound contemplation upon Deity a pure-bred soul has lost the consciousness of separation from Deity. The distinction between _I_ and the great _Thou_ has vanished; the One is present in the mind not as an objective thought, but by a transformation of the consciousness itself. The words of Hindus themselves in the _Advanced Text-book of Hindu Religion_ are: The human soul (the Jivatmic seed) ”grows into self-conscious Deity.”

Listen also to the words of Swami Vivekananda, in the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, about his master, Ramkrishna Paramhansa's growing into self-conscious Deity: ”Every now and then strange fits of G.o.d-consciousness came upon him.... He then spoke of himself as being able to do and know everything.... He would speak of himself as the same soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as Buddha, born again as Ramkrishna.... He would say he was ... an incarnation of G.o.d Himself.” Again Swami Vivekananda tells us: ”From time to time Ramkrishna would entirely lose his own ident.i.ty, so much so as to appropriate to himself the offerings brought for the G.o.ddess” (to the temple in which he officiated). ”Sometimes forgetting to adorn the image, he would adorn _himself_ with the flowers.”[112] Transmigration is not necessarily bound up with the pantheistic view of the world, but in _Hinduism_, transmigration is only a ladder towards the realisation of the One.

[Sidenote: Contrasts--”Born again” and a spiritual aristocracy of long spiritual descent.]

[Sidenote: Heaven and h.e.l.l not necessary ideas in Transmigration.]

Radical differences from Christian thought emerge. In the Hindu conception, the acme is reached only by a spiritual aristocracy of long spiritual descent; for the common mult.i.tude there is no gospel of being born again in Christ, no guiding hand like that of Our Lord towards the Father's presence. The upward path, according to the Hindu idea, is the path of philosophical knowledge and of meditation, not the power of union with Jesus Christ to make us sons of G.o.d. Most striking difference perhaps of all--in the Hindu philosophical system there is no place for even the conceptions of heaven and h.e.l.l except as temporary halting-places between two incarnations of the soul, which practical necessity requires. For the soul, this world is the plane of existence; union with omnipresent Deity is the climax of existence that the Hindu devotee seeks to attain; yet not in a Hereafter, but as he sits on the ground no longer conscious of his self. ”The beatific vision of Hinduism,” says a recent pro-Hindu writer, ”is to be relegated to no distant future.”[113] Heaven and h.e.l.l are mocked at as absurdities by the new sect of the [=A]ryas in the United Provinces and the Punjab, who retain the doctrine of transmigration.[114]

[Sidenote: Several heavens and h.e.l.ls in popular Hinduism.]

Hindus are divided as to the existence of these temporary halting-places between the successive incarnations of the soul. The _Text-book of Hindu Religion_, already referred to, speaks unhesitatingly about their place in the Hindu system. The [=A]ryas, on the other hand, hold that the instant a soul leaves its body it enters another body just born. The soul is never naked--to employ a common figure. Of course in popular Hinduism it is not surprising to find not merely the ideas of Heaven and h.e.l.l, but even that each chief Deity has his own heaven and that there are various h.e.l.ls. In the Tantras or ritual books of modern Hinduism, there is frequent mention of such heavens and h.e.l.ls, and when the idea of rebirths is also met with, the rebirths are regarded as stages towards the reward or punishment of the _individual conscious_ souls. It is the popular idea of heaven that has given rise to the common euphemism for _to die_, namely, to become a deva or inhabitant of heaven.

[Sidenote: Transmigration, a.s.sociated with pessimism and pantheism, is likewise yielding.]

We have observed the pessimistic mood of India yielding before the improved conditions of life, and the brahmanical pantheism before the thought of G.o.d the Father. Bound up as the idea of transmigration has been with the pessimism and pantheism of India, we are prepared to find that it too is yielding. Of that we now ask what evidence there is in the ordinary speech and writings of educated India, apart from controversy or professedly Hindu writings, in which the accepted Indian orthodoxy would probably appear.