Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
This is what the ancients called Metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls; a doctrine which is still held by the natives of India, who scruple to destroy the life, even of the most insignificant animal, not knowing but it may be one of their relations in an altered form.
I not only disbelieve utterly, but intensely dislike, the doctrine of metempsychosis, which, if I understand it aright, seems the negation of the creative impulse, an apotheosis of staleness nothing quite new in the world, never anything quite new not even the soul of a baby; and so I am not prepared to entertain the whim that a bird was one of his remote incarnations; still, in sweep of wing, quickness of eye, and natural sweet strength of song he is not unlike a super-bird which is a horrid image.
Rebirth and the Nature of the Soul The most characteristic doctrine of Indian religion—rarely absent in India and imported by Buddhism into all the countries which it influenced—is that called metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul or reincarnation. The last of these terms best expresses Indian, especially Buddhist, ideas but still the usual Sanskrit equivalent, Saṃsâra, means migration.
Isaac Abravanel sees in the commandment of the Levirate a proof of the doctrine of metempsychosis for which he gives the following reasons: God in His mercy willed that another trial should be given to the soul, which having yielded to the sanguine temperament of the body had committed a capital sin, such as murder, adultery, etc.; it is only just that when a man dies young a chance should be given to his soul to execute in another body the good deeds which it had not time to perform in the first body; the soul of the wicked sometimes passes into another body in order to receive its deserved punishment here below instead of in the other world where it would be much more severe.
Notwithstanding the doctrine of metempsychosis, and the belief that life is only an endless round of birth and death, sin and suffering, the most sacred Buddhistic books teach a pure and elevated morality, and that the highest happiness is only to be reached through self-abnegation, universal benevolence, humility, patience, courage, self-knowledge, and contemplation.
"Do you know," said Natasha in a whisper, moving closer to Nicholas and Sonya, "that when one goes on and on recalling memories, one at last begins to remember what happened before one was in the world..." "That is metempsychosis," said Sonya, who had always learned well, and remembered everything. "The Egyptians believed that our souls have lived in animals, and will go back into animals again."
No ancient philosopher held more firmiy than Pythagoras to belief in the immortality of the soul; it formed a part of his doctrine of Metempsychosis. He was also noted for his numerical speculations in Astronomy and Music.
To appreciate the direct influence of Buddhist teaching upon the minds of the common people, we must remember that in Shinto there was no doctrine of metempsychosis. As I have said before, the spirits of the dead, according to ancient Japanese thinking, continued to exist in the world: they mingled somehow with the viewless forces of nature, and acted through them.
Under this conception there is no such thing as Chance all is according to Law. As an ancient Grecian philosopher once said: "Without the doctrine of metempsychosis, it is not possible to justify the ways of God," and many other philosophers and theologians have followed him in this thought.
So much has been written on metempsychosis and reïncarnation of late that it is hardly necessary to dwell on a now so familiar idea. In its widest sense the whole process of nature is subject to this mode of existence, and in its more restricted sense it is the path of pilgrimage of the Soul in the desert of Matter.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking