Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
But hereafter they may be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth may take. In the present it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, 'through great varieties of untried being, and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood."
The second statement will require explanation; but as regards the former, there is no denying the strain of melancholy, the note of hopelessness, that pervades these words we have quoted, or that they are characteristic of India. In them life seems a burden; to be born into it, a punishment; and of the transmigrations of our souls from life to life, seemingly, we should gladly see the end.
And if two souls, will they be purified and return together to the body, though one be good and the other bad? "I believe not in Osiris; nor that my soul after many transmigrations shall find and reanimate its rejected tenement. Yet I know no other god or even if I have a soul. Can I by searching find out truth or the true God? Will there be a time when the truth shall be made clear?
For every particle of matter is bound by eternal fealty to some spiritual lords, to be pinched by one and squeezed by another and torn asunder by a third; now to be painted by this and now blistered by that; now tormented with heat and soon chilled with cold; hurried from the Arctic Circle to sweat at the Equator, and then sent on an errand to the Southern Pole; forced through transmigrations of fish, fowl and flesh; and, if in some corner of creation the poor thing finds leisure to die, searched out and whipped to life again and kept in its constant round.
Imagine a reclining figure one hundred and fifty feet long and forty feet high, entirely overlaid with plate gold; the soles of its monstrous feet covered with bass-reliefs inlaid with mother-of-pearl and chased with gold; each separate design distinctly representing one of the many transmigrations of Buddha whereby he obtained Niphan.
It also teaches that when the soul leaves the body it goes through a long and tedious purifying process, whereby the effect of its vices is worn off by means of a series of transmigrations and reincarnations, wherein it develops several perfections, etc.
The central dogma is that every part of the universe, including not only gods and men, but animals, plants and the very mud itself, is capable, by successive transmigrations, of attaining to Buddhaship. In one sense, Nichirenism is the transfiguration of atheistic evolution.
In an ancient temple at Lophaburee is a curious picture, of less merit than those of Nai Dang, representing the marriage of Buddha with the princess Thiwadi, beside many of the transmigrations of the Buddhas; and there are elsewhere one or two pictures well worthy of notice, by masters whose names have not been kept in remembrance.
It ought to be consoling to those who think a great deal of their bodies, to reflect, that, if we may tend "to base uses," we may also tend to very noble ones. In the course of their transmigrations, the elements of a worthless individual may get into far better company than they have before enjoyed, may enter into brains that immortalize their owner and redeem the errors of the old possessor.
We see from this account the mythical origin of all that concerns the organization and genesis of the world, the destinies and nature of the soul, since these are sublimated myths; the elements are first regarded as deities, and the world is made in the image of man, and considered to be alive; the stars and the earth are endowed with life and intelligence; the fate of souls before and after death, their recollection of a prior existence, their transmigrations and wanderings around the tombs, demoniac possession in inspiration and madness, are all very ancient mythical representations, which form a great part of the theoretical and spiritual cosmogony of savages in all times and places.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking