Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c17.s1.7

c17.s1.7

The mechanism of transmigration, vaguely conceived earlier, is now brought into effective connexion with action. Normally a being, god, man or animal, lives its life without essential physical change, though occasionally punishment for crime may change a man into a woman or transfer him into a hell being without the intervention of death. But death is normally the portal to the next existence and the last consciousness of life is determined in form by appropriateness to the new birth to be achieved, which in its turn depends on the action to be rewarded or punished. If the fate of the man on death is to be hell, he hears the cries of the tormented, and his rebirth or conception consciousness (*pratisamdhi-vijñāna*) is a continuation of this last consciousness before death. An animal is incapable of action proper; but an ancient deed may reward it with rebirth as a man, and its dying consciousness takes the form of ideas, desires or images which are continued in an infant birth. The process is complex, since each individual series extends indefinitely into the past, and the future rebirth cannot be predicted, though a meritorious person may often secure the kind of rebirth he desires by intense thought of it before death.¹