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These simple principles and the absence of all dogmas as to God or Brahman distinguish the teaching of Gotama from most Indian systems, but he accepted the usual Indian beliefs about Karma and rebirth and with them the usual conclusion that release from the series of rebirths is the summum bonum.
But he has never given to himself, or to us, the first reason for believing that this endless fugue of rebirths will accomplish that which he accepts without questioning; namely, the ultimate glorification of all souls. There is nothing in this long and tedious process itself which assures us that any soul will reach final beatification rather than permanent and irremediable degradation.
"He who liberates a bull at the Aswamedika place of pilgrimage obtains mukti, that is salvation or an end of his rebirths." "All sin is destroyed by the repetition of Kali's thousand names." And so on ad infinitum. Superstition, Western or Eastern, has no end of panaceas. We recall the advertisements of "Plenaria indulgenzia" on the doors of churches in South Italy.
At any rate, with this double layer of nourishing earth the belief, first, that what you are now is the result of your actions in previous lives, and, secondly, that there are plenty more rebirths in which any merit you possess may have its just recompense of reward, the caste system has flourished like the Psalmist's green bay tree, though its influence has been more like that of the deadly upas.
If in consequence of my faults, rebirths be mine, I shall, in those new births, devote myself solely to Bhava." ""'Indra said, "What reason canst thou assign for the existence of a Supreme Being or for His being the cause of all causes?"
The body of a creature is called the car. The senses are said to be steeds. Our acts and the understanding are the traces. He who followeth after those running steeds has to come repeatedly to this world in a round of rebirths. He, however, who, being self-restrained restrains them by his understanding hath not to come back.
Suffering many kinds of torture, he travels in a repeated round of rebirths even like a wheel that turns ceaselessly. Thou, however, hast cut through all thy bonds. Thou, abstainest from all acts! Possessed of omniscience and the master of all things, let success be thine, and do thou become freed from all existent objects.
The warnings of the ancient abbot, good and learned man as he was, full also of ripe experience and of the foresighted wisdom that is given to such as he, oppressed me deeply. He promised us sorrow and bloodshed beyond the mountains, ending in death and rebirths full of misery. Well, it might be so, but no approaching sufferings could stay our feet.
And then, O Prince, elsewhere the game will begin afresh, and what you have lost shall be found anew, and the sweeter for it sheltering from the vile breath of men. Ki's magic is not all a lie, or if his is, mine holds some shadow of the truth, and when he said to you yonder in Tanis that not for nothing were you named 'Lord of Rebirths, he spoke words that you should find comfortable to-night."
"The rational soul," he says, "wanders round the whole world and through the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that our posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors saw nothing greater than we have seen.
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