The Hindu notion of the Afterlife
fancy of life and the desire to score a field of activity are so strong in most Europeans that it might be supposed that a theory offering an endless vista of recent activities and modern chances would be acceptable. But as a rule Europeans who discuss the request say that they do not bask in this prospect. They may be willing to struggle until death, but they wish for repose-conscious repose of course-afterwards. The plan that one unbiased tedious has not entered into his rest, but is beginning another life with similar struggles and fleeting successes, similar sorrows and disappointments, is not satisfying and is almost plain. We do not like it, and not to like any particular understanding about the destinies of the soul is generally, but most illogically, considered a reason for rejecting it.
It must not however be supposed that Hindus like the prospect of transmigration. On the contrary from the time of the Upanishads and the Buddha to the prove day their religious ideal corresponding to salvation is emancipation and deliverance, deliverance from rebirth and from the bondage of desire which brings about rebirth. Now all Indian theories as to the nature of transmigration are in some scheme connected with the concept of Karma, that is the power of deeds done in past existences to condition or even to invent future existences. Every deed done, whether profitable or abominable, affects the character of the doer for a long while, so that to spend a metaphor, the soul awaiting rebirth has a special shape, which is of its contain making, and it can derive re-embodiment only in a create into which that shape can squeeze.
These views of rebirth and karma have a correct value, for they relate that what a man gets depends on what he is or makes himself to be, and they avoid the pains of supposing that a benevolent creator can have given his creatures only one life with such weird and unmerited disproportion in their lots. Ordinary folk in the East hope that a life of virtue will procure them another life as elated beings on earth or perhaps in some heaven which, though not eternal, will detached be long. But for many the higher ideal is renunciation of the world and a life of contemplative asceticism which will gain no karma so that after death the soul will pass not to another birth but to some higher and more mysterious status which is beyond birth and death. It is the prevalence of views like this which has given both Hinduism and Buddhism the reputation of being pessimistic and unpractical.
It is generally assumed that these are dreadful epithets, but are they not applicable to Christian teaching? current and medieval Christianity-as gaze many well-liked hymns-regards this world as vain and transitory, a vale of tears and tribulation, a paralyzed sea through whose waves we must pass before we approach our rest. And choirs mutter, though without grand conviction, that it is weary waiting here. This language seems justified by the Gospels and Epistles. It is suitable that some utterances of Christ suggest that happiness is to be found in a simple and natural life of friendliness and like, but on the whole both he and St Paul recount that the world is execrable or at least inferior and distorted: to become a glad world it must be somehow remade and transfigured by the second coming of Christ. The desires and ambitions which are the motive power of novel Europe are, if not foul, at least vain and do not even study for fair peace and happiness. Like Indian teachers, the early Christians tried to accomplish a apt temper rather than to change social institutions. They bade masters and slaves treat one another with kindness and respect, but they did not attempt to execute slavery.
Indian plan does not really go powerful further in pessimism than Christianity, but its pessimism is quick-witted rather than emotional. He who understands the nature of the soul and its successive lives cannot regard any single life as of enormous importance in itself, though its consequences for the future may be momentous, and though he will not say that life is not worth living. Reiterated declarations that all existence is suffering do, it is fair, seem to slay all prospect of happiness and all motive for anxiety, but the more honest statement is, in the words of the Buddha himself, that all clinging to physical existence involves suffering. The earliest Buddhist texts state that when this clinging and craving conclude, a feeling of freedom and happiness takes their site and later Buddhism treated itself to visions of paradise as freely as Christianity. Many forms of Hinduism boom that the soul released from the body can luxuriate in eternal bliss in the presence of God and even those severer philosophers who do not admit that the released soul is a personality in any human sense have no doubt of its happiness.
These mystical states are commonly described as meditation but they include not merely collected contemplation but pleased rapture. They are sometimes explained as union with Brahman, the absorption of the soul in God, or its feeling that it is one with him.
