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Furthermore, in relation to the alleged pre-existences, according to strict Buddhist doctrine it was not really he who had gone before, it was only a Kharma or character that had exchanged hands many times before it could be taken up by the real and conscious Buddha born upon the earth.
One candle may light another before itself is extinguished, but it does not do it by an inherent necessity. But this flame of the soul, this Kharma, must enter some other body of god, or man, or beast. Again, the question arises, How can responsibility be transferred from one to another?
And this transitional something, this restless moral or immoral force which must work out its natural results somehow and somewhere, and that in embodied form projects into future being a residuum which is known as Kharma. What, then, is Kharma? Literally it means "the doing." It is a man's record, involving the consequences and liabilities of his acts. It is a score which must be settled.
And this is strikingly true of moral character and the well-known power and momentum of habit. Who shall change the leopard's spots or deflect the fatal drift of a human soul? Remorselessly these Oriental systems exact from Kharma the uttermost farthing. They emphasize the fact that according to the sowing shall be the reaping, and that in no part of the universe can ill desert escape its awards.
Its doctrine of Trishna and Upadana. 3. Its theory of Kharma. 4. Its doctrine of Nirvana. The Skandas, five in number, constitute in their interaction what all others than Buddhists regard as the soul. They consist of material properties; the senses; abstract ideas; tendencies or propensities; and the mental powers.
Kharma without a soul to cling to is something in the air. It alights like some winged seed upon a new-born set of Skandas with its luckless boon of ill desert, and it involves the fatal inconsistency of investing with permanent character that which is itself impermanent.
How can the heavy load of a man's sin be laid upon some new-born infant, while the departing sinner has himself no further concern in his evil Kharma, but sinks into non-existence the moment his "conformations" are touched with dissolution? Buddhism acknowledges a mystery here; no real explanation can be given, and none seems to have been attempted by Buddhist writers.
Our direction was N. 10 E. I found the rock here composed throughout of red Thon stone, with transverse strata of the same substance, but of a green colour; beyond Djedeyde, a little higher up, I found, in my return from Medina, feldspar rocks. At one hour from the Souk, we passed a similar village in the valley, called El Kharma, which is comprised within the Wady Szafra.
The new-born soul that inherits its unsettled score has no memory or consciousness that connects it with himself; it is not heredity; it is not his father's character that invests him. This Kharma may have crossed the ocean from the death-bed of some unknown man of another race. The doctrine is the more astonishing when we consider that no Supreme Being is recognized as claiming this retribution.
Gautama, therefore, reached Nirvana forty-five years before his death. It is claimed, however, that insomuch as it cuts off Kharma, or re-birth, it involves entire extinction of being upon the dissolution of the body. It is held by still others that Nirvana is a return to the original and all-pervading Boddhi-essence.
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