A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c6.s3.t2.39

c6.s3.t2.39

herself borrowed it from India. If Prof. Keith¹ acknowledges that the Egyptians themselves believed in the possibility of a dead man “returning to wander on earth, visiting the places he had loved in life, or again changing himself into a heron, a swallow, a snake, a crocodile or a girl,” there is no justification for saying, as he does, that “this is indeed transmigration, but a different transmigration from either that of Greece or India.” Whenever there is recognised the possibility of the soul coming to inhabit a body as a god-like principle from without, wherever it is supposed that the soul could likewise part from the body as it came, wherever it is thought that the soul after parting from the body could lead a life of disembodied existence, and wherever it is supposed to return again to the earth and inhabit any form of existence whatsoever, there is a kind of undying life conceived for the soul from which the step to actual Transmigration is not very far removed; while the crowning idea in transmigration, namely that of ἀνάμνησις is a product of very late growth, and even though it is found in Pythagoras and Plato and the Indian system of Yoga, we have no reason to attribute it definitely to the Vedic seers or to the Upanishadic philosophers, unless perhaps we scent it in the rather unconscious utterance of the sage Vāmadeva that he was in a former life “Manu or the Sun.”²