History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c95.147

v7.c95.147

Not only Pythagoras, but Empedocles (who is reported to have said that he was a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird and a fish) and Plato believed in the pre-existence and post-existence of the soul, in the idea that the bodies which will accompany the soul in several births would bear similitude to the lives that they had led, that the happiest would be those who had practised the social and civil virtues called temperance and justice and that supersensible thinking would be the only means of disengaging the soul from successive lives of sense. Vide Kenneth Walker's 'The circle of Life' p. 93 (where he says that the doctrine of metempsychosis was probably well-known in India at the time of Christ) and Gough's 'Philosophy of the Upanisads' (London 1882), pp 25-28, where he cites a long passage from Plato's Phaedon on this subject and pp. 29-31 for a long quotation from Hume's Dialogues concernig Natural Religion on the miseries and migration of the soul from body to body. Gough on p 25 of the above work opines that since in the Vedic literature prior to the Upanisads there is no reference to the belief in the passage of the soul into plants and human bodies, it is reasonable to suppose that the Hindus borrowed this doctrine from the indigenes in the course of their absorption of indigenous blood Vide also 'Studies in honour of Bloomfield' pp. 76-88 for G. W. Brown's views to the same effect. This is a most gratuitous assumption, it is a pure conjecture and without any evidence whatever. If belief in transmigration could exist among Egyptians and many primitive tribes, there is no reason to assume that Indians did not themselves arrive at the doctrine, particularly when there exists nowhere else in the whole world any theory of Karma and transmigration so detailed, so influential and so thorough as in Sanskrit Literature. One may dismiss the conjectures of Gough and G. W Brown as verbiage (the latter conjectures on pp. 87-88 that even the words Yoga, Sānkhya and Upanisad are coined from similar words in some Dravidian tongue now lost). All Scholars (particularly Western ones when writing about the East) should lay to heart the words of Mallinātha 'nāmūlam likhyate kiñcit'. The present writer is not against conjectures at all but they must not be bold and must always be treated as such. But the danger is that the conjectures of former scholars or men are often treated as valid conclusions by later writers. All scholars must bear in mind Acton's warning 'Guard against the prestige of great names; no trusting without testing'. In the H of Dh Vol. IV. pp 38-40 the doctrine of Karma and Punarjanma was briefly discussed in relation to the consequence of sins and their removal and details were reserved for treatment later