The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s8.17

v2.c41.s8.17

The probability of parallelism as regards the development of the doctrine of transmigration is shown by the fact that Plato in the *Laws* ¹ treats the idea as pre-Pythagorean and illustrates one motive creating it in the view that the murderer of a father or mother must be reborn to endure in his own person the punishment of a similar fate. It is no more surprising that such an idea should be found independently in two countries than that the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa ² should record as a symptom of divinely induced madness the action of a priest in cutting off the heads of his father’s cattle, even as Aias shows his dementia by his onslaught on his kine. The tale of Aias was known to the *Little Iliad*,³ and was probably current by 700 B. C., far too early to permit of borrowing. For Greece Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ⁴ finds the cause of the doctrine in the succession of generations, the grandson bearing the grandfather’s name and reproducing him, while Rostagni ⁵ insists on the fact that the early mind, when it reflects, is unable to conceive of anything utterly perishing or coming into being from nothing, and thus is induced to accept transmigration. It is surprising that Gomperz,⁶ who recognizes this fact, should insist on deriving the Greek view from India. His view is evidently based in part on inaccurate information, as in the case of his contention that ‘the formulae which summarize the whole of the “circle and wheel” of birth are likewise the same in both’ Pythagorean and Indian belief. Similarly he finds ⁷ a curious parallel between the appearance of the doctrine of transmigration shortly before the belief of Parmenides in the one reality, as compared with the first records of transmigration in India as occurring not long before the doctrine of the eternal one; this suggestion of Oldenberg ⁸ is not supported by the facts, which suggest that the order in time of the doctrines was rather the reverse. Gomperz admits, however, the radical difference between the Greek outlook as scientific as well as religious, and the Indian as mainly religious. A most striking illustration of the divergence is furnished by the doctrine of the Pythagoreans recorded by Aristotle ⁹ explaining how souls were always available to enter new bodies when these came into being. They found the explanation in the existence of particles of dust in the sunlight, which they conceived to be living souls, not immaterial but formed of fine matter, a conception which maintained itself as late as the Neo-Platonists ¹⁰ in one aspect of the doctrine of πνεῦμα.