A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c6.s3.t2.37

c6.s3.t2.37

30. We have been obliged to make this long survey of the Vedic idea of life after death only in order to prove that the three chief moments in the idea of Transmigration, namely the passage of the soul from the body, its habitation in other forms of existence like the plants or the waters, and even its return to the human form, are all implicitly found even so far back as the times of the Rigveda; and when these are coupled with the incipient idea of the quality of action (*dharma*) which determines a future existence, we see that there is no reason why we should persist in saying that the idea of Transmigration is an un-Aryan idea, that the Indians borrowed it from the non-Aryan aborigines of India, and that in some inexplicable way the idea found entrance in other countries and cults beyond India. On the principles of ethnic psychology, almost every nation contains within it the possibility of arriving at the idea of Transmigration from within its own proper psychological development; and there is no more reason why we should say that Greece borrowed the idea of Transmigration from India than we might say that Egypt