DOES Buddhism teach transmigration? If it does, how does it work? Does the soul really transmigrate? Such questions are frequently asked, and I will try briefly to answer them here. The idea of transmigration is this: After death, the soul migrates from one body to another, celestial, human, animal, or vegetative. In Buddhism, as it is popularly understood, what regulates transmigration is ethical retribution. Those who behave properly go to heaven, or to heavens, as there are many heavens according to Buddhist cosmology. Some may be reborn among their own races. Those, however, who have not conducted themselves according to moral precepts will be consigned after death to the underground worlds called Naraka. There are some destined to be reborn as a dog or a cat or a hog or a cow or some other animal, according to deeds which can be characterized as pre-eminently in correspondence with those natures generally ascribed to those particular animals. For instance, the hog is popularly thought to be The idea of transmigration has a certain appeal to the imaginative mind if one is not too critical or scientific--the idea that each motive, consciously conceived or unconsciously prompted, has its ethical value and is punishable or rewardable accordingly, and that the Lord of Death ruling the underworld makes no mistake in assigning us to places where we each belong. His mirror of judgment and his records never err in this respect. These ideas correspond to our sense of justice and compensation. Instead of all sinners being summarily consigned to everlasting fire when the Day of judgment comes, it is certainly more in accord with common sense and justice that each sin, judiciously weighed and evaluated, be given its particular due. This evaluation and consignment, when demonstrated in the doctrine of transmigration, takes on a poetic coloring. Suppose I did something wrong or something not so very bad and were made to be reborn as a cat. I would live in this animal form for a while, perhaps eight or ten years, for the cat does not live very long. My sin is expiated, for probably I behaved properly as a cat from the human point of view. As Transmigration pictures us traveling through an infinite number of Kalpas as we go on individually experiencing life in its possible varieties. Evolution, however, delineates human existence as a whole as having gone through all these stages. This is the difference between science and religion: science deals with abstractions, whereas religion is individualistic and personal. So far, evolution has not taken account of ethical implications. It has treated the subject from the point of view of biology and psychology. In the rising development of the human race, the scientists have not given much significance to the ethical and spiritual factors; they have been primarily concerned with the way man has made use of his intelligence more than anything else in his so-called upward course of development. Transmigration reviews man's existence entirely from the point of view of ethics and religion; it is hardly concerned with his intelligence. And this is the very point where transmigration interests us. The idea may not have anything deserving scientific investigation. But in spite of this, it perpetually attracts the attention of religious minded people. Theoretically speaking, the idea of incarnation must have come first, then reincarnation, and finally transmigration. Something took the flesh, God or the word or the devil or the first principle or anything else, which had to express itself in a tangible and visible form so that we can talk of it as Besides this interpretation of the transmigration idea in its moral and punitive aspects, there is an enjoyable phase of it when we make it a matter of experience during our lifetime. When we scrutinize our daily experiences, we realize that we have here everything we could experience by going through an indefinitely long period of transmigration. Every shade of feeling we have while on earth finds its counterpart somewhere in the heavens or in the hells or in some intermediate realms of the preta, or asura or tiryagyona. For instance, when we, are angry, we are with the asura; when we are pleased, we As far as I can see, the doctrine of transmigration does not seem to enjoy any scientific support. The first question we encounter is, "What is it that transmigrates?" We may answer, "It is the soul." "What, then, is the soul?" The soul cannot be conceived as an entity or an object like any other objects we see about us. It cannot be anything tangible or visible. If so, how does it manage to enter into a body? How does it get out of one body when this body decomposes and pass into another body? Where is this "other body" waiting for the liberated soul to enter? The body without the soul is inconceivable; we cannot imagine a soulless body in existence somewhere to receive the soul newly detached. If the soul can maintain itself without embodying itself, why do we not find bodyless souls wandering somewhere? Can a soul subsist without a body? If the doctrine of transmigration is to be tenable, we must say that there is something that transmigrates; if there is something, what is it? If we cannot affirm it as an entity, what can it be? Can the questions enumerated above be satisfactorily answered? There are still other questions which must be answered before we can establish transmigration. We can think of the soul not as an entity but as a principle. We can conceive of the soul as not entering into a body already in existence and ready to receive the soul, but as creating a body suitable for its own habitation. Instead of form or structure determining function, we can take function as determining form. In this case, the soul comes first and the body is constructed by it. This is really the Buddhist conception of transmigration. Buddhist philosophy considers tṛiṣṇā or taṇhā, or "thirst," the first principle of making things come into existence. In the beginning there is tṛiṣṇā. It wills to have a form in order to express itself, which means to assert itself. In other words, when it asserts itself it takes form. As tṛiṣṇā is inexhaustible, the forms it takes are infinitely varied. Tṛiṣṇā wants to see and we have eyes; it wants to hear and we have ears; it wants to jump and we have the deer, the rabbit, and other animals of this order; it wants to fly and we have birds of all kinds; it wants to swim and we have fish wherever there are waters; it wants to bloom and we have flowers; it wants to shine and we have stars; it wants to have a realm of heavenly bodies and we have astronomy; and so on. Tṛiṣṇā is the creator of the universe. Being the creator, tṛiṣṇā is the principle of individuation. It creates a world of infinite diversities. It will never exhaust itself. We as its highest and richest expression can have an insight into the nature of tṛiṣṇā and its working. When we really see into ourselves, tṛiṣṇā will bare itself before itself in us. As it is not an individualized object, self-inspection is the only way to approach it and make it reveal all its secrets. And When I was discussing this subject the other day, one of the great thinkers now in America remarked, "Does this mean that there are in our consciousness all these tṛiṣṇā as its constituent elements?" This is perhaps the way most of our readers would like to interpret my presentation of tṛiṣṇā when I make it the basis of mutual understanding, as it were, between ourselves and Nature generally. But I must say that that is not Some may like to compare tṛiṣṇā with Schopenhauer's Will to live, but my idea of tṛiṣṇā is deeper than his Will. For the Will as he conceives it is already differentiated as the Will striving to live against death, against destruction. The Will implies a dualism. But tṛiṣṇā remains still dormant, as it were, as in the mind of God, for God has not yet moved to his work of creation. This moving is tṛiṣṇā. It is tṛiṣṇā that moves. It is tṛiṣṇā that made God give out his fiat, Let there be light." Tṛiṣṇā is what lies at the back of Schopenhauer's Will. Tṛiṣṇā is a more fundamental conception than the Will. For Schopenhauer, the Will is blind; but tṛiṣṇā is neither blind nor not blind, for neither of them can yet be predicated of tṛiṣṇā. Tṛiṣṇā is not yet a what. It can be called the pure will In early Buddhism, tṛiṣṇā forms one of the links in the chain of "Dependent Origination," and it is demanded of us to get rid of it in order that we may be freed from grief and fear. But early Buddhists were not logical enough to push the idea of tṛiṣṇā far enough to its very source. Their effort to deliver themselves from tṛiṣṇā's so-called leading to grief, fear, and so on, was also the working of tṛiṣṇā itself. As long as we are human beings, we can never do away with tṛiṣṇā, or, as they say, destroy it. The destruction of tṛiṣṇā will surely mean the annihilation of ourselves, leaving no one who will be the enjoyer of the outcome. Tṛiṣṇā is indeed the basis of all existence. Tṛiṣṇā is existence. Tṛiṣṇā is even before existence. Coming back to the transmigration phase of the tṛiṣṇā doctrine, I should like to assert again that this tṛiṣṇā as it expresses itself is essentially the same in any form it may take. (We cannot think of it in any other way.) The human tṛiṣṇā as we feel it inwardly must be that of the cat, or the dog, or the crow, or the snake. When a cat runs after a rat, when a snake devours a frog, when a dog jumps up furiously barking at a squirrel in the tree, when a pig goes around groveling in the mud, when the fish swims about contentedly in the pond, when the waves rage angrily on a stormy ocean, do we not feel here our own tṛiṣṇā expressing some of its infinitely variable modes? The stars are shining brightly, wistfully twinkling in a clear autumnal night; the lotus flowers bloom in the early summer morning even before the sun rises; when the spring comes, all the dead trees vie with one another to shoot out their fresh green leaves, waking up from a long winter sleep-do we not see here also some of our human tṛiṣṇā asserting itself? I do not know whether ultimate reality is one or two or three or many more, but I feel that one tṛiṣṇā, infinitely diversified It may not be amiss here to add a word regarding the difference of attitude between the earlier and the later Buddhists toward the doctrine of transmigration and tṛiṣṇā. As we have already seen, the earlier Buddhist treatment of the subject is always negative, for it tends to emphasize the aspect of liberation or emancipation. The later Buddhists, however, have turned against this and strongly insist on tṛiṣṇā as being most fundamental and primary and needed for the general welfare not only of mankind but of all other beings making up the entire world. They would declare that tṛiṣṇā works in the wrong way when it chooses bad associates; that is, when it combines itself with the relative or psychological self, relying on the latter This tṛiṣṇā emancipated from all its encumbrances incarnates itself in every possible form in order to achieve a universal salvation of all beings, both sentient and non-sentient. Therefore, when Buddha declares that he is "all-conquering, all-knowing" he means that he has tṛiṣṇā in its purity. For when tṛiṣṇā comes back to itself, it is all-conqueror and all-knower, and also all-loving. It is this love or karuṇā or maitrī that makes the Buddha or Bodhisattva abandon his eternally entering into a state of emptiness (śūnyatā) and subjects himself
128:1 The Dhammapada, verses 151-2.V.
Transmigration
I
IV
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Footnotes