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Karma and Rebirth - Terebess · Preface to New Edition Karma and Rebirth was first published in 1943, at a time when the Second World War was at its height. The doctrine, known to

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Page 1: Karma and Rebirth - Terebess · Preface to New Edition Karma and Rebirth was first published in 1943, at a time when the Second World War was at its height. The doctrine, known to
Page 2: Karma and Rebirth - Terebess · Preface to New Edition Karma and Rebirth was first published in 1943, at a time when the Second World War was at its height. The doctrine, known to

KARMA AND REBIRTH

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Karma and Rebirth

CHRISTMAS HUMPHREYS

CURZON PRESS

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© Curzon Press 1994

Published in 1994 byCurzon Press Ltd.St John’s Studios

Church RoadRichmond

Surrey TW9 2QA

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library,2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor &Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks

please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

ISBN 0-203-98601-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0 7007 0163 X (Print Edition)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this title is

available from the British Library

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Preface to New Edition

Karma and Rebirth was first published in 1943, at atime when the Second World War was at its height.The doctrine, known to the East from timeimmemorial, was new to the West, and the effect ofits acceptance on those grieving for their loved oneswas immense. The news of someone’s death, from awound of cold finality, was seen as only thepremature happening of an event which is periodicfor us all.

If love is indeed ‘the fulfilling of the law’ the forceof these twin aspects of the nameless Absolute,which the Buddha called ‘the Unborn’, will surely,in a life as yet to come, heal the apparent severance.

But today it seems that the twin doctrine is helpingan ever-widening public to drop the fear of death, tosee that justice rules the world and all within it, andthat we are indeed, in the smallest detail, at leastpotential masters of our destiny.

1983 T.C.H.

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Contents

Introduction 7

I The Law of Karma 12

II Karma in Action 26

III What Karma is not 42

IV What Karma Explains 50

V Some Difficulties Considered 60

VI Rebirth 68

VII Who Believes in Karma and Rebirth? 82

VIII Karma and Rebirth Applied 88

IX The Ending of Karma and Rebirth 99

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6

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Introduction

There are many books on the twin doctrines of Karmaand Rebirth, but the tendency of each newpublication is to present the subject as more andmore mechanical, until so nearly does this timeless,universal Law approximate to a soulless Fate thatwhat is in fact a reign of law becomes a reign ofterror, and compassion, described in The Voice ofthe Silence as ‘the Law of Laws, eternal Harmony’,is utterly ignored. The cause of this degradation isprobably twofold; first, the general tendency ofWestern thought to materialize whatever spiritualprinciples swim into its ken, and secondly, theincreasing departure from the available sources ofour knowledge of the doctrine, with thecorresponding reliance of each writer on previoustextbooks and his own ideas.

In the result, most Western writers on the subjectconfine themselves to the ‘lower knowledge’described by the Vedanta philosophers, which issufficient for those too lazy to awaken in themselvesthe higher centres from which alone the ‘higherknowledge’ may be seen. But though the law ofKarma must, on its own plane, remain to usunknowable, a thoughtful study of the sources fromwhich our knowledge is derived will give the

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genuine student a vision of essential principleswhich, if not yet of the ‘higher knowledge’ reservedfor the few, may serve to awaken the higher centresthrough which, as windows on to the Absolute, theTruth may finally be known.

The present volume is therefore a humble attemptto reconsider the subject in the light of such‘authorities’ as are available and from a morespiritual and therefore less mechanical point of view.The doctrine is too old and too widely held to beregarded as the property of any one religion, but theScriptures of the Hindus and Buddhists provide theoldest available sources. When to these are added,by way of commentary, the writings ofH.P.Blavatsky, who was herself trained in Tibetanmonasteries, there is available a triple ‘authority’which, taken as a whole provides the basis for an all-embracing Law which guides and governs theevolution of mankind.

Yet the ultimate authority for any doctrine is notin the written nor in the spoken word, but rather inits own sweet reasonableness, and in the fact that itis ratified by the intuition and seems to ‘work out’ inthe day’s experience. Neither God nor man mayprove to another that a principle is true. As theBuddha said to the Kalamas: ‘Do not go by hearsay,nor by what is handed down by others, nor by whatpeople say, nor by what is stated on the authority ofyour traditional teachings…But, Kalamas, when youknow of yourselves: “These teachings are good;these teachings, when followed out and put intopractice, conduce to the ending of suffering, topeace of mind, to Nirvana”—then accept them.’

In accordance with this view of authority, noauthority is claimed for the views of the writersquoted in this essay, and therefore no exact

8 INTRODUCTION

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references have been given. Where, however,another’s words express my meaning better or morecogently than my own, I have adopted them for thereader’s benefit. For the rest, there is no authorityfor any man save the ‘still small voice’ within.

It is an axiom, approved by all experience, thatthe more spiritual a doctrine the more is itimmediately applicable in daily life, and inpresenting Karma and Rebirth against their spiritualbackground they will be found to be of moreimmediate application than when regarded as amere mechanical debit and credit account in theledgers of some extra-cosmic God. I therefore writein no sense as a scholar, nor as one presenting aninteresting belief of the Orient. Rather I write as onewho believes the doctrine to be true, and believesthat any reconstruction of Western civilization isdoomed to failure unless it is based on consciousco-operation with this ultimate and all-embracingLaw. As Loftus Hare wrote:1 ‘A man becomes whathe does. Can this doctrine be refuted? If it be true itis the most important and the most neglected truthin the world.’ One might add, that if it be false it isstrange that none has yet attempted to prove itsfalsity, nor offered a better solution of the ‘Riddleof Life’.

But because it is true the doctrine is intenselydifficult. Those who imagine that the fundamentaltruths of existence can be described on the plane ofthe intellect have yet to discover that thesetremendous principles are not facts, as pebbles onthe beach are facts, but cosmic forces compared withwhich the power and grandeur of the Niagara Falls

1Mysticism of East and West.

INTRODUCTION 9

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are insignificant. In the Brihad Upanishad, one of theoldest Hindu Scriptures, Karma is referred to as ‘amighty secret’, which only the initiated may know.In the Sutta Nipata, one of the oldest BuddhistScriptures, Ananda says of Karma to the BlessedOne, ‘How deep is this Causal Law, and how deep itseems! And yet do I regard it as quite plain tounderstanding.’ To which the Buddha replied, ‘Saynot so, Ananda, say not so! Deep indeed is thisCausal Law, and deep it appears to be. It is by notknowing, by not understanding, by not penetratingthis doctrine that the world of men has becomeentangled like a ball of twine…unable to passbeyond the Way of Woe, and the ceaseless round ofRebirth.’ Even to our intelligence the ramificationsand interrelations of cause and effect in all thedepartments of the Universe are so immenselycomplex that none would presume to understandthem; how infinitely more enlightened must thatbeing be whose understanding can embrace this Lawat the fountain head of its eternal majesty!

Only by studying, and to some extent grasping, anoutline of the Wisdom of which Karma and Rebirthare part can the meanest vision of the doctrine beattained, and even then it is difficult to examine itapart from the Wisdom itself from which, assunlight in the air, it is inseparable. Yet thedifficulty is largely of our own making. Forcenturies the Western mind has been building up anutterly false notion of a separate ‘I’, and it is hard forus to grasp a view of existence in which theseparative self is viewed as an illusion and thefather of all suffering. It follows, whether or not theidea be pleasing to the scholar mind, that only hewho treads the Way which leads to the end ofseparative self-hood will attain to understanding of

10 INTRODUCTION

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the Wisdom wherein self, as something separate, canhave no abiding-place.

Study, deep study, quiet meditation on the livingprinciples revealed in that study, and the constant,self-regardless application of those principles todaily life, these alone will provide the final ‘proof’of the laws of Karma and Rebirth, and only he whoknows them thus will be in a position to offer to theWest, by the written and the spoken word and bythe force of character, the Wisdom of which the Westhas so abundant and so urgent need.

C.H.

INTRODUCTION 11

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IThe Law of Karma

The word Karma, or in its neuter form, Karman (inPali, Kamma), is a Sanskrit word from the root kri,meaning to do or to make. Karma is therefore ‘doing’or ‘making’, but in the course of time the word hasbeen applied to what Lessing has described as theoldest doctrine in the world. It may be viewedexoterically, from the material point of view, inwhich case it is merely the law of causation, thebalance of cause and effect, the fact known in everyscience laboratory that action and reaction are equaland opposite. Esoterically, from the spiritual point ofview, Karma is the law of moral retribution,whereby not only does every cause have an effect,but he who puts the cause in action suffers theeffect. Professor Radhakrishnan has called it ‘the lawof the conservation of moral energy’. It ismagnificently described in the eighth book of theLight of Asia, one stanza of which must here suffice.

That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields! The sesamum was sesamum, the corn

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Was corn. The Silence and the Darkness knew! So is a man’s fate born.

This law of merit and demerit, Karma in the senseof the reign of moral law, is neither particularlyHindu, Buddhist nor Theosophical. It isfundamental in all Oriental philosophy, and waspreached by St. Paul. ‘Brethren, be not deceived.God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweththat shall he also reap.’ For the first few centuries ofChristianity it remained a cardinal belief in theWest. But at the Council of Constantinople, in A.D.551, the Christian Fathers, finding the doctrine ofRebirth incompatible with the curious system ofthought which they were in the process of creating,decided that belief in Rebirth should be henceforthanathema, and with this doctrine went that whichmakes it necessary of acceptance, Karma. Now,under the double influence of English translationsof the Hindu and Buddhist Scriptures, and thereproclaiming by Mme Blavatsky of the AncientWisdom, or Theosophy, of which all religions arepart, Karma and Rebirth have returned to the West,and a glance at chapter VII of this book will show towhat a wide extent the dual doctrine hasproved acceptable.

Either it is true or false. The Universe is eithercosmos or chaos, for it cannot be partly ruled by lawand partly by a blind, unreasonable chance. Karmais not a law of which it can be said: ‘There may besomething in it.’ Either the Law exists or it does not.If it exists he is a fool who does not use it, and healone is wise who studies it, proclaims it far andwide, and applies it to the smallest detail of hisdaily life. If it be not true it is a strangely venerable

LEVELS OF COGNITION 13

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error, and seeing that it has been taught as the basisof the world’s accumulated wisdom since, it wouldseem, the search for truth began, it is strange that noother Law has been propounded to explain this life’sphenomena. But the Law is only understandablefrom the spiritual point of view. To regard it as amechanical law of debit and credit for good and evilactions is to rob the doctrine of its living power. If itis all-embracing, coeval with the Universe, it canonly be grasped from a universal, that is to say, aspiritual point of view. Man has many levels ofcognition, windows on the spiral staircase of hisunderstanding, and even as the lighthouse-keeper,whose tower is based in the living rock, climbs tothe level of the lantern where he tends the lightwhich is not his light, so man’s evolvingconsciousness must climb from plane to plane untilhe finds, and learns to tend, the Light within, whichshines eternally. Beyond the intellect, which is themachinery of thought, is the plane of the intuition,the faculty of immediate, direct cognition of Reality.In most of us it sleeps, or functions dimly in a lowreflection as the ‘instincts’, or on the psychic plane.Yet all may develop it, and none may know the Lawwho has not to some extent acquired it as an activeinstrument. At first it serves to illumine the intellectwith fitful flashes of understanding; later, theascending consciousness begins to use it on its ownplane, and he who has experienced such dazzlingglimpses of ‘the heart of things’ will know, andknow beyond all doubting, that the Law is true.Meanwhile, on the level of the intellect, wheredoubts arise and cloud the understanding, the Lawcan only be viewed as a doctrine of sweetreasonableness which, in the workshops ofexperience, is tested and found true. Karma is a Law,

14 THE LAW OF KARMA

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a Law which dominates all other natural laws, fromgravity to the law of averages, but it is not blind Law.It is living and intelligent as all else in the Universe.‘There is no such thing as either “dead” or “blind”matter, as there is no “blind” or “unconscious”Law’, for

the Universe is worked and guided from withinoutwards. As above so it is below, as in heavenso on earth; and man, the microcosm andminiature copy of the macrocosm, is the livingwitness to this Universal Law, and to the modeof its action.1

The Wisdom-Religion

From this it must be obvious that in order tounderstand Karma it is necessary to have someknowledge of the Wisdom of which it is the basiclaw. Only then will it be seen as a necessary part ofthe cosmic Whole, and the place of man, thelaw-giver who is yet subject to the law, made clear.This Wisdom-Religion, older than any knownreligion, will be found to be based upon threefundamental Principles. These are necessarilydifficult to describe, first because they speak ofthings which lie beyond the range of our limitedintelligence, secondly because any descriptioninvolves the use of words and names, and both arewidely different in the various descriptions of thePrinciples, and thirdly because any attempt todefine and describe such cosmic Laws is like

1 The Secret Doctrine, H.P.Blavatsky.

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picking up a handful of a rushing stream orattempting to pigeon-hole the tide.

The Ultimate Principle, which all the capitalletters in the alphabet can never describe, is theParabrahman of the Hindus, the Adi Buddha of theMahayana Buddhists, the Fana-al-Fana of the Sufis,and the Tao, in its highest sense, of the Taoists. It is,in the words of The Secret Doctrine,

an Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless andImmutable PRINCIPLE, on which allspeculation is impossible, since it transcendsthe power of human conception and can only bedwarfed by any human expression orsimilitude. It is beyond the range and reachof thought.

It is, as the writer later says, ‘Be-ness’ rather thanBeing, and many prefer to consider it as the ultimateNamelessness. It is important to note further that ‘itsimpersonality is the fundamental conception of theSystem’, and that it is therefore utterly beyond thelimited and limiting belief in a personal God. ‘It islatent in every atom of the Universe, and is theUniverse itself.’

But ‘Be-ness’, to be recognizable to itself, mustmanifest, and the manifested Universe is the Fieldof Becoming whereon the One unrolls into the Manyand returns again. This periodic ‘rolling andunrolling’, as the Buddhist Scriptures call it,occupies immense though not, it is said,incalculable periods of time. It demonstrates ‘theuniversality of that law of periodicity, of flux andreflux, ebb and flow, which physical science hasobserved and recorded in all departments of nature’,and which is contained in the Buddhist doctrine of

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anicca, ceaseless change. The Universe whenmanifest is but of relative Reality, or Maya, yet deepin the heart of each of the Many is a fragment orray of the One, and each human mind is an aspector ray of the Universal Mind—the ‘Essence of Mind’of the Sutra of Wei Lang—which is the ‘appearance’of the Namelessness. Within this Field of Becomingthe One has become Two. But no two things arecognizable without relationship, and with thisrelationship the Two become Three.

From Three in turn comes Seven, and from theSeven come what the Chinese call the TenThousand Things, the manifested Universe in itsinfinite diversity. The fundamental ‘Pair ofOpposites’ is Spirit and Matter, Subject and Object,the Purusha and Prakriti of Indian philosophy, andfrom the interplay of this original duality is spun onthe warp of motive and the woof of acts, the Karmawhich we create and suffer, create and suffer as theWheel of Becoming turns unceasingly.

The third Fundamental Principle is sometimescalled the Cycle of Necessity, the necessarypilgrimage of every ‘soul’ (using that term as the rayof the Flame in every man), from purest ‘Spirit’ intodarkest ‘Matter’ and then, on the return journey,‘home’. Within this mighty cycle of one completeunrolling and re-rolling of the Universe there are, ofcourse, an infinity of lesser cycles. Even on thisearth, itself subject to cosmic cycles of birth anddeath, there are tremendous cycles, from thosewhich belong to the field of geology to those whichaffect the mass migration and the racial cycles ofmen. Ever the cycle runs—‘Coming to be, coming tobe; ceasing to be, ceasing to be’1—or, in greaterdetail, birth, growth, decay and death; birth, growth,decay and death.

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In the Buddhist Scriptures this cycle is stillfurther analysed into the twelve Nidanas, whichMme Blavatsky describes as a detailed expression ofthe Law of Karma under twelve aspects. The subjectis more fully treated in Mme David-Neel’sBuddhism, its Doctrines and Methods and in Whatis Buddhism?2 and need not be elaborated here.These twelve spokes of the ‘Wheel of Causation’,however, do throw light on the process of involutionand evolution, according as they are read forwards orin inverse order, and are essential for those whodesire to study the ‘rolling and unrolling’ of theUniverse. It is important to note that the spokes arenot merely causal, i.e. directly sequential the onefrom the other, but form an elaborate interrelation ofcausal factors on all planes. The first is Jaramarana,old age and death, for life is cradled in death; everyatom, as soon as it is born, begins to die. Old age anddeath is therefore caused by Jati, birth. ‘The causeof death is birth.’ Birth is caused by Bhava,‘becoming’, which is the Karmic agent of rebirth,and Bhava is caused by Upadana, fierce attachmentto life and the things of life which man, in hisignorance, foolishly believes will quench his ‘thirst’,or Tanha (Sanskrit, Trishna), the desire for sentientexistence. This thirst or desire is caused by Vedana,feelings, which is in turn produced by Phassa,contact, the connecting link between the organs ofsense and the objects they cognize. Contact comesthrough the six senses, Sparsha, being the usual five

1 From the Sutta Nipata.2 Compiled and published by the Buddhist Lodge,London.

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and the lower mind, and these arise from Nama-Rupa, literally Name and Form. The cause ofNama-Rupa is Vinnana, consciousness which,needing a vehicle for self-expression, creates foritself a ‘meaning and form’ through which itmanifests. Consciousness in turn is the outcome ofthe Sankharas, about which volumes might bewritten, for these compounds of thoughts, belief,ideals and prejudices together form ‘the germs ofpropensities and impulses from previous births tobe developed in this’, and as such are an aspect ofKarma itself. But Karma in this sense is the productof Avidya, ignorance, the dark illusion which is thewomb of suffering and the basis of causation and itsendless progeny of cause-effects.

The Nature of Man

What, then, is the place of man in this mightyscheme of things?

Man is a complex entity, and whether he beregarded as the ‘spirit, soul and body’ of St Paul, oras the more complex analysis of Indian philosophy,which ignores both the physical body and the spiritand yet leaves five other planes of consciousness, orwhether the number be carried to seven, as set out inthe Ancient Wisdom itself, is a matter ofterminology and choice. For the purpose of thisaccount of Karma and Rebirth the Pauline analysiswill suffice. Man is spirit, that is to say, he is of thevery essence of that ‘Be-ness’ which is ‘beyond therange and reach of thought’, and the various‘garments’ which he wears are the vehicles orinstruments through which he contacts thedescending planes of consciousness. These bodiesor instruments are all made of ‘matter’, but of matter

LEVELS OF COGNITION 19

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which at the highest is so fine as to be all but non-existent, and at the lowest is of our ‘common clay’.All alike are anatta, that is to say, lacking apermanent life as such, and all are anicca, subject tochange. They change with every act at any level ofconsciousness, for every new cause must modify tosome extent the sum total of effects which is thatvehicle. It follows that the ultimate heresy, theprofoundest error in all human belief, is Attavada,the belief in the essential separateness of any ofthese vehicles, be it mind or soul or spirit itself fromthe Namelessness or infinite SELF of which allmanifestation is part. This fundamental principle,the very basis for the solidarity and hence the‘brotherhood’ of man, must be thoroughly graspedand assimilated before the law of Karma can be inany way understood.

We must not lose sight of the fact that everyatom is subject to the general law governing thewhole body to which it belongs…. Theaggregate of individual Karma becomes that ofthe nation to which those individuals belong,and the sum total of National Karma is that ofthe world. The evils that a man suffers are notpeculiar to the individual or even to the nation,they are more or less universal; and it is uponthis broad line of human interdependence thatthe law of Karma finds its legitimate andequable issue.1

1 The Key to Theosophy, H.P.Blavatsky.

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From this the writer proceeds to one of the finestpassages in all her writings.

It is an occult law, moreover, that no man canrise superior to his individual failings withoutlifting, be it ever so little, the whole body ofwhich he is an integral part. In the same wayno one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin,alone. In reality, there is no such thing as‘Separateness’; and the nearest approach to thatselfish state which the laws of life permit is inthe intent or motive.1

But if no man’s spirit is separate, in that being onewith the Namelessness it is not even his, the soul iseven less immortal, for it is changing every momentof the day. It is, as will be explained later,equivalent to character, the collection of attributes,good and bad, which make up the man Still moreimpermanent is the ‘body’, using the word in thesense of the mask or personality through which thesoul, and through the soul the spirit, is mademanifest. This outward and visible aspect of theman is the densest of his vehicles, being thatthrough which he contacts the lowest planes ofmatter, yet, said the Buddha, ‘In this very body, sixfeet in length, with its sense-impressions and itsthoughts and ideas, I declare to you are the world,the origin of the world and the ceasing of the world,and likewise the Way that leads to the ceasingthereof’.1 It follows that he who waits for a heaven-world in which to begin his inner development willwait in vain. At page 122 of Dr Jacobi’s Psychology ofC.G.Jung, there is a diagram of what that famouspsychologist, as the result of a life’s work, believesto be the content of the invisible side of Man. To

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equate the analysed aspects of man as taught byEastern philosophy with the empirically discoveredequivalents in Western psychology is a task whichprobably only a Dr Jung could at the momentundertake, but those who meditate upon therespective analyses will learn a vast amount fromthe comparison. In either case the teaching isinsistent on the indivisible wholeness of the thing weknow as man. Whether his ‘skins’ be compared tothose of an onion, which may be successivelyremoved, or his consciousness be compared to thatof a lighthouse-keeper, as in the analogy used above,or the various aspects be built into a glyph ordiagram, ever the SELF and all its vehicles is One,even as Karma is One, for both are subject to andaspects of the ‘Be-ness’ without name.

The Law of Equilibrium

For the study of Karma it is best to consider theman at the level of his individuality or ‘soul’. Herethe Self creates, uses, suffers and in a very real senseis its Karma, and those who study Jung’sdiagram will note with interest that this Self unitesthe most outward and most inward, most materialand most spiritual parts of the whole. For thekeynote of the law of Karma is equilibrium, andnature is always working to restore that equilibriumwhenever through man’s acts it is disturbed. AsEmerson wrote,

If you love and serve men, you cannot by anyhiding or stratagem escape the remuneration.

1 The Anguttara Nikaya.

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Secret retributions are always restoring thelevel, when disturbed, of the divine justice. Itis impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrantsand proprietors and monopolists of theworld in vain set their shoulders to heave thebar. Settles for evermore the ponderousequator to its line, and man and mote, and starand sun must range to it, or be pulverized bythe recoil.1

To the same effect wrote H.P.Blavatsky:

The only decree of Karma, an eternal andimmutable decree, is absolute Harmony in theworld of Matter as in the world of Spirit. It isnot, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes,but it is we who reward and punish ourselves,according as we work with and throughNature, abiding by the laws on which thatharmony depends, or breaking them.2

And this in turn was echoed by W.Q.Judge, herpupil, when he wrote, in his famous KarmicAphorisms, ‘Karma is an undeviating and unerringtendency in the Universe to restore equilibrium, andit operates incessantly.’ Because this ceaseless effortto adjust a troubled harmony takes time, thedoctrine of Rebirth is a necessary corollary of Karma,for the longest life on earth will not suffice to restorethe harmony disturbed by a daily round of self-

1 Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868.2 The Secret Doctrine.

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regarding actions; life after life must pass before theultimate lesson is learned, and the ‘triple fires’ ofhatred, lust and illusion die for want of fuelling.

Karma is the master Law of the Universe, butthere is no Law-giver. Its Ultimate Cause, as theultimate cause of anything, is of course unknownand to our intelligence unknowable, but it iscertainly not ‘God’, as the Church which claims thename of Christianity conceives that term. AbsoluteConsciousness, or Adi-Buddha, however one mayname the Namelessness, is as far beyond theconception of a personal God as the sea is greaterthan a stream. The anthropomorphic God is only, asColonel Olcott wrote, ‘a gigantic shadow thrownupon the void of space by the imagination ofignorant men’,1 for even as ‘the Tao that can betalked about is not the eternal Tao,’ SQ

a man can have no God that is not bounded byhis own human conceptions. The wider thesweep of his spiritual vision, the mightier willbe his deity. But where can we find a betterdemonstration of Him than in man himself–inthe spiritual and divine powers lying dormantin every human being?1

The Law is all-embracing. As is said in one of themost famous passages in the Dhammapada, ‘Not inthe sky, not in the midst of the sea, not if we enterinto the clefts of the mountains, is there known aspot in the whole world where a man may be freed

1 A Buddhist Catechism.1 Isis Unveiled, H.P.Blavatsky.

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from an evil deed.’ None is above the Law save hewho has attained, by his use of the Law, supremeenlightenment, and then only because, with thedissolution of the Self which caused the Law to beset in motion, there is no longer an object on whichthe Law can operate.

The Law is timeless, therefore, in that it willlast for as long as there remains a single beingin whom it can and must inhere. Its patienceis inexhaustible—

Times are as nought, to-morrow it will judge,Or after many days.

Such is the Law, and it is the basis of all truth.As Paracelsus wrote, ‘Philosophy is only the trueperception and understanding of Cause and Effect.’

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IIKarma in Action

Karma creates nothing.

Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It isman who plans and creates Causes, and KarmicLaw adjusts the effects, which adjustment isnot an act, but universal harmony, tending everto resume its original position, like a boughwhich, bent down too forcibly, rebounds withcorresponding vigour.1

It is man who creates his Karma, for it is the productof his thought. As is written in the most famousverse in the Dhammapada, ‘All that we are is theresult of what we have thought; it is founded on ourthoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.’ Note thecorollary which follows, when harmony demandsthe corresponding effect.

If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought,pain follows him, as the wheel follows the footof him who draws the carriage. But if a manspeaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness

1 The Secret Doctrine, H.P.Blavatsky.

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follows him, like a shadow that neverleaves him.

It is of great importance to grasp the fundamentalfact, as expressed by W.Q.Judge in The Ocean ofTheosophy, that ‘No act is performed without athought at its root, either at the time of performanceor as leading to it’. According to Indian philosophy,the sequence is ignorance, desire, will, thought andact. First comes Avidya, Ignorance, because allmanifestation, and all that proceeds within it, isunenlightened. In his ignorance man desires thingsfor himself, believing that he has a ‘self’ which hasinterests of its own. ‘Man is altogether formed ofdesire; according as his desire is, so is his will;according as his will is, so are his deeds; accordingas are his deeds, so does it befall him.’1 But betweenthe will to act and the act is thought, the conceptionwithin the mind of which the act is the visibleexpression. It follows that control of thought, withwhich is included emotion, is a necessary prelude tocontrol of action, for, as a man thinks, sohe becomes.

Thus man, as spirit, as the highest self-consciousaspect of the One Life, rules the Universe with theaid of Karma. But once he has created Karma, as hedoes with every act, he must necessarily bow theknee to the Nemesis of his creation, and it is not forhim to complain that Fate, against his will, hasbound his actions or decreed an unjust doom.‘Karma-Nemesis is no more than the spiritualdynamical effect of causes produced and forces

1 The Brihad Upanishad.

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awakened into activity by our own actions.’2 Thehigher the plane from which the harmony of natureis disturbed, the more powerful the reactionto the act.

It is a law of Occult dynamics that a givenamount of energy expended on the spiritual orastral planes is productive of far greater resultsthan the same amount expended on thephysical, objective plane of existence.1

The Law of Karma, therefore, is utterly impersonal,being the servant of its creator, man, and not thewhim of a benevolent or avenging God. It followsthat it is useless to attempt to placate it, pray to it,argue with it or defy it; for ‘as a man thinks, sohe becomes’.

Karmic Agents

Yet it is, be it emphasized, supremely intelligent,and it therefore works through intelligent agents.These agents are manifold in kind.

The whole Cosmos is guided, controlled andanimated by an almost endless series ofHierarchies or sentient Beings, each having amission to perform, and who—whether we callthem Dhyan Chohans or Angels—are‘Messengers’ in the sense only that they are theagents of Cosmic or Karmic Laws. They vary

2 The Secret Doctrine, H.P.Blavatsky.1 Ibid.

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infinitely in their respective degrees ofconsciousness and intelligence…. Each of theseBeings was, or prepares to become, a man.2

Such are the Buddhist Avalokiteshvara andAmitabha, and the four ‘Regents of the Earth’ whoappear in many mythologies, and the ‘Thrones,Dominions and Powers’ of Christianity. But there isan ancient tradition that by reason of their own pastKarma certain human beings act in a given life asfocal points for mighty happenings, lightningconductors, as it were, through whom the Karmicforce is ‘earthed’. These are men to whom and aboutwhom things of wide importance are alwayshappening, whether they be at the head of a nationor a factory, but they are quite unconscious of theirspecial, self-attracted function. Only a genuineAdept, one who has attained Enlightenment, canconsciously control the forces of mass Karma, and sobe a conscious agent of the Law. Incidentally,somewhere in this esoteric aspect of Karma must beincorporated the ‘archetypal images’ of Jung’sdiscovery, but this, although a fruitful field for laterresearch and consideration, is beyond the scope ofthe present volume.

Karmic Responsibilities

It would seem that man is responsible only forsuch acts as are generated in the mind. He is not, inother words, responsible for actions where thethought or intent did not run with the deed. If, forexample, in turning quickly on a station platform

2 Ibid.

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someone bumps into a person standing close behindhim, and so tips him on to the line in front of atrain, he would not be responsible for a death whichhe never intended. Here the Law would seem to bethe ‘above’ of which our English law is the reflected,though unconsciously reflected ‘below’. For inEnglish law there must, to constitute responsibility,not only bean actus reus, the wrongful deed, butalso a mens rea, the wicked mind. A man is notresponsible for a pure accident unless it was causedby such gross negligence that he must be held tohave intended the ‘natural and probableconsequences’ of his act. In the same way lunatics,children and persons completely drunk may beincapable of the mens rea which is a necessaryingredient of their responsibility.

This, however, is an over-simplification of anintensely difficult subject, for the latest discoveriesin psychology enormously widen the range of theword ‘intend’. One may, for example, ‘intend’ thoseacts which seem the very reverse of those apparentlyintended, and the most fantastic ‘accident’ may be adeliberate act by the unconscious, though fiercelyrepudiated by the conscious mind. Many anapparently accidental death, for example, isunconscious suicide, and many an injury caused toanother may be deliberate at unconscious levelsthough unintended by the normal consciousness.The mind of man is a realm of which but a tithe isyet explored, and that but superficially, and the oft-repeated cry from the dock, ‘I don’t know what cameover me’, displays, to the trained psychologist, ahidden motive which the victim of his ownunconscious genuinely denies.

One clue to the mystery may lie in the fact that anact has separate and often different effects on the

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various planes of consciousness. A millionaire, forexample, may build a local hospital at vast expenseand offer it to the town. The effect of his generositywill appear on different levels of his being. Theoutward deed was good, and will produce ‘good’Karma, whatever the motive, but the mental effectwill vary with the motive. If the reason of the giftwas a genuine desire to use his worldly means forthe benefit of his fellow men, his mind will beennobled with the deed. If, on the other hand, hissecret motive was the love of applause or, worse, adesire to curry local favour before standing as thetown’s representative in Parliament, then the effecton his mind will be that of the misuse of a power forselfish ends. This crude illustration will also explainthe difference, so much insisted on in the famousSutra of Wei Lang, between ‘merits’ and ‘felicities’.

Such deeds [the Patriarch pointed out] asbuilding temples, giving alms and entertainingthe (Buddhist) Order will bring you onlyfelicities, which should not be taken for merits.Merits are to be found within the Dharmakaya(Body of the Law), and have nothing to do withpractices for attaining felicities.

Felicities, in other words, are pleasant Karma on thephysical plane, but do not necessarily conduce tothe attainment of Enlightenment. Merits, on theother hand, are reactions on the mind of mentalwelldoing or right motive, and are conducive to themind’s enlightenment.

Further light on our responsibility for ‘accidents’is furnished by returning once again to the basicprinciples on which the Universe is built. Life isOne, and all its forms are interrelated in a vastly

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complicated but insever able whole. It follows thatevery act by any form of life, from the highest to thelowest, must react on every other form. The power ofthought is terrifying, for thoughts are truly things,and once created have an independent existence oftheir own. The length and strength of this lifedepends on the intensity and clarity of the thinker’smind, but good or bad, each thought is a power, aliving power for good or evil respectively. As such itaffects not only the thinker, ennobling or debasinghis mind for future thinking, but it affects all otherlife in the Universe. As A.P.Sinnet wrote in TheOccult World:

Man is continually peopling his current inspace with a world of his own, crowded withthe offspring of his fancies, desires, impulsesand passions; a current which reacts on anysensitive or nervous organization which comesin contact with it, in proportion to itsdynamic intensity.

As the average mind is too undeveloped to confinethe springs of action to its own thought alone, mostmen are at the mercy of the myriad thoughts whichpress upon the brain as bodies press one’s body in aswaying crowd, and each man’s actions are to thatextent the effect not merely of his own volition butof the mass volition of the crowd. Hence the well-known phenomena of ‘mob psychology’, the powerof slogans, the whims of fashion, the speed ofrumour and, generally, the suggestibility of theweaker by the stronger mind.

Motive, therefore, is the dominating factor inevery act, for the act that springs from ‘accident’, ifsuch there be, will at any rate have less effect than

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the carefully intended act. Acting from the highestlevels in his being, man is the creative andcontrolling force in the Universe; acting from thelowest he is the worst enemy both of himself andthe One Life. He can, if he did but know it, controlthe forces of nature consciously as he at present usesthem unconsciously to produce their inevitableeffect. Whether the user of these forces is ‘whitemagic’ or ‘black magic’ depends on the motive alone.Every act is in accordance with or against the streamof progress. He who swims with the current will thesooner reach the sea; he who swims against it willsooner or later suffer for his determined folly and inthe end, broken and exhausted, move unwillinglydown to the self-same sea.

Hour by hour we are choosing our direction, andthe Law with utter justice acts accordingly.The choice between right and wrong is difficultenough to make at times, but the choice is harderstill when it lies between right and right. Each manhas many duties and many loyalties, and when theyconflict it is hard to decide which is the more ‘right’of the two. Yet the choice must be made, onprinciple and, if the heart be stout enough, ‘in thescorn of consequence’. Thereafter the effect onvarious planes will mirror the wisdom and theselflessness of the decision made. Better, theWisdom seems to say, a firm decision which, whenfound to be wrong, is as firmly changed and thepunishment of error cheerfully borne than avacillation which, if it breeds not error, breeds noright, and carries the weakling mind no further onthe road to self-enlightenment.

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Man as Karma

‘Life becomes what it does.’ There, in five words, isthe essence of the Law. It follows that ‘humanhistory, from one point of view is nothing but arecord of the Karma of Humanity, working itself outaccording to the good or evil of our racial, nationaland personal deeds’.1

Man is his Karma, and his deeds are part of him.Hence Maeterlinck’s famous saying, ‘Let us alwaysremember that nothing befalls us that is not of thenature of ourselves.’ Or, to quote from EdwinArnold’s Light of Asia,

Karma—all that total of a soulWhich is the things it did, the thoughts it had,The ‘Self’ it wove—with woof of viewless timeCrossed on the warp invisible of acts—…

Compounded of good and evil, man as we know himis good in proportion as he has found the Lightwithin, and learnt to ‘let the Light shine’; and he isbad to the extent that he is still under thedominance of Maya, illusion, and lets himself be ledby the lower, personal desire.

Trishna, that thirst which makes the living drinkDeeper and deeper of the false salt wavesWhereon they float, pleasures,ambition, wealth, Praise, fame or domination, conquest, love;

1 Mysticism of East and West, Loftus Hare.

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Rich meats and robes, and fair abodesand prideOf ancient lines, and lust of days, and strifeTo live, and sins that flow from strife,some sweet,Some bitter…

Yet once again it must be emphasized that thesoul, wherein the ceaseless warfare between lightand darkness, right and wrong, is waged, is notimmortal nor eternal; still less is it changeless, for itis changing as a handful of a river changes, withevery new thought and act that leaves or enters thewhirlpool of the soul.

A Buddhist [wrote Mr R.J.Jackson1] will regardhis property as property, but not as his; willregard his body as body, but not as his; willregard his sensations and ideas as sensationsand ideas, but not as his There is no truth inthe thought that ‘this is mine and I have allthese things’. If there is anything a man cantruly call his own it is not what he possessesbut what he does.

The soul or Self is a ray of the SELF, and the mindthat decides its acts and motives is but a child of theEssence of Mind, which is ‘intrinsically pure’.

Rewards and Punishments

Man is punished by his sins, not for them. Karmaneither rewards nor punishes; it only restores lost

1 Buddhism and God.

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harmony. He who suffers deserves his suffering, andhe who has reason to rejoice is reaping where he hassown. But even if all deserve their suffering, in thatthey have caused it, there is no excuse for callousindifference to their suffering by those more‘fortunate’. In the long run there is no such thing aspersonal Karma, for the acts of one are the acts ofthe whole, and the acts of the whole react on itslittlest part. This vast and comprehensive blendingof innumerable Karmas is the basis and the bedrockof the cosmic truth of Brotherhood. All things are intheir essence good, and suffering is the servant ofthis Good. By that we learn, and in our commonsuffering move, by infinitely slow degrees, to that‘far off divine event to which the wholecreation moves’.

The Doctrine of Merit

Nevertheless, though men are in essence One theyare, at their present distance from enlightenment,separate entities, and though Karma reflects in allthe acts of each, yet the average man is a Karmicunit, as it were, who suffers the good and evilresults of his own actions. This fact is the basis ofthe doctrine of merit, of which so much appears inBuddhist literature. All good acts acquire merit forthe actor in that at some future date, in this life or alater one, the cause will bear its due effect. This is afact, but it is a low, unworthy motive for the doingof good deeds. As the Chinese Taoist, ChuangTzu,proclaimed, ‘Rewards and punishments are thelowest form of education.’ The reason is that behindsuch motive is the spur either of fear or else of lowdesire for the pleasure which the noble deed isbelieved to bring. This limitation of thought may

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serve, like blinkers, to keep the thinker to a simpleethical code, but will not produce enlightenment. Ina talk to an American audience Krishnamurti saidthat such ‘thought cannot escape from its limitedaction and reaction until it understands deeply andfully the cause and process of its own bondage’.When such limited thought expresses itself in action,he goes on, that action creates further limitationof thought.

Into this simple reality, reward and punishmenthave been introduced to deter so-called wrongaction. If one is good—the good depending onlimitation of thought, not uponunderstanding—then in the future or in thenext life one will be suitably rewarded, and ifone is not, one will be suitably punished. Thiselement of fear, as reward and punishment,destroys understanding and love. If thought isinfluenced by reward and punishment, gainand loss, it cannot understand the craving thatseeks reward and avoids punishment. Thoughtcan only understand its own process if it doesnot identify itself with and cling to any of itsown creations, any of its outgoing desires.

None the less, the doctrine of merit is a usefulapplication of the Law of Karma to the daily round,for whatever the motive the habit of good deeds willpurify the mind, and prepare it for greater wideningof its scope. A better motive for right living is awider appreciation of the Law and its relation to theUniverse as a whole. With an understanding,however dim, of the basic unity of life and theinterrelation of all its members comes the desire toassist all life towards enlightenment. This, refined

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still further, awakens finally the highest springs ofaction, ‘to live by Law, acting the Law we live bywithout fear’; so to have found and known theEssence of Mind that nought is felt to be right savethat which serves it utterly. So long as merit anddemerit is the motive-power of action there is thedanger of that heartless snobbery of thought which,seeing suffering, remarks that it must be thesufferer’s Karma to suffer, and anyhow, what is it todo with me? Such thought will bear its own result, afurther hardening of the heart which, blinded withits dear delusion, continues to feel separate from itsfellow men and, like the Levite, passes by on theother side. Only the light of compassion, anunderstanding love for all that lives, can see thatKarma as Law is a loving Law; that if it is just it isalso utterly merciful. We who on earth make lawswith which to judge our fellow men know that ourjustice is fallible, and therefore add to the coldmachinery of justice the warmer quality of mercywhich, so far from dropping like a gentle dew fromheaven, is a virtue latent in the human heart. For‘Compassion is no attribute. It is the Law of Laws,—eternal Harmony, Alaya’s. SELF; a shorelessuniversal essence, the light of everlasting right, andfitness of all things, the law of Love eternal’.1 Onlyhe who sees that law and justice and mercy and loveare so many aspects of the Law of Harmony willunderstand that Karma is only a name we givethat Law.

1 The Voice of the Silence.

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Classifications of Karma

The field of manifestation is subject to the illusionof time, for though in Reality all is Eternal Now, yettime is real to our Senses. To our eyes there is past,present and future, and a cause and its effect areseparated by an interval of time. In essence thecause-effect are as the two sides of a coin,inseverable and instantaneous, but we see themseverally. It follows that we can, for purposes ofunderstanding, analyse and classify the cause-effectsof Karma, and four such classifications may bementioned here.

Karma is often analysed in terms of time.

Karma [wrote W.Q.Judge in his Aphorisms onKarma] may be of three sorts: (a) Presentlyoperative in this life through the appropriateinstruments; (b) that which is being made orstored up to be exhausted in the future;(c) Karma held over from past life or lives, andnot yet operating because inhibited byinappropriateness of the instrument in use bythe Ego, or by the force of Karmanow operating.

In the same way the twelve Nidanas, alreadydescribed, are often grouped in three, ignorance and‘mental formations’ belonging to the past lives, thenext eight in the list to this life, and the last two,rebirth and decrepitude and death, belonging to thefuture life or lives. But whether ‘Now working’, ‘Inthe making’ or ‘Held over’, the process is in factindivisible. In terms of time, however, it is obviousthat the complex causes of a busy life cannot all beworked out in that or in the succeeding life, and inany one life a man receives the results of only a

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small proportion of his own past causes, whether‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Karma reacts, as already explained, on all threeplanes, the mental, whence it originally sprang, thepsychic and the physical, and the make-up of a manin any life will accord with the differing Karma thathe has produced on the several planes ofconsciousness. A great mind may abuse its body andbe reborn with a poorer one; a glorious body,exquisitely cared for, may harbour a poorlydeveloped or even vicious mind. Yet the interactionis close. ‘As we think, so we are’, and evil thoughtwill mar the body even as it shows in the face.Again, the evil in the mind may be rectified by agreater understanding long before the effect, say, ofcruelty practised by the body has worked itself outon the physical plane. Hence the hunch-back with alovely mind.

In the well-known chapter on Karma in herBuddhism, its Doctrines and Methods, MadameDavid-Neel describes the Tibetan classification.General Karma perpetuates the round of existence asset out in the twelve Nidanas, which may be appliedto all manifestation. Then comes Inanimate andAnimate Karma. The Karma of ‘inanimate’ objectsproceeds on the cyclic law of birth, growth,decay and death. Animate beings are subjectin addition to moral Karma, that is, Karma thatoriginates in the mind and for which the‘individual’ is responsible. Finally, with man thereis the still more particular Karma wherein he is hisKarma, and as such and only as such moves frombirth to birth towards enlightenment.

Finally, for the present purposes, Karma may beclassified in terms of the size of the unit involved. Agroup or club or society may have its collective

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Karma as much as that smaller ‘group of qualities’ wecall a man. In the same way a nation will not onlyreap the benefits and evil of its collective acts, butre-incarnate in the larger cycle of its destiny. Romeand Greece were units of rebirth, and the Punic warsare with us again to-day. Red Indians will appear inthe race that slew them in such quantity, and manya minority movement in a country represents someolden enemy returned, this time, within the gates tocontinue an age-long war. He who wouldunderstand the pattern of history cannot ignore thedoctrine of Karma; still less can he ignore Rebirth.

Summary

Karma, then, is the fundamental Law that rules allmanifested things, and man, the conscious user ofit, is but another aspect of the Namelessness. TheLaw was born when man was born, and will die‘when every blade of grass has entered intoenlightenment’. It is utterly impersonal andabsolutely just. It strives for harmony, and he whodisturbs the harmony must suffer the adjust ment.The Law has agents, human and ‘divine’, yet these,the demi-gods, are likewise subject to its sway. Manis punished by his sins, not for them; it follows thatthere is no such thing as forgiveness and thereforenone who can forgive. Yet the Law is merciful, forthe Law is Love.

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IIIWhat Karma is not

Karma is not new. It is not a new theory of life to beidly discussed by the dilettante mind. Either it is afundamental Law of the Universe or it is untrue.

It is not an Eastern doctrine, a product of anEastern mode of thought. If it is true, it embraces notonly East and West but the whole Universe, and thelightest study of Western literature for the last threethousand years will show that it has been held astrue by most of the greatest minds.

Karma not anti-Christian

It is not opposed to Christianity, nor evenincompatible with it. The principal differencesbetween Christianity and Buddhism are in thenature and power of God and the nature of the‘soul’. The Buddhists say that God is so great that notonly is this ultimate Principle absolutelyimpersonal, but it is ‘beyond the range and reach ofthought’ and therefore even unnameable. ‘THAT’, asthe Hindus call it, has no say in the affairs of any ofits myriad parts, for all are parts or aspects of oneinseverable Whole. To this extent and to this onlyBuddhists are atheists, in that they refuse to demeanthe ultimate Namelessness to the status of a tribaldeity. On the question of soul the difference is

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subtle yet profound. The Christian believes that hissoul, being ‘divine’, is immortal, and will go, whenpurged of sin, to heaven. The Buddhist proves, bysound analysis, that the soul or character, the ray ofthe One or spark of God or however it be described,so far from being immortal is changing every secondof time (anicca), is lacking in any permanentlyseparate or special factor which makes it differentfrom any other aspect of the parent One (anatta),and being a (temporarily) separated part of theWhole, a child of illusion wandering in a world ofMaya, is and will be the subject of suffering (dukkha),until that day when once again the ‘dewdrop slipsinto the Shining Sea’. In other words, the Christianholds the soul to be the immortal part of man; theBuddhist presses the analysis of our being a wholestage further back and claims that nothing in man iseternal, but only that Oneness, the Essence of PureMind which, though it shines in every man, is neverhis. The light in an electric bulb shines through thebulb, but the bulb does not own it. Nor can it claimany ‘piece’ of electricity as being in its possession,for that which shines now in a billionth of a secondis gone. There is but a river of life or light that flowsthrough a myriad conduit pipes. None owns the riverof Life, and he who holds its waters in his hand willfind that in his attempt to possess the water he hasstayed the flow, and all that he holds is ‘dead’.

It is, however, as difficult to speak of theteachings of Christianity, as if they were all agreed,as of the teachings of Buddhism. The Founderscame, and taught, and went away. Their followerstreasured all that they remembered of what they had,or thought they had, understood. This was laterwritten down, or some of it, and thereaftergenerations of monkish editors added, subtracted

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and altered the script to accord with their own by nomeans settled views. Finally we have translations,as accurate as the understanding of the translatorand no more. Such is the history of the Buddhistand Hindu Scriptures, and assuming that Jesus wasan historic figure, such was the Christian tragedytoo. It is said that there are three hundred sects ofChritianity; there are certainly six in Buddhism. Buttaking a reasonable consensus of belief in the twogreat religions, the differing views on ‘soul’ are ofgreat importance. If I have a soul or, to be moreaccurate, am a soul with a body, and that soul isimmortal and specially created by God at my birth,then I shall inevitably fight for the benefit andsalvation of that soul, while vaguely hoping thatthose of my fellow men will be equally fortunate.The feeling is that of separation, save for thecommon Fatherhood of a God whose ways areunpredictable. If, on the other hand, I know thatnothing of the SELF is mine, that all of me is anicca,anatta and a prey to dukkha, then selfishness andpersonal ambition have no purpose and are seen asfoolishness; and though in the fight against theillusion of selfish purposing I may and shall bevanquished again and again, still, at least I know that‘there is no abiding Self in man’, and that everysingle form of life, and there is nothing ‘dead’, isequally Divine.

So much for differences. But are they ancient ormodern? St Paul unquestionably taught the doctrineof Karma and Rebirth, and many of Christ’s sayingsare meaningless unless they refer to a doctrine sowell known to his audience. But more of thishereafter. At the moment it is enough to observe thatKarma is not by any means anti-Christian.

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Karma not Good or Bad

Karma is neither good nor bad, and it is inaccurateto speak of ‘good Karma’ and ‘bad Karma’. Karma is;how we view it is our own affair. None but anadept, a Master of the Law, can judge another’sKarma. We who see but a few strands of the webcannot know the design of which these tangledthreads are part. What may seem at the timemisfortune may, by clearing away the refuse of pasterror, open a way to further advancement; goodfortune may so puff up the recipient that fromspiritual pride he falls to the ground again, andsuffering tests and strengthens character. The habitof avoiding man-made labels for the day’s events isitself an advance in character. It is a sign of strengthto appreciate that everything that is has had a cause,and that all that befalls one is genuinely ‘right’. AsEpictetus said, ‘True instruction is this: to learn towish that each thing should come to pass as it does.And how does it come to pass? As the Disposer hasdisposed it.’ For Epictetus the Disposer was nopersonal God but a natural Principle, which in itsoperation is the Law of Karma. Man-made labels donot clarify; they cloud the mind to proper values. Asis written in a Japanese Scripture,

Since everything in this world is caused by theconcurrence of causes and conditions, therecan be no fundamental distinction betweenthings. The apparent distinctions exist becauseof people’s absurd and deluding thoughts anddesires. In the sky there is no distinction ofEast and West; people create the distinctionout of their own minds and then believe itto be true.

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The anonymous writer of this ancient Scripture goesmuch further, and his words accord with the parentIndian philosophy.

In the universal process of becoming there areinherently no distinctions between the processof life and the process of destruction; peoplemake a distinction and call the one birth andthe other death. In action there is no distinctionbetween right and wrong, but people make adistinction for their own silly convenience….To Buddha every definite thing is illusion,something which the mind constructs; heknows that whatever the mind can grasp andthrow away is vanity; thus he avoids thepitfalls of images and discriminative thought.

Predestination and Freewill

Once the Law of Karma is understood it will be seenthat there is no such thing as luck, good or bad, but,to quote from the Stoic Emperor, Marcus Aurelius,‘Subsequents follow antecedents by a bond of innerconsequence; it is no merely numerical sequence ofarbitrary and isolated units, but a rationalinterconnection.’ Nor is the doctrine of Karmaequivalent to the doctrine of Predestination orDeterminism. Still less is it Fatalism. ‘The latterimplies a blind course of some still blinder power,but man is a free agent during his stay on earth’,1 free, that is, within the working of the Law. For,viewed from one life, the ‘operative’ Karma of thatlife is equivalent to the Greek Nemesis or Destiny.

1 The Secret Doctrine, H.P. Blavatsky.

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But this destiny is not the decree of a wrathful Godbut the product of that man’s imagining. ‘The fault,dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves thatwe are underlings.’ In order, however, to understandProfessor Radhakrishnan’s dictum, ‘Freedom andKarma are two aspects of the same reality’, it may bewise to return to first principles.

The soul of man, as distinct from ‘his’ spirit andthe physical body, is the battleground of the ‘pairsof oposites’ which, ranged under the banners ofGood and Evil, contend for the mastery. On the sideof light is the will, in the sense of the driving forcetowards enlightenment; on the other are the masseddesires of the lower, personal self which craves forits separative own aggrandizement. These two forcesstrive unceasingly, and now the one and now theother gains the field. Such is

‘the sickness of the spirit (soul)’ [as StAugustine called it] ‘that raiseth itself not to itsfull stature, being sustained by the truth butweighed down by custom. And thus there aretwo wills, and neither is entire….’

Bearing in mind this internal duality of the soul, andremembering that the mind is the father of Karmaand that it is choosing every moment whether itsacts shall be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the words of the writerPascal will provide the solution to the problem ofFreewill and Destiny, which is in fact no problem atall. ‘Though slaves of the past,’ he wrote, ‘we aremasters of the future.’ The following analogy mayhelp. A man is in a room with two doors. He pilesup the furniture against one door and falls asleep.Later he wakes, and complains that he has no choiceof exit, for there is only one door available. The

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answer is—remove the furniture. It sometimeshappens that a man may truly say, ‘There seemed noother course open to me—I had no choice.’ But it ishe who by his own past action piled up thefurniture against the alternate door. He is bound byhis fate, but he is his fate, and nothing in the worldsave his own debility of will prevents him becomingfree. There are many who cry in the bonds ofcircumstance, ‘I bow before the will of God.’ But asthere is no God save the God within, whoseinstrument is Karma, we have but one excuse forour bondage, that we lack the will to be free.

If there is no luck or chance there is no such thingas coincidence. However amazing the said‘coincidence’, each set of facts was the result ofprevious causes. But whether the additional factthat the results fell out so strangely to our eyes hasany significance is a different matter, for Law is Lawbut meaning is what we add to it, and the meaningdrawn from any facts will vary with the individual.Many apparent coincidences are clearly the effects ofprevious acts. The innumerable stories of peoplewho, by an amazing series of events, are drawn to aparticular place or away from it at the moment whena terrible event takes place are not in the least‘accidents’. For some reason, which nought but aMaster could trace, that person was ‘meant’, or wasnot ‘meant’, to be killed when the bomb fell, orwhatever the event might be. Taking the matter on alarger scale, it may be that a man who is incarnatedinto a particular family or race at a particular timewas guided there by his Karma, under the laws ofaffinity, in order that he might be subject to theworking out of national Karma, whether of war orearthquake or a period of prosperity. In a work ofthis size, however, it is impossible to speculate on

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the working out of the Law. It is enough to explainwhat seem to be its basic principles, and leave theindividual, with an awakening intuition, to studyfor himself the Law which in a sense he is.

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IVWhat Karma explains

Once the Law is reasonably understood it solves alarge proportion of the problems which cloud ourpresent mind, and certainly in the East, whereKarma is as obvious as the law of gravity, theseproblems do not arise.

In the first place it explains the inequities andinequalities of daily life. Only Karma

can explain the mysterious problem ofGood and Evil, and reconcile man to theterrible apparent injustice of life, For whenone unacquaintedwith the noble doctrine looksaround him, and observes the inequalities ofbirth and fortune, of intellect and capacities;when one sees honour paid to fools andprofligates, and their nearest neighbour, withall his intellect and noble virtues, perishing ofwant and for lack of sympathy; when one seesall this and has to turn away, helpless to relievethe undeserved suffering, that blessedknowledge of Karma alone prevents him fromcursing life and men, as well as theirsupposed Creator.1

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On the other hand, nothing is more untrue than thecry that all men are born equal. They are not. Eachis born with the burden, pleasant or unpleasant, ofhis own Karma, and no two men are equal, for no twoare the same.

All mankind is one family, but its members areof different ages. Therefore there is no equalityof opportunity and no equality ofresponsibility. Although all are marchingtowards a common goal they cannot bear equalburdens, and would not be expected to if theLaw of Karma were understood.1

In the same way Karma explains the problem ofOriginal Sin. There is no problem, for there is nooriginal sin. First causes are necessarilyunknowable, and as the Buddha insisted again andagain, discussion of such matters is unprofitable, asleading in no way to the heart’s enlightenment. Butthe teaching of the Wisdom is clear. Evil is man-made, and is of his choosing, and he who sufferssuffers from his deliberate use of his own free will.Cripples, dwarfs and those born deaf or blind are theproducts of their own past actions, and one’s pityshould be used, not in bewailing the injustice oftheir condition, but in assisting the new-born brainto appreciate its own responsibility and to producenew causes whose result will be the undoing of theevil whose results are manifest. Infant prodigies, onthe other hand, are clearly the result ofspecialization in some particular line, and even

1 The Secret Doctrine, H.P.Blavatsky.1 The Scales of Karma, Owen Rutter.

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special aptitudes and preferences are the outcome ofthe Law.

Conscience is a Karmic memory. The Essence ofMind is deathless, and its ray, the consciousness(vinnana) which moves from life to life, is a store-house of immensely complex memory. Even thoughthe brain, which is new in each life, has forgottenthe lessons of past experience, the inner mindremembers, and when temptation murmurs again ofthe pleasures of a certain low desire, the voice ofmemory replies, ‘But what of the cost in suffering,the price that you paid?’

Heredity versus Environment

Karma explains. ‘“Karma”, expresses, not that whicha man inherits from his ancestors, but that which heinherits from himself in some previous state ofexistence.’1 In the same way, environment is aproduct of one’s own past actions, for each newbirth accords with the Karma therein to bedischarged. All that is inherited from parents is thebody, the outermost garment of the many-robed,essential man. The mind, or returning unit ofconsciousness, so far from being the product of itsbody’s parents, chose those parents, and the bodywhich they would provide for the working out of aportion of past Karma. Heredity is therefore theservant of Karma and not its substitute. By the lawof affinity, the magnetic law of attraction andrepulsion, each new body attracts an appropriate‘soul’ or character, as each returning consciousness

1 Buddhism in Translations,Henry Clarke Warren.

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attracts or is attracted to a vehicle suitable for self-expression in the life to come. The staggeringcomplexity of such elaborate choosing, allowing forperiod, race, sex, family and the compoundcircumstances of ‘environment’, is a reason for themind’s humility before the Law, but no bar to itsacceptance. If an automatic telephone exchange canbe made to ‘choose’ which of a dozen lines is theleast ‘loaded’ at the moment, how much more canthe Namelessness in manifestation operate its ownhigh purposes!

Karmic Cycles

Modern astronomy has reached considerableknowledge of the stellar cycles, and even modernastrology, the half-understood remains of a onceesoteric and spiritual science, has much to say onplanetary cycles and their effect on man. Indianphilosophy has a complete record of ‘Yugas’, greatand small, covering enormous periods of time, andof cycles, wheels within wheels, as regular as theebb and flow of the tide. These cycles affect allplanes of manifestation, the psychic and mental aswell as the physical, but the law which governsthese cycles cannot be understood save in thecontext of the wider, Karmic Law. The obviousexample of the working of the Law on a mass unit ofhumanity is the rise and fall of races or sub-races,which may or may not be coincident with nations.Whole civilizations are known to have risen,flourished, reached a great height of culture andthen decayed or, as in the case of the Khmers ofIndo-China, suddenly disappeared. Modern Greece,though still, as the world now knows, a magnificentfighting nation, is not to be compared in culture

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with its classic forebear; Spain and Portugal are notwhat they were; Mexico has sunk to comparativeinsignificance. On the other hand, many a nationnow at its prime has risen suddenly, and in theround of time will as surely fall. Ethnologists arealways puzzled at the causes of a tribe’s collapseand disappearance, and only an understanding ofthe Law of Karma-Rebirth will solve the mystery. Itis not that a given tribe or race by hereditaryevolution of its inherent abilities grows rapidly frommediocrity to genius, but that an ever higherstandard of ‘souls’ find in the rising raceopportunity for their own development. In duecourse, when the cycle has reached its greatestheight, these great ones, far on the road of genius intheir several ways, begin to leave, and with theassistance of external causes, themselves Karmic,such as disease, sterility, conquest or moral decay,the race dies out.

The Cause of War

One of the obvious cycles is that of peace and war.War is an effect, the mass-effect of mass thinking,and once the cause is produced the effect isinevitable. The cause of war, as of all evil, is the‘Three Fires’ burning in the human mind, desire,hatred and illusion. Hatred is born of illusion, theillusion that life is separate, the ignorance of man’sessential unity, and desire, or its negative aspect,fear, is the product of and in turn engenders hate.

Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for,nor weapons to act through. It is the constantpresence in our midst of every element of strife

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and opposition, and the division of races,nations, tribes, societies and individuals intoCains and Abels, wolves and lambs, that is thechief cause of the ‘ways of Providence.’1

Hate is a force, a tremendous force, and mass hateslowly accumulates as a thunder-cloud in the sky.When the opposing thought-forms on the psychicplane have reached a point of over-loading it needsbut the lightning flash to cause a discharge. But theanalogy is insufficient. When the thunder-cloud hasfallen the tension is over; the discharge itself doesnot, in the ordinary sense, produce another cloud.But in war there is hate, deliberate cruelty, revengeand lust. All these are causes, and each must bear itsinevitable effect. Thus wars are the cause of wars,and a ‘war to end war’ is one of the wilder illusionsof the human mind.

Even in peace we are causing war.

In our daily life we are competitive, aggressive,nationalistic, vengeful and self-seeking, whichinevitably culminates in war. Intellectually andemotionally we are influenced and limited bythe past, which produces the present reaction ofhate, antagonism and conflict…. Until our ownlives are no longer aggressive and greedy, andpsychologically we cease from seekingsecurity, and so breaking up the world into

1 The Secret Doctrine, H.P.Blavatsky.1 Krishnamurti. Notes of a Talk in America.2 Practical Occultism, H.P.Blavatsky.

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different classes, races, nationalities andreligions, there cannot be peace. 1

The cause of war, therefore, is the individual mindwhich, in its ignorance of man’s essential unity,wants everything for itself and therefore hates andfears its fellow men. But this war is an everlastingwar within, and until each human being has slain thefoe within he will not find peace without. ‘The manwho wars against himself and wins the battle can doit only when he knows that in that war he is doingthe one thing which is worth doing.’2

Foretelling the Future

If the future is the past and present not yet come,then it should be as possible to predict the future asit is to predict the future weather, providing, and itis a very large proviso, that all the causal factors areknown. But just as a meteorologist can only predictfrom his known facts, and there are usually factors ofwhich he has no information, so the fortune-teller,whether he be an astrologer dealing in worldastrology or some other type considering the affairsof an individual, can only calculate from knownfactors to the resultant effect which is not yetmanifest. If a single factor is missing the wholecalculation is worthless. Much ‘fortune-telling’,however, is the work of persons whose psychicfaculties, though quite untrained, are more awakethan is usual in the Western world. They ‘feel’, bymeans of cards or other devices for concentratingtheir faculties, the cloud of unexpected Karma in theaura, or psychic envelope, and try to read it. Beinguntrained they are seldom accurate, and thoughpalmistry, physiognomy and the like might

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conceivably, at a later stage in man’s evolution,develop into sciences, they are, at our present stage,a poor substitute for knowledge, even assuming thatsuch knowledge is to be desired. But is it? Or doesthis morbid craving to lift the veil of the future leadbut to a weakening of the will? Certainly it is amiserable substitute for the planned and purposefuldevelopment of all one’s faculties by the conscioususer of the Law. The first type wonders what thefuture will bring; the other decides it.

Further Advantages

The advantages of working by the Law of Karmahave no end. As already explained, the Lawprovides a graded sanction or reason for right living.At the worst, it is seen that it pays to be good; higherthan this, it proves that men are in essence one, andthat any deed which hurts one’s neighbour or thecommonweal is an injury to oneself; finally, itreveals a world or a plane of consciousness whereright becomes the inmost law of being, and a mandoes right, not because it pays or because it avoidsself-injury, but because, beyond all argument,he must.

Karma destroys the cause of envy and jealousyand the consequent ill-will, for your neighbour ismore fortunate than you because he has earned abetter fortune. It removes impatience, for when thereis all but infinite time ahead, why worry the fretfulhour? It largely removes the fear of death, for wherethere is inner conviction of rebirth and, by the lawof affinity, reunion sooner or later with those oneloves, why worry that the hour must come forleaving the present robes and resting, ere returning,robed anew, for fresh experience?

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Karma and Modern Psychology

Psychology, the Cinderella of Western science, is yetin its infancy, but any doctrine must sooner or latercome to terms with it. Here is a fascinating field forresearch and experiment. Industrial psychologists,for example, are troubled with the problem of the‘accident prone’ workmen who are always sufferingor somehow being mixed up in unnecessary‘accidents’. An American scientist writes that ‘it hasbeen completely proved, beyond all shadow ofdoubt, that the elimination of certain men fromindustrial plants met with a decrease if not acessation of accidents in that plant’. From thepersonal point of view these men may have‘unconsciously-deliberately’ caused the accidents;from the mass point of view they may be Karmicagents, that is, as W.Q.Judge defined it, ‘one whoconcentrates more rapidly than usual the lines ofinfluence that bring about events, sometimes in astrange and subtle way’.

Karma would seem to be the missing link inmodern psychology. Surely ‘complexes’ are onlydeposits in the unconscious from action andreaction in past lives, and ‘character deficiencies’,gaps in the moral development of the patient, defythe physician’s skill because none can implant inanother’s mind a virtue which, though therepotentially, has not been developed in the lives goneby. In other words, the psychologist, however skilfulhis analysis, can only restore the position at birth,removing the knots and inhibitions of wrongthinking and leaving the patient free to resume thepath of development with less impediment andwasted energy. The application of psychology tocrime, and in particular juvenile delinquency,would be far easier if the psychologist appreciated

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that he must look further back than the criminal’schildhood for the true cause of the crime, and thewhole field of insanity should be revised in the lightof the Karmic Law. These, however, are theexceptions, for the West has need of applying theLaw to the many, not only to the few. The outlookon life of the ‘man in the street’ could be utterlychanged by a knowledge of Karma, and he whoaccepts it as a reasonable hypothesis will find by hisown experience that the Law is true, and that hewho uses it is master of life and death, and the solecustodian of his destiny.

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VSome Difficulties considered

Many persons on being first introduced to Karmademand the precise details of its working, andfailing to receive them refuse to accept the Law. It isuseful to ask them in reply if they know the nature ofelectricity. If they are truthful they answer, No. Towhich one may reply, Nor does one know the natureof Karma but, like our knowledge of electricity, weknow just a little how it works. The rest is a matterof research and experience.

It is a strange aberration of the mind that refusesto accept a law of life because it cannot at presentgrasp its detailed working. We use X-rays, but knowvery little about them; use wireless and we are onlyon the fringe of ‘how it works’; and though we haveused the laws of light for three generations we arenow discovering that our knowledge, at any rate ofthe straightness of its rays, was far from full. Karmais true or untrue, and only the individual can decidein which category to place it. But to refuse to acceptit on the ground that our knowledge of its working islimited is, to say the least of it, an immodest pointof view.

It is sometimes said that Karma is cold, that it isheart less. Karma is neither warm nor cold. It is. Butthose who are justly fearful of a world wherein law,

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as they conceive the term, is paramount, and loveexcluded from its scope, have nought to fear. IfKarma is the Law of Harmony, so is love. LikeKarma, ‘Compassion is no mere attribute. It is theLaw of LAWS, eternal Harmony.’ So runs The Voiceof the Silence, which is one of the oldest books in theworld. Karma is an aspect of the One, theUnnameable; love is another, If Karma controls therelations of the myriad parts to each other and theWhole, love is the cement that binds them all inOne. He who regards Karma as a Law and hisbrother as separate from himself does notunderstand Karma. There is but one Karma, thougheach part of the wholeness suffers the effects ofwhat the smallest part has caused. My brother’ssuffering is my own and mine is his, and ‘in mybrother’s face I see my own unanswered agony’. Tosay of a suffering friend, ‘It is his Karma,’ may be true,but to assume that therefore it is not yours too is toprison the heart in the iron bars of illusion, and it isthe heart which so regards its neighbour, not theLaw, that is cold.

Interfering with Karma

One cannot ‘interfere’ with Karma, as many seem tosuppose. A man may have placed himself in aserious predicament, and a friend is fearful lest, inhelping him, he is ‘interfering’ in the working out ofhis Karma. The friend fails to realize that it may bethe man’s Karma that he should be helped, and thehelp or withholding of it is just as much his Karmaas his present suffering. The misconceptionprobably arises from the Western preoccupationwith its neighbour’s affairs, for we are so bent on‘social service’ that we forget a greater duty still, our

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own improvement. Yet the Biblical story of the moteand the beam should be borne in mind, andpractised. There may be nothing finer than self-forgetfulness, but the very thought of whether or notone is interfering is self-remembrance, notforgetfulness, and he who helps wherever help isneeded, and for the rest removes his own beamsfrom his eye, is doing his duty, and no man can domore. The question has been raised in extreme formby certain pacifists who, refusing to lend themselvesto violence, equally refuse to help a dying man in anair-raid lest they should seem to be taking part inthe war. Egotism could hardly go further, and suchabsorption in selfish thinking is pathetic. The Lawof compassion, which never clashes with that ofKarma, overrides all else. ‘Inaction in a deed ofmercy becomes an action in a deadly sin.’l Karmawill act according to its nature, and needs no helpfrom any man. He who acts according to his heart,as controlled by experience and sweetreasonableness, may act in error, but only by errorwill he learn his error. For the rest he will earn themerit of doing what he feels to be right, and no mancan do more.

Vicarious Atonement

Those who have studied the Buddhism of theNorthern or Mahayana School will have read of thedoctrine of merit, and of certain men or bodies ofmen being ‘fields of merit’ for the commonweal. It isobvious that a person with a lovely mind will shed aradiance round him in which all may share, and a

1 The Voice of the Silence.

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monastery of persons leading a holy life will radiateits own vibration. But when it is suggested that theirefforts will neutralize the ‘evil’ Karma of others thedoor is open to the dangerous doctrine of ‘vicariousatonement’. The dangers are obvious. ‘Work outyour own salvation,’ said the Buddha, and therewould be chaos indeed if any Being, however great,could ‘forgive’ another’s sins.

Each time that a repentant sinner is assured thatthe effects of causes he himself set in operationcan be nullified by forgiveness from any source,he is being taught an untruth which cannot butimperil the future development of his soul.Each time a priest pronounces absolution oversome terrified being whom the shadows of thegallows, perhaps, has frightened into‘repentance’ after a long life of selfishness andcrime, he assumes an authority and a powerwhich is absolutely at variance with the law towhich he owes his own existence.1

The doctrines of vicarious atonement and Karma aretherefore incompatible. But the doctrine of vicarioussalvation is a little different, and though easilyabused, has a foundation in one aspect of theKarmic Law. Remembering man’s essential unity,both with other forms of life and with the Lawwhich is another aspect of the Namelessness, it maybe seen how the goodly deeds of one may benefitand so hasten, though never alone procure, the‘salvation’ of another. The Bhikkhu Silacara has

1 Reincarnation, Anderson.

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much to say on the subject in his pamphlet,Kamma. When, he says, a Buddhist performs an actof merit, and on the pagoda-platform, after offeringincense and flowers before the image of the Buddha,strikes a great bell which lies beside him, he is notcalling on the supposed keeper of the records ofKamma for another item to be put to the credit ofthat person.

What he is saying is this: ‘All ye to whose earscomes the sound of this bell, know that a deedof merit has just been performed. The doer ofthe deed hereby gladly offers you a share of hismerit from the doing of the good deed, andbegs you with equal gladness to accept it.’

This is a very different thing from expecting thedeeds of others to atone for one’s own misdoing. Toradiate love to all beings is one of the standardmeditations of Buddhist practice, and its object,besides suffusing the heart of the meditator withunbounded love, is to assist all living things in theirdevelopment. For the effect of love is to kill out hate,to dissolve the illusion of selfishness and to reducethe unworthy desire which is the cause of suffering.If every living thing experiences to some extent theacts of every other, then each can deliberately striveto see that the effects of his own causing are, so faras he can control them, good. Once more, therefore,the inseparability of the threads of Karma is a clue toa doctrine which, though easily and frequentlyabused, is spiritually true.

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‘Unmerited Suffering’

The same clue may provide the solution to anotherproblem, that of ‘unmerited suffering’. Do wedeserve all that happenes to us, or are thereoccasional ‘accidents’ in which we suffer withoutjustice? An immediate answer would be that if so,there must equally be unmerited happiness, forwhich in due course we must compensate withsuffering, and that on balance the cosmic harmony,within and by the Law of Karma, would be restored.The key to the problem is time, one of the necessaryillusions of manifestation. It would be impossible, atleast to our conception, to guide an incoming ‘soul’to a body and set of circumstances which exactlyaccord with its needs and deserts, and all that didnot do so, pleasant or unpleasant, wouldpresumably be the subject of later adjustment by theall-embracing and utterly just Law.

Karma and Duty

There are some who find difficulty in reconcilingKarma and duty. If all that we do is what we are,and according as we are so we act, what, they ask, isthe place of duty in the Law’s machinery? Theanswer imports a new term, Dharma (in Pali,Dhamma), which, like most key-words in Orientalphilosophy, is untranslatable.

Many words have been suggested in translation,among them Law, Duty, the Good, the True,Righteousness, the Norm, the Ideal and eventhe Way, but it is the symbol of a concept of toocomplex a nature to admit of translation by anyone English term…. It may be described as theoutward manifestation of a body of Teaching,

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Moral Law, Doctrine or system of philosophywhich has existed for all time, in the abstractworld of thought, which is Plato’s ‘NoumenalRealm’. Hence the meaning of Norm, or IdealForm, as the clothing of a vast idea….1

Considering the word as duty, that which in‘rightness’ should be done, it has been said that theDharma of one life is that portion of the individual’sKarma due to be discharged or worked out in thatlife. As such, it is one’s ‘duty’ to face it, accept it andso be rid of it, whether it be ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Hencethe insistence in nearly every occult work on thedue performance of all duty, from the Bhagavad Gitaand the Bible to The Voice of the Silence and theDhammapada. To quote from the last, ‘By oneselfevil is done; by oneself one suffers. By oneself evil isleft undone; by oneself one is purified. Purity andimpurity belong to oneself; no one can purifyanother’—and then: ‘Let no one forget his own dutyfor the sake of another’s, however great; let a man,when he has discerned his own duty, be alwaysattentive to it.’ This does but echo the admonition ofthe Bhagavada Gita, that ‘there is danger inanother’s duty’, and this belief is the basis of theEastern virtue of minding one’s own businesswhich the West, in its enthusiasm for social serviceand good works, is apt to ignore. In either part of theworld, however, all pilgrims of the Path agree that‘the immediate work, whatever it may be, has theabstract claim of duty, and its relative importanceand non-importance is not to be considered at all’.

1 What is Buddhism? The Buddhist Lodge, London.

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And again, ‘There can be no permanent rest orhappiness as long as there is some work to be done,and not accomplished, and the fulfilment of dutiesbrings its own reward’.1 He who is wise has faithin the Law, and knows that in doing what hebelieves to be right he is using the Law to theadvantage of mankind.

1 Practical Occultism, H.P.Blavatsky.

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VIRebirth

Certain writers have distinguished shades ofmeaning between the doctrines of Metempsychosis,Transmigration, Pre-existence and Rebirth, but forpresent purposes the word Rebirth is used to coverthe doctrine which, from the human point of view,is the inseparable twin of Karma. In this sense, justas physical progress is effected through hereditarytransmission, so spiritual progress is achieved bythe process of rebirth. Cause and effect are anindivisible unity, but in the illusion of time the onefollows the other. In the opinion of theBhikkhu Silacara,

One might even say that they are the samedoctrine, looked at in one case subjectively,and in the other objectively. In a manner ofspeaking, Kamma is rebirth latent, and for thetime being unmanifest; and rebirth is Kammabecome active and manifest.

From another point of view, the lessons of Karmanecessitate a school wherein they may be learnt;Rebirth provides such a school whose ‘terms’ and‘holidays’ succeed one another until the final lessonis learnt.

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The Reincarnating Entity

It has been seen that that which reincarnates is notan immortal soul but the product of countlessprevious lives, a bundle of attributes calledCharacter which is changing from moment tomoment, and lacks any element of immortalitywhich it could truthfully claim as its own. On theother hand, each such returning unit of life is a rayor spark or aspect of the Wholeness which, throughthe slow experience of its myriad points ofconsciousness, collectively attains self-consciousness, or, in the words of the mystics, ‘findsItself’. The Brahmin philosophy speaks of Atman(Pali, Atta), the Spirit in man which is his share inthe Absolute, as it were, but by the Buddha’s timethis spiritual conception had been debased, as inmodern Christianity, to that of an immortal soul.Against this degradation of a mighty truth theBuddha taught the doctrine of An-atta—not-(immortal) Soul—destroying the wrong conceptionof the positive by stressing the negative. In thewell-known story of Vacchagotta the Wanderer,there is a passage on the nature of self whichexplains the Buddhist and therefore the trueBrahmin point of view. Vacchagotta asked theBuddha what he had to say about the Self, but theBlessed One refused to answer. When the questionerhad departed in disgust, the Venerable Anandaenquired the reason for his silence. ‘If I hadanswered that the Self exists,’ the Buddha said, ‘thatwould be to side with those who are eternalists. Butif, Ananda, I had replied that the Self does not exist,that would be to side with those who areannihilationists.’ The answer is further elaborated,but the point is already clear. The Self is and is not.That which is reborn is the old man and yet a new.

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The soul is immortal, but it is changing every hour.As an immortal entity there is no soul, even, as apersonal deity, there is no God.

Analogies sometimes help, and a favourite themeof Buddhist exegesis is the flame.

Life is a flame, and transmigration, newbecoming, is the transmitting of the flame fromone combustible aggregate to another; just that,and nothing more. If we light one candle fromanother, the communicated flame is one andthe same, in the sense of an observedcontinuity, but the candle is not the same.1

Note that each candle perishes, but the flame liveson, and note that the flame, though in a way aparticular flame, is in essence Light, and as suchcommon to all.

The proximate force or energy which out ofthe past material produces a new ‘being’ isTrishna, the thirst for sentient existence, the libidoof modern psychology, but Karma is the guidingpower behind. The ‘three fires’ whose burningcraves for further fuel are hatred, lust andillusion. Hate is a powerful force, and draws thehater into perpetual dose relation with the personhated until he learns that ‘hatred ceaseth not byhatred, hatred ceaseth but by love’; lust, or personaldesire in every form, is an obvious cause of lifeafter life on the Wheel of Rebirth, but thestrongest force is illusion, the Maya of ignoranceabout this very truth of Anatta. For ‘the humanmind discriminates itself from the things that

1 Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, Coomaraswamy.

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appear to be outside itself without realizing thatit has first created those very things withinits own mind’,1 and one of the things which it hasitself created is the separation between self and self.Hence the ‘Great Heresy’ of Attavada, belief in theseparative self.

To sum up on this all-important matter of thenature of the thing reborn, there are three selves inman, or, more correctly, he functions at three mainlevels of consciousness. The mind

on its lowest level is a discriminating mind; onthis level it has the ability to see, hear, taste,smell, touch, to combine these sense concepts,to discriminate them, and to consider theirrelations. On a higher level it is an intellectualmind, where it has the ability to make theinward adjustments that are necessary toharmonize the reactions of the discriminatingmind and to relate them to each other and to awhole ego conception. On its highest level it isUniversal Mind.1

These levels correspond exactly with the ‘body, souland spirit’ of St. Paul, and it is at the middle level,that of the ‘soul’, that man, the potentially immortalEssence of Pure Mind, reincarnates unceasinglyuntil the potential has become the actual and the‘dewdrop’ has become the ‘Shining Sea’.

1 From a Japanese Scripture.

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The New Body

The new life accords with the deserts, or part ofthem, of all preceding births. By the law of attractionthe incoming man is drawn into the current whichwill land him in an environment most suited to his(spiritual) needs. Whether the new-born souldislikes or likes its environment is immaterial. Itmade its bed, and now must lie on it. In the new lifeit may be following still further a line ofdevelopment already begun; hence definiteproclivities in one direction and the desire to pursuethem; or it may strike out in a new, and possiblycomplementary line of progress; or it may, by reasonof causes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ of past behaviour, find itselfwith utterly new environment and differentopportunities for self-expression. In the words of theLight of Asia:

Who toiled a slave may come anew a Prince For gentle worthiness and merit won;Who ruled a King may wander earth in rags For things done and undone.

But such a change is not necessarily for the worse.Christ reminded his followers that the rich man’s lotwas a spiritually hard one, for wealth is apt to bindthe awakening mind, and he who clings to wealth ofpocket or mind will lose it, even as only he whogives away his very life shall find it.

It will be noted that the mind chooses the bodyand is not its child, as is still the belief of Westernmaterialism. The soul chooses the body most suitedto its needs, and therefore comes into the familywhich will provide that body. If a lawyer wishesfurther experience as a lawyer he will probablyenter a legal family. If so, he will be a lawyer not

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because his father was a lawyer, but because, beingalready a lawyer, a ‘legal’ brain in the new body willmake his task the easier. Other factors are the rhythmof the sexes, of the introvert and extrovert types ofmind, and of a thousand other complementary typesof character, while men may change the pattern oftheir lives as the years go by and with it the kind ofexperience they gain. In all there is infinite variety;not even the element of progress is constant, forblinded with illusion a man may in a single lifeundo the accumulated merit of many livespreceding, and every conquest made is painfullyrelative to the distance yet to be run.

Veil after veil will lift—but there must beVeil upon veil behind.

Change of Values

Those who accept or re-accept the Law of Karmawill find that the new conception radically alters theprevailing point of view. Parents, for example, areseen with new eyes; friends are probably oldfriends, and foes old enemies. Places and people andeven things are ‘remembered’. The body is seen asan instrument to be, as a dog or horse, well cared forbut well disciplined. The various parts in thedrama-comedy of life are seen for what they are,so many masks assumed for the part, then laid asidewhen the play is ended. The mental eyes areshortened and yet lengthened in their view. On theone hand, now is the time that matters, now whenthe lightest act is building the days unborn, herewhere the effects of every act must be digested, notin a heaven or hell to be known hereafter. On theother hand, death is not the end of the adventure.

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Infinite time is ours for the using, and the spaceavailable is commensurate with the Universe. Andthe struggle is worth while.

Yea! whoso, shaking off the yoke of fleshLives Lord, not servant, of his lusts; set freeFrom pride, from passion, from the sin of ‘Self’,Toucheth tranquillity!… Live where he will,Die when he may, such passeth fromall ‘plainingTo blest Nirvana, with the Gods, attaining.

And Nirvana is but the death of ‘self’, the self that inits piteous pride is unaware that it is of the Essenceof Pure Mind.

Yet sooner or later each incarnation comes to anend. The mask begins to perish and the actor,laden with new experience received through hissenses and his perishable brain, longs for a periodof rest wherein to digest the lessons of that life.And so the body dies, not of death but of too muchlife. The pressure of the electric current in timewears out the lamp, and the lamp must berenewed. Life never tires, nor ages; only the formgrows old. At the body’s death there is no occasionfor grief, and if we mourn we mourn but for ourfoolish selves.

When the day’s work is ended, night brings thebenison of sleep. So death is the ending of alarger day, and in the night that follows everyman finds rest, until of his own volition hereturns to fresh endeavour and to labours new.So has it been with this our brother, so will itbe for all of us, until the illusion of a separated

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self is finally transcended, and in the death ofself we reach Enlightenment.1

When the body has been consumed with fire, and soas swiftly as possible reduced to its naturalelements, it is best forgotten. The friend remains,and by a law beyond all breaking will be met with inthe lives to come.

After Death

The period between lives can never be the subjecrelatable experience, and anything said of it rests ona different footing from the principles and doctrinesabove set out, for these are not only the accumulatedexperience of mankind, but are capable ofverification by all who study them. But the sameimmemorial Wisdom is as precise about the periodbetween lives as it is clear in its condemnation of‘bhuta-worship’, the intercourse with the astralremains of the dead which the West calls spritualism. The purpose of this book being to make Karma andRebirth a living reality in the mind of those whoaccept it, any discussion on post-mortem states ofbeing is only of marginal interest, but for the sake ofcompleteness reference may be made to Letter XXVof The Mahama Letters to A.P.Sinnett, where thesubject, referred to casually in numerous works ofEastern wisdom, is usefully summed up.

There are two fields of causal manifestation,the objective and subjective. So the grosserenergies, those which operate in the heavier or

1 From a Buddhist Funeral Service.

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denser conditions of matter, manifestobjectively in physical life, their outcome beingthe new personality of each birth includedwithin the grand cycle of the evolvingindividuality. The moral and spiritualactivities find their sphere of effects in‘devachan’…. Bacon, for instance, whom a poetcalled ‘The greatest, wisest, meanest ofmankind’, might reappear in his nextincarnation as a greedy money-getter, withextraordinary intellectual capacities. But themoral and spiritual qualities of the previousBacon would also have to find a field in whichtheir energies could expand themselves.Devachan is such a field.

Hence, the writer goes on, all his plans for moralreform, of research into the abstract principles ofnature, all his divine aspirations would find theirfruition in Devachan, ‘the abode of the Gods’, and theentity previously known as Bacon would, in a dream-like state of consciousness, digest all previousexperience ‘until Karma is satisfied in thatdirection, the ripple of force reaches the edge ofthe cyclic basin, and the being moves into the nextarea of causes’, i.e., the next rebirth.

This alternation of states of consciousness,objective in the body and subjective out of it, hasbeen poetically described as a string of black andwhite beads alternating, strung on the thread of life.But while it is in the subjective state the broodingsoul, wrapped in the process of digesting pastexperience, can never descend to earthlyconsciousness, and those who wish to communicatewith the ‘dead’ can only do so by ascending inconsciousness to the exalted realm of mind in which

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they dream. In time, after a period which may coverhundreds of years, the hand of Karma begins to drawthe dreamer back to waking consciousness. Desirefor fresh experience, choosing a body and otherenvironment according to its needs, impels thesehigher vehicles of the evolving man to assume freshworldly garments, and so the pilgrim wakes on earthto new discovery and a new-old treading ofthe Way.

… As when one layeth His worn-out robes away,And, taking new ones, sayeth, ‘These will I wear to-day!’So putteth by the spirit Lightly its garb of flesh,

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And passeth to inherit A residence afresh.1

No Rebirth in Animals

The birth may be in the lowest savage or in a princeof virtue, but it will not be in anything less.The degraded belief in rebirth in animal form can beshown to be another example of a spiritualtruth misunderstood.

It is all a coarse symbol caricaturing the innervital truth of reincarnation [says Mr Walker,who studied the subject closely], springing fromthe striking resemblance between men andanimals in feature and dispostion, in voiceand mien.1

Once consciousness attains to human level there isno return. If evil reaches a stage beyond redemptionthere may be an utter dissolution of that entity;otherwise, though man may become a super-man, hewill never be less than man.

Objections to Rebirth

There are various objections put forward to belief inthe doctrine of Rebirth, and they are always thesame. The first is that we do not remember previouslives. The answer is simple, that the brain is new

1 The Song Celestial, Edwin Arnold.1 Reincarnation.

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each life. Memory is a faculty of the mind, not of thebrain which is its temporary instrument, andmemory is the power to re-read the indelible recordsmade by every thought and deed in the atmospherearound us. In some way nature preserves in theakasha, the substance of manifestation in its finestform, a record which may be accurately ‘read’ bythose whose spiritual powers have been developed,and it is by this power to contact the AkashicRecords that the Buddha, for example, coulddescribe at length the details of his own past lives.But though the average person remembers nothingof the past, there are thousands who, through a lowerpsychic development, occasionally recall their ownpast lives and speak of it. But the psychic world inwhich these chance impressions are picked up by thereceptive mind is a world of illusion. Only thetrained disciple of a master of nature’s forces canspeak with accuracy of these things, and it would bepart of his training not only ‘to dare’ and ‘to do’ butalso ‘to keep silent’. Moreover, few of those whocomplain that they do not remember would bebrave enough to do so were they suddenly giventhe power.

The obscuring of memory [writes Owen Rutter]is surely merciful. The remembrance of all thewrongs we have done and all the wrongs whichhave been done to us, throughout our chain oflives, would be an intolerable burden. Most ofus have enough to contend with in this lifewithout

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burdening ourselves with the recollection ofthe dangers, the fears and the hates of otherlives.1

All that we hate and despise in the acts of others weourselves have sometime done, and paid for, or arepaying now. Would it help our present striving upthe mountain side to learn of the loathsome acts andthoughts and feelings of our own dead selves? TheLaw is wise, and it is well that the brain, the newlycreated instrument of each rebirth, has only itspresent folly to remember. As it is, we rememberbut a tithe of the last week’s happenings, and only athousandth part of the year before. The inner mindis garnering all the time what it needs of the lessonsof experience, and the wise man knows that thoughit is sometimes right to remember, it is often wiseto forget.

The second objection usually raised is theinjustice of our suffering for the deeds of someoneabout whom we remember nothing. The answer isthe same. It is the inner mind, the reincarnatingentity, which draws from the universal memory thelessons it would learn. The man who has forgotten,the man who complains is, though he has a newbrain, the man whose deeds he suffers, is the Karmaof which he now complains. The third objection isthat Rebirth is disproved by the doctrine ofheredity. This, of course, ignores the differencebetween the mind that uses the body and the bodyproduced by its parents’ union. The former choosesa body, in the sense that it is drawn by the laws of

1 The Scales of Karma.

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attraction to that body which is suitable to theworking out of its Dharma, its Karma for that birth.The body obeys the laws of heredity, of the rebirth ofthe body; the mind obeys the Law of Karma-Rebirth,of the rebirth of the ‘soul’.

Finally, the objection is often raised that thedoctrine is uncongenial. ‘I don’t want to come backto this world of misery and toil,’ the complainersays. The Law replies, ‘Who cares about your likesand dislikes, you who claim to be separate? Inessence you are part of the Law, and made it so.’ If abrick falls on my head I may dislike the law ofgravity, but I don’t deny that it exists. And why thisfierce objection to return? He who understands theLaw knows that all causes have effects, and that alleffects have sprung from causes. The deeds of thepast must be ‘digested’. Where? The obvious andreasonable answer is here, on earth, and if thesufferer dislikes this life it is he who made it so.

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VIIWho believes in Karma and

Rebirth?

Schopenhauer said that if an Asiatic asked him for adefinition of Europe he would answer that it wasthat part of the world which was haunted by theincredible delusion that man’s present birth was hisfirst entrance into life. Taking the world as a whole,therefore, it would almost be justifiable to reversethe question at the head of this chapter, and to ask,Who does not accept the Law of Karma-Rebirth, andon what grounds do they reject it? In any event, it ispertinent to examine the European attitude to thedoctrine, and most books on the subject give, with awealth of detail and quotation, the evidence whichshows how widespread such belief has become. Onthe other hand, as Owen Rutter points out:

No one is likely to accept a philosophy whichdoes not appeal to him, nor is he necessarily tobe convinced of its truth, because, throughoutthe ages, men of intelligence have accepted it.Nevertheless, although few

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people are influenced by argument, many areglad to listen to explanation,1

especially when that explanation of life’sinequalities and suffering is the only one whichaccords with reason and experience. In hisinteresting introduction to Reincarna tion,E.D.Walker proves how

once the whole civilized world embracedreincarnation, and found therein a completeanswer to that riddle of man’s descent anddestiny which the inexorable sphinx, Life,propounds to every traveller along her way.But the Western Branch of the race, in workingout the material conquest of the world, hasacquired the compensating discontent of amaterial philosophy. It has lost the old faithand drifted into a shadowy region, where theeagerness for ‘practical’ things rejects whatevercannot be physically proven.

Yet scores of enlightened thinkers and most poetshave seen, with spiritual certainty, the truth of a Lawwhich the State religion has expelled in favour ofdogmas unknown to its Founder, and none has yetdisproved their ever new ‘discovery’.

The East has known the Law from timeimmemorial; the West accepted it until and for a longtime after the birth of Christianity. Greek andRoman, Egyptian and Jew, in one form or anotherknew the Law, and chapters of books and booksthemselves have been written to show its prevalence

1 The Scales of Karma.

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in the days of Jesus, and the Master’s adoptionwithout question of the Law in which he had beenbred. On Karma, the Master said: ‘By their fruits yeshall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, orfigs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringethforth good fruit; but the corrupt tree bringeth forthevil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit,neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.’And he who rewards accordingly is no Being,however mighty, but the Father within, the Buddhawithin, the SELF within from which has evolvedboth man and the all-embracing Law. On Rebirth,Jesus said, when asked about the man born blind,that it was neither he that had sinned nor hisparents. Clearly it was he in a previous life. Andwhence the widely current rumours that John theBaptist was Elias, ‘which was for to come again’?

But, it may be said, the ancients were ignorant ofthe truth before the coming of Christ, and a fewBiblical passages may be incorrectly reported. It isstrange, then, that so many writers, in prose andverse, in the last three hundred years haveapparently seen the inevitability of the doctrine.From Wordsworth’s famous Ode on the Intima tionsof Immortality to Edwin Arnold’s splendid EighthBook of the Light of Asia, English poetry is filledwith allusions to the Law, and the writers in prosewere never far behind. Some write as if homesickfor a land they feel as ‘home’. In many cases this isthe East, and they are therefore ill at ease in what tothem is an alien Western body. Others are not socertain where they were previously born. But‘memory appears to be a palimpsest from whichnothing is ever obliterated’, declared ProfessorDixon, and many a poet has felt convincingly thathe or she has lived before.

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Perhaps I lived before In some strange world where first my soul And all this passionate love was shaped, andjoy, and painThat come, I know not whence, and swaymy deedsAre old imperious memories, blind yet strong,That this world stirs within me.1

Shakespeare made rational enquiry in Sonnet LIX;

If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are ourbrains beguil’dWhich, labouring for invention, bear amiss The second burthen of a former child!

Tennyson, more mystical, in a little-knownsonnet begins:

As when with downcast eyes we museand brood And ebb into a former life, or seemTo lapse far back in a confused dream To states of mystical similitude…

Browning is more personal, in a poem to EvelynHope,who died at the age of sixteen:

Just because I was twice as old

1 George Eliot inThe Spanish Gypsy.

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And our paths in the world divergedso wide,Each was naught to each, must I be told? We were fellow mortals, naught beside?

And he answers his own enquiry:

I claim you still, for my own love’s sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet,Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few; Much is to learn and much to forgetEre the time be come for taking you.

And Tennyson, later in the sonnet above quoted:

So friend, when first I looked upon your face,Our thoughts gave answer each to each, so trueOpposed mirrors each reflecting each,Although I knew not in what time or placeMethought that I had often met with you,And each had lived in others’ mind and speech.

Rossetti remembered places:

I have been here before, But where or how I cannot tell;I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell,The sighing sound; the lights around the shore.You have been mine before, How long ago I may not know;But just when at that swallow’s soar Your neck turned so,Some veil did fall—I knew it all of yore.

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In Lalla Rookh, Thomas Moore likened the spiritpassing from body to body to a lighted brandpassing from hand to hand until it reached the goal,a remarkable echo of the Eastern analogy of thecandle-flame or the wave to describe the re-incarnating entity that moves from life to life on thelong road to perfection.

But it has been left to John Masefield, the presentPoet Laureate, himself a student of Buddhism, toproclaim his personal creed for all to hear:

I hold that when a person dies His soul returns again to earth;Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise, Another mother gives him birth.With sturdier limbs and brighter brain The old soul takes the road again…So shall I fight, so shall I tread, In this long war beneath the stars;So shall a glory wreathe my head, So shall I faint and show the scars,Until this case, this clogging mould,Be smithied all to kingly gold.

The list is endless. For those who like precedent fortheir own belief there is ample precedent, and anyman who for the moment doubts the truth of adoctrine which seems to run counter to so much ofthe popular belief around him may take heart ofcourage from the fact that so many of those whohave given the matter thought have been impressedwith the reasonableness, even the inevitability ofthe Law.

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VIIIKarma and Rebirth applied

It has been said that a man believes a doctrine whenhe behaves as if it were true. Assuming, then, that fora while one were to behave as if the Law of Karmawere the all-embracing Law, and that life, instead ofa span of a few minutes to seventy odd years, werean endless series of days and nights, days of labourand nights of rest, wherein each fragment-mind ofthe Essence of Mind was slowly learning the onlylesson, to become what it is—assume this for awhile, and consider the result on character.

The SELF is One; it IS; and Karma is its Law:

Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall ceaseto be never; Never was time it was not; End andBeginning are dreams!Birthless and deathless and changelessremaineth the spirit for ever;Death has not touched it at all, dead though thehouse of it seems!

Such is the answer of the Bhagavad Gita to thosewho believe that life can die. There is no death.

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If this be true, the effect is immediate andtremendous. Each man learns that he is and alwayshas been master of his future, the captain of hissoul. He knows, in the words of the Dhammapada,‘By oneself the evil is done, by oneself one suffers;by oneself the evil is left undone, by oneself one ispurified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself; noone can purify another.’ But he knows, too, that‘Self is the lord of self’, and that he must thereforecurb himself ‘as the merchant curbs a good horse’.Henceforth he is master of himself as well as of hisdestiny. For him there is no more drifting, as arudderless ship. He knows that all that pertains tothe separative self is evil, that all that pertains to thelarger Self, his truer self, is proportionately good. Hemust choose, for ‘the cycle of necessity’ is not acircle but a spiral, and the path goes up or down.Henceforth the pilgrim chooses his own journey,and though there will always be guides available, hemust learn to travel alone. ‘You yourself must makethe effort,’ says the Dhammapada, ‘Buddhas do butpoint the Way.’ And again, in The Voice of theSilence, ‘Prepare thyself, for thou wilt have to travelon alone. The Teacher can but point the Way. ThePath is one for all; the means to reach the goal mustvary with the Pilgrims.’ Yet now there is a joyoussense of the community of souls, the Oneness of allforms of life, the pilgrimage of the homeless makingtheir slow way home.

Character-building

For the first time there is encouragement todeliberate character-building, a thoughtful planningof the future without regard to time. ‘Sow a thoughtand you reap an act; sow an act and you reap a

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habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow acharacter and you reap a destiny.’ So runs the oldrune, and it is now seen to be true. Are you tired of apeevish temper? Seek its cause and remove thecause. Would you have greater concentration ofmind? None can prevent it, if you have the will toprepare a plan for self-development and to carryit through.

When a man accepts and partially understandsthe working of Karma, he can at once begin thisbuilding of character, setting each stone withdeliberate care, knowing that he is building forEternity. There is no longer hasty running upand pulling down, working on one plan to-day,on another to-morrow, on none at all the dayafter; but there is the drafting of awell-thought-out scheme of character, as itwere, and then the building according to thescheme, for the Soul becomes an architect aswell as a builder, and wastes no more time inabortive beginnings.1

All this takes time, but there is time for patience,both for the total of work to be done and for waitingfor the right and proper moment for each act. On theone hand, ‘drop by drop is the water-pot filled’,whether with good or evil; on the other hand, thereis a rhythm in events, a ‘tide in the affairs of men’which all should study and use.

To act and act wisely when the time foraction comes, to wait and wait patiently when

1 Karma, Annie Besant.

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it is time for repose, puts man in accordwith the rising and falling tides, so that, withnature and law at his back, and truth andbeneficence as his beacon light, he mayaccomplish wonders.1

Note that the beacon light is composed of truth andbeneficence, understanding and compassion. TheBuddha was known as the All-Enlightened One, butalso as the All-Compassionate One. There can be notrue love without understanding, for understandingof man’s integrity gives birth to that benevolenceand beneficence which comes with a vision ofTHAT. On the other hand, there can be no trueunderstanding without love. The mind knows moreand more about the objects of its survey. Loveknows. Thereafter life is sacred and one’s brother isoneself. ‘He who looks into the pupil of his brother’seye sees himself; he who sees the Self in all and allin the Self—he will not injure the Self by the Self.’Or to return once more to The Voice of the Silence:

Thou shalt not separate thy being from BEINGand the rest, but merge the Ocean in the drop,the drop within the Ocean. So shalt thou be infull accord with all that lives, bear love to menas though they were thy brother-pupils,disciples of one Teacher, the sons of onesweet mother.

In brief, he who applies the Law to daily life willfind that so far from being cold, or leading to

1 Practical Occultism, H.P.Blavatsky.

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heartlessness, the Law of Harmony and Justice isequally the Law of Love.

Changing Values

An understanding of the Law leads to a greaterunderstanding of our own and others’ suffering.Great events are seen as of small importance, andthe littlest act is seen as the possible parent of greatconsequences. With a growing sense ofresponsibility for every thought and act there comesa new valuation of all circumstance. There is agreater willingness to face facts as they are and areluctance to label them. Things and events are seenas neither good nor bad; they are. It is man whoadds the changing labels to the bare events. Thevalue of intense sincerity is obvious, for if to lie toothers is evil, to lie to oneself is an absolute barrieron the Way. Even sin is the less sinful when itstands alone, and is not aggravated by self-delusionas to what it is. In the delightful words ofGerald Gould:

For God’s sake, if you sin, take pleasure in it, And do it for the pleasure. Do not say:‘Behold the spirit’s liberty!—a minute Will see the earthly vesture break awayAnd God shine through.’ Say: ‘Here’s a sin—I’llsin it; And there’s the price of sinning—andI’ll pay!’

In the same way, happiness is seen for what it is.Most men would say that it was the aim of life, yet,as I wrote elsewhere,

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when the conception is analysed, it is found tocontain at least four ingredients, of which thefirst is a sense of security. In the second placethere must be an absence of worry, which tomost men means an absence of that fruitfulcause of worry, responsibility. Thirdly, theremust be an absence of strife, or conflict; andfourthly, there is a powerful sense of comfort,involving a ‘comfortable’ income, good health,a happy home…. Such a conception is alie, utterly selfish, and impossibleof achievement.1

Even when such an animal contentment is for ashort while achieved it is only at the expense ofutter forgetfulness of the intolerable misery ofmillions of mankind. Not that pleasure is evil, norhappiness a sin, but to seek for it, to make it themotive of life and the goal of all endeavour, is a low,unworthy motive for treading the Way.

It is more, it is undignified, and one of the firsteffects of applying the Law to all one’s actions is anew-found sense of dignity. Man is no longer apawn on a chessboard, moved by an unseen Hand,nor a blown leaf on the winds of destiny. He is thepatient reaper of his self-sown past, and thedeliberate creator not only of such future as may bebuilt by the right user of all opportunities, but thecreator of opportunity which may be rightly used.The wise man uses Karma as the scientist useselectricity, and the Law is just as impersonal. Hewho is ignorant of its powers or careless in its

1 From a speech reported in Buddhism in England, forJuly, 1938.

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handling will suffer accordingly, and only himselfmay bear the blame, though others may suffer for hisfolly. Again, if a man uses a natural law to a selfishend it will work as well as if the end were sheerbenevolence. He who wants will get; it does notfollow that having got it he will be satisfied withwhat he has got. There is such a thing as dust andashes, and he who sows for himself willreap unhappiness.

Few men are their own masters in business; thevast majority have their outward lives planned forthem. Yet in the inner life all are equally free. Thereis dignity in the thought of a long-term planning forthe development of character. In one life much maybe done, but in endless lives to come, as many as areneeded, all is possible, all will assuredly be done.

Only in action will the wisdom come. Lead thelife, and the Way will open and the truth be finallyattained. Such is the Wisdom in all Scriptures, butthe Way, the Middle Way of harmony, must betrodden for the sake of the SELF, and not for the selfalone. Mistakes are inevitable, but he who is willingto learn will pay the price demanded, retrace hissteps to the point of divergence, and march on. Andhe will learn from his own mistakes to be lesscritical of others. Where those he despises stand atthe moment, he once stood, even as he will standwhere now, on the heights ahead of him, he sees themore developed of his fellow men. The parable of themote and the beam is always apt, and it is to befound in the Dhammapada of Buddhism, in Indianphilosophy, and in most of the religions of theworld. In the Dhammapada it reads, ‘The fault ofothers is easily perceived, but that of oneself isdifficult to perceive; the faults of others one lays

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open to all, but one’s own one hides, as a cheat willhide the bad die from the gambler.’

Mistakes will be made, and be paid for, invaluations as in all else. For values pertain to themind, not to things, and as the mind evolves, somust its values and its power to value wisely. Sinand happiness must be revalued, as already shown;so must time, for it is only time which separatesthose below us in the scale of evolution and thoseahead. So must death and the fear of death. When thebody is seen as a garment of the soul, and the soulor returning Self is found to be one with the SELF,where is the sorrow at the need of sleep, of rest atthe close of day? Again, a lesson well learnt cannever be bought too dearly, and many of those whoin the stress of war have lost their all—visiblebelongings—have learnt, as only the violent teacher,war, has been able to teach them, the unimportanceof possessions, when all that a man possesses iswhat he is.

The way is a Middle Way, a path of temperance,of the due avoidance of extremes. ‘All oppositesprovoke their opposites’, which is another way ofsaying that action and reaction are equal andopposite. All extremes must ultimately cancel out,even as a pendulum, however fiercely swung, willfinally fall to rest. The more a spring is compressed,the greater will be the recoil. The Middle Wayavoids extremes, and threads its way between theopposites so lightly and so reasonably that no actis followed by reaction, and hence there is no needfor a Self to suffer the consequences of the act. ‘Theperfect act has no result.’

But the Middle Way has nought to do withcompromise, where compromise means loosing thereins of principle. That which is right, for that

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individual at that time in those circumstances, isright; all other act is wrong. The way between twoextremes is not a little of each, but a third way, thegenuine Middle Way which is not so much betweenthe opposites as a strait and narrow way, ‘narrow asa razor’s edge’, between yet above them both. If anact is right, it is neither too much this nor that; if itis not right it has slipped down the steeps of illusionon one side or the other. And all the while thewinds of doubt are blowing, cold and keen….

The road is long, and the pilgrim soon growsweary. The accumulated Karma of the past, which inits own inexorable time will offer itself forcancelling, is appalling in the true sense of the word.Habits of thought and act and motive must be haltedand reversed; all values changed. We must ‘cease todo evil’ before we can ‘learn to do good’. Then,when the trend of our acts is purified, we must‘cleanse the heart’, till the ‘I’ which is not I has learntthat it is of the Essence of Pure Mind.

According to Yoga, the Indian science ofspiritual development, there are many branches ofthe Way, of which three may be mentioned inparticular. Jnana Yoga is the way of Knowledge, anever-increasing under standing as the awakeningfaculty of Buddhi, the intuition, illumines themind. Bhakti Yoga is the way of devotion, of love, ofutter self-sacrifice in the service of the BelovedIdeal. The third is Karma Yoga, and this, it wouldseem, is the Dharma, the present duty or right pathfor the West. This is the way of Action, of the rightperformance of all duty, however high, howeversmall. Yet Jnana and Karma Yoga arecomplementary. On the Middle Way

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action and vision go hand in hand, and thatis why the teachings of the Gita alternatebetween knowledge and action in a way sobaffling to the purely intellectual man. Purifiedand disciplined action opens the inner eye andgrants the vision of the highest that the discipleis yet capable of seeing. But that vision mustnot remain a mere private ecstasy. It must betranslated into action, and so built into thepersonality before another range of vision canpresent itself to the inner eye and the way beopened for yet another cyclic advance.1

The burden of Karma is heavy. All alike haveheavy debts to pay. Yet none, so the Wisdomteaches, is ever faced with more than he can bear.Whether or not we can grin, we must bear it, and itis folly to attempt to run away. Yet thousandsbelieve that by moving their bodies across the worldthey will escape from Karma. Others, equally foolish,believe that they can escape from ‘the whips andscorns of time’ by suicide. Only the body dies; theKarma remains, with the added burden of self-murder and the weakling will that feared to pay.Others, as all psychologists know, ‘escape’ intoneuroses, often attaining the degree of madness,believing that in their own minds they will escapefrom the harshness of the world without; othersagain, like the proverbial ostrich, seek to escape bypretending that, as they cannot see the doomapproaching, it is not there. Their efforts are vain.As a gentleman pays his debts, so a Karmically

1 The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna Prem.

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educated gentleman invites the bill and pays itwillingly.

Here, however, a curious minor law asserts itself.It seems to be that he who deliberately takes himselfin hand, and sets about the task of his own self-development, calls down on himself a larger shareof ‘suspended’ Karma than otherwise he would havehad to endure. The price of entry on the Path withopen eyes, it seems, is an immediate testing, self-demanded; and many a student, finding the rewardof incipient effort to be, not as he hoped a sense ofspiritual well-being but a host of trials andobstacles, gives up the attempt, and joins once morethe army of drifters who, with no higher goal thanpersonal happiness, form the bulk of mankind.Those who survive these apparent testings findthemselves at the entrance to a Path whose end isself-Enlightenment, and on this Path, ‘the first stepis to live to benefit mankind’. In a message to theAmerican Theosophists in 1889 H.P. Blavatskyquoted a Master of the Wisdom as saying, TheUniverse groans under the weight of Karma, andnone other than self-sacrificial Karma relieves it.How many of you have helped humanity to carry itssmallest burden, that you should all regardyourselves as Theosophists? Oh, men of the West,who would play at being the Saviours of mankindbefore they even spare the life of a mosquito whosesting threatens them! would you be partakers ofDivine Wisdom or true Theosophists? Then do asthe gods when incarnated do. Feel yourselves thevehicles of the whole humanity, mankind as part ofyourselves, and act accordingly.

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IXThe Ending of Karma and

Rebirth

Even if modern science and modern Christianity aregravely at variance, the leading scientists of the dayare rediscovering the truths of the Wisdom which isolder than any religion. Sir James Jeans, in TheMysterious Universe, has written: ‘The universe canbest be pictured…as consisting of pure thought’, andthat ‘its creation must have been an act of thought’.This is pure Vedanta and pure Buddhism, and it isthe basis of Theosophy. The Essence of Mind, as thePatriarch Wei Lang described it, the Universal Mindof modern philosophy, is ‘intrinsically pure’, andeach of our human minds is an outpost of that‘cosmic consciousness’. What is the relationbetween the two? ‘Thou art THAT,’ says the Wisdomof India. ‘Look within, thou art Buddha,’ says thenumerically largest religion in the world. Man isenlightened but knows it not. ‘I and my Father areone,’ said Christ, the Christos or ‘God within’ ofevery man. The difference between an enlightenedand an unenlightened man is only this, said WeiLang, that one knows it and the other does not. Butbetween the two states of consciousness there lies aWay, a long and weary way from the might-be to thehas-become, a way of becoming until the littlestblade of grass has entered Buddhahood, until each

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living thing has re-become what it potentially is, theAll.

Potentially we are one with the Absolute.

But having fallen into illusion we have theexperience of a separated life which is notterminated at death. We remain in the illusionuntil we have exhausted it, until we havelearned the full significance of our deeds, andremoulded them so that a return to the identity-consciousness is possible; for works are a meansto knowledge, and knowledge the means toliberation. Thus karma-reincarnation is alikethe machinery of the illusion and theescapement from it.1

But if the nature of man is determined by his user ofthe Law, so that in a very real sense he is his Karma,and if every act and thought is adding to the total ofcause-effects, how will it end? According to theWisdom the answer to this question, as to mostothers of its kind, is a paradox, that none may knowthe ending until he has reached the end. Only hewho has ‘exhausted’ his Karma may utterly knowthe Law. How, then, is the unenlightened mortal toproceed? The answer seems to be, in Christianterminology, with faith and works. There must befaith in the Law that the due performance of all dutywill in some mysterious way remove one from thesway of Karma, and faith is not, as a humorist put it,believing what you know to be untrue, but knowingwith a partially awakened intuition the truth of a

1 Mysticism of East and West, Loftus Hare.

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law which the intellect has not as yet been able tograsp. In this sense only is faith of value, as aninner conviction that where the finger of the guide ispointing there is a way, the right Way to thegoal desired. But faith is valueless unless it beexpressed in works. We in the West are anaction-loving people, and even in the moreintroverted Indian mind there is an equal necessityfor the knowledge within to appear in acts without,even as the Universe itself ‘becomes itself’ bymanifesting outwardly.

But action, right or wrong, alike produces freshresults. Where, then, is the end, if even the dueperformance of all duty brings us back again to reapthe harvest, still the victim of our own endeavour,still on the Wheel of Rebirth, bound on the cycle ofour own necessity? The answer is twofold and yetone. By removing the self which causes and is itsKarma, and by acting so dispassionately, so‘resultlessly’, that every act is without reaction, andtherefore needs no actor to suffer the consequences,good or evil, of the act.

There are two ways to the Goal, to diminish theself, the power of the personality, until it is servantto the Self, and then to diminish the Self, the ‘soul’or character, until it ceases to have any will orpurpose other than that of the SELF, or the Vedantinrather than the Buddhist way, to increase the powerof the SELF in the Self, and then in the self till theseparative impulse has ceased to exist and thewhole of the man is One. In this connection it hasbeen said that all men serve a self, but theirenlighten ment depends on the size of the self theyserve. It is the purely selfish lust of the egotist, themore enlightened love of family and neighbour andthe immediate commonweal, or is it a love, an

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enlightened and illumined love for all mankind? Asis the answer, so will be the attainment of thatindividual in the process of becoming.

The first answer, then, to the problem of theending of Karma is that the self which causes andmust suffer Karma must be left to die. When thethree fires of hatred, lust and illusion die for want offuelling, the personality, robbed of its independentwilling, becomes the obedient servant of the soul,and as the soul gives up its life it learns to live. Forthe only slavery is desire, and he who learns to letgo, to climb the wind-swept hills of self-becoming,naked of all possessions and desire, will drink themountain air of freedom, and find the peace that liesnot in the satisfaction but in the controllingof desire.

The second answer is twin to the first. ‘Withoutattachment, constantly perform action which is duty,for performing action without attachment man verilyreacheth the Supreme.’ So runs the Bhagavad Gita,and its theme is the absence of attachment to theact. There must be no more action in which ‘I’ strivefor a result. But if the act seem good, that is, to beduty and no more, let there be the performing of thataction, regardless of the consequence.

Whose acts are free from the moulding ofdesire, whose acts are burned up by the fire ofwisdom, he is called Sage by the wise. Havingabandoned all attachment to the fruits of action,ever content, seeking refuge in none, whiledoing acts he is not doing anything. Free fromdesire, his thoughts controlled by the SELF,having abandoned all attachment, performingaction by the body alone, he commits no sin.Content with what he receives, free from the

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pairs of opposites, without envy, balanced insuccess and failure, though he has acted he isnot bound. For with all attachments dead,harmonious, his thoughts established inwisdom, his work as sacrifices, all his actionsmelt away.

The secret, then, is motive. Action must go on, foronly by right action can the Law be used to its ownending. But the motive for each act must beincreasingly selfless until all that we once thought I,and such a splendid I, is seen to be dross and purgedaway. Thereafter there is a doing of the deed thatmust be done, and the doer’s motive is merely that,being right, it should be done. It must be noted thatsuch action has become ‘right’ in the highest sense,by being that which should be done. So long as thethought of self remains, a good deed binds the doeras much as any sin. If I am generous, with thethought of how generous I am, the results will begood, but I must return to receive them. Only wheneach act is a cheerful, unattached performance of‘right action’ is the doer free. As is said in Light onthe Path, ‘Desire to sow no seed for your ownharvesting; desire only to sow that seed the fruit ofwhich shall feed the world.’ Otherwise, ‘Verily,Brethren, there is no end to the suffering of beingsburied in blindness who, seized by craving, arebrought again and again to birth unceasingly.’1

The Buddhism of the Northern School, theMahayana or Great Vehicle, has developed a lovelydoctrine of the Bodhisattva, one who having

1 Samyutta Nikaya.

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attained Enlightenment works on for humanity,guarding him so far as the Law permits from folly,guiding him with a finger pointing the Way. Thesegreat ones of all religions, variously known asArhats, Bodhisattvas, Rishis, Mahatmas, Masters,Saints and Brothers, form collectively, the Wisdomtells, a guardian wall about humanity, and watch itsprogress with a troubled eye. For though each hasreached the end of his own immediate journey andattained his own Release, yet he may not ‘interfere’with another’s Karma, nor would it help him if hecould. From the beginning to the end of the journeyman must travel alone, but he travels guarded,guided and in some way protected from his folly,and it is the aim of the noblest of mankind to add tothat Guardian Wall. When the weary but triumphantPilgrim nears the end of the journey, and the gatesof Enlightenment swing wide to receive him withhis due reward, Compassion speaks and says: ‘Canthere be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shaltthou be saved and hear the whole world cry?’2 Andhe who after a thousand lives of fierce endeavourhas achieved self-mastery abandons all that he hadstriven to obtain, forgoes the guerdon of his efforts,and returns and by his great Renunciation hastensthe liberation of all mankind. Yet this too is theLaw, for the Law is Justice, but the Law is also Love.

There are those who seek the SELF by learning;those who seek it by devotion to the Beloved Ideal;those who seek by the way of action. There is thepath of Occultism, of the science of the spiritualforces which rule mankind; there is the way ofMysticism, of a vision of the Goal whereby all else is

2 The Voice of the Silence.

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seen as insignificant; there is the way of Zen, thatthrusts aside all obstacles and marches, not up thegentler paths of slow endeavour, but straightway upthe hill. All these are ways within the Way, for ‘theways to the One are as many as the lives of men’,and each before he treads the Path must in truthbecome the Path, for the Life and the Truth and theWay are One, even as Karma uses and is used by allimpartially. Karma is truth and the way to truth;Karma is justice and therefore uses the illusion oftime. But Karma is also love, for ‘Love is thefulfilling of the Law’.

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