"If A Bikkhu should desire, O brethren, to call to mind his
various temporary states in days gone by--such as one birth, two
births, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, one
hundred, or one thousand, or one hundred thousand births,--in all
their modes and all their details, let him be devoted to quietude
of heart,--let him look through things, let him be much alone."
--Akankheyya Sutta.
I
Were I to ask any reflecting Occidental, who had passed some
years in the real living atmosphere of Buddhism, what fundamental
idea especially differentiates Oriental modes of thinking from
our own, I am sure he would answer: "The Idea of Pre-existence."
It is this idea, more than any other, which permeates the whole
mental being of the Far East. It is universal as the wash of air:
it colors every emotion; it influences, directly or indirectly,
almost every act. Its symbols are perpetually visible, even in
details of artistic decoration; and hourly by day or night, some
echoes of its language float uninvited to the ear. The utterances
of the people,--their household sayings, their proverbs, their
pious or profane exclamations, their confessions of sorrow, hope,
joy, or despair,--are all informed with it. It qualifies equally
the expression of hate or the speech of affection; and the term
_ingwa_, or _innen_,--meaning karma as inevitable retribution,
--comes naturally to every lip as an interpretation, as a
consolation, or as a reproach. The peasant toiling up some steep
road, and feeling the weight of his handcart straining every
muscle, murmurs patiently: "Since this is ingwa, it must be
suffered." Servants disputing, ask each other, "By reason of what
ingwa must I now dwell with such a one as you?" The incapable or
vicious man is reproached with his ingwa; and the misfortunes of
the wise or the virtuous are explained by the same Buddhist word.
The law-breaker confesses his crime, saying: "That which I did I
knew to be wicked when doing; but my ingwa was stronger than my
heart." Separated lovers seek death under the belief that their
union in this life is banned by the results of their sins in a
former one; and, the victim of an injustice tries to allay his
natural anger by the self-assurance that he is expiating some
forgotten fault which had to, be expiated in the eternal order of
things.... So likewise even the commonest references to a
spiritual future imply the general creed of a spiritual past. The
mother warns her little ones at play about the effect of
wrong-doing upon their future births, as the children of other
parents. The pilgrim or the street-beggar accepts your alms with
the prayer that your next birth may be fortunate. The aged
_inkyo_, whose sight and hearing begin to fail, talks cheerily of
the impending change that is to provide him with a fresh young
body. And the expressions _Yakusoku_, signifying the Buddhist
idea of necessity; _mae no yo_, the last life; _akirame_,
resignation, recur as frequently in Japanese common parlance as
do the words "right" and "wrong" in English popular speech.
After long dwelling in this psychological medium, you find that
it has penetrated your own thought, and has effected therein
various changes. All concepts of life implied by the idea of
preexistence,--all those beliefs which, however sympathetically
studied, must at first have seemed more than strange to you,--
finally lose that curious or fantastic character with which
novelty once invested them, and present themselves under a
perfectly normal aspect. They explain so many things so well as
even to look rational; and quite rational some assuredly are when
measured by the scientific thought of the nineteenth century. But
to judge them fairly, it is first necessary to sweep the mind
clear of all Western ideas of metempsychosis. For there is no
resemblance between the old Occidental conceptions of soul--the
Pythagorean or the Platonic, for example--and the Buddhist
conception; and it is precisely because of this unlikeness that
the Japanese beliefs prove themselves reasonable. The profound
difference between old-fashioned Western thought and Eastern
thought in this regard is, that for the Buddhist the conventional
soul--the single, tenuous, tremulous, transparent inner man, or
ghost--does not exist. The Oriental Ego is not individual. Nor is
it* even a definitely numbered multiple like the Gnostic soul. It
is an aggregate or composite of inconceivable complexity,--the
concentrated sum of the creative thinking of previous lives
beyond all reckoning.