THE STORY OF LIFE AND DEATH
Long long ago, the unknown spirit began to play a game of life and
death, and he is still playing it. That is what a Hindu child is
taught, so life is not a real thing to him, but is only make-believe.
Yet the rules of this game are so hard and fast that none of the
puppets can escape from them. The Hindu story of life and death all
circles round one rule of the game. That rule is that everything anyone
does and everything anyone says must be punished or rewarded in another
life, so that a little Indian child believes that he has been alive on
earth hundreds of times before, and that everything that happens to him
in this life happens because of something he has said or done in a life
that is gone by, and which he forgets.
He fears too very much to do anything for which he may suffer in
another life, for if he does wrong in this life he may be born a
woman, or a cow, or a frog, or he may be sent to one of the hells to
be tortured by demons there. Because of this, and because, too, the
spirits of his gods may be in trees or animals or stones, he is very
kind to animals, and he worships trees and stones.
The round of birth and death is very long, for the full number of lives
is eight million four hundred thousand, and if, after the soul has made
many steps upwards, it breaks a rule of life, it may have to go away
back to the beginning.
The one great hope is that some time in the dim future, by keeping all
the rules of the game in one life after another, the spirit may be set
free from birth and death, and may drop out of the endless game. It may
not seem at first such a very terrible thing to go on living one life
after another, but the thought of it has become an awful thing to those
who believe in it.
Life to them is very hard. Terrible famines come, and bring hunger and
plague and death. And men and women lay all that is left to them of
food and of money before the gods, and pray them to send rain. Even
when there is no famine in the land the daily observances of custom and
the weary round of toil depress the spirits of men, so that the more
they think of anything beyond the work of the day, the more they long
to give up living altogether. A South Indian folksong says:--
“How many births are past, I cannot tell,
How many yet to come no man can say,
But this alone I know, and know full well.
That pain and grief embitter all the way.”
_Quoted by_ C. A. MASON _in “Lux Christi.”_