EARLY BUDDHISM

The book discusses adopted doctrineskarma transmigration in a chapter to describe essential doctrines of the original Buddhism. They are at the same time the distinctive doctrinesthat is to say, the doctrines that distinguish it from all previous teaching in India. But the Buddha, while rejecting the sacrifices and the ritualistic magic of the Brahmin schools, the animistic superstitions of the people, and the pantheistic speculations of the poets of the preBuddhistic Upanishads, still retained the belief in transmigration. This beliefthe transmigration of the soul, after the death of the body, into other bodies, either of men, beasts or godsis part of the animistic creed, or is so widely found throughout the world that it was probably universal. In India it had already, before the rise of Buddhism, been raised into an ethical conception by the associated doctrine of Karma, according to which a man’s social position in life and his physical advantages, or the reverse, were the result of his actions in a previous birth. The doctrine thus afforded an explanation, quite complete to those who could believe it, of the apparent anomalies and wrongs in the distribution here of happiness or woe. A man, for instance, is blind. This is owing to his lust of the eye in a previous birth. But he has also unusual powers of hearing. This is because he loved, in a previous birth, to listen to the preaching of the law. The explanation could always be exact, for it was scarcely more than a repetition of the point to be explained. It fits the facts because it is derived from them.