42 XOTES 



his transgression ; and a robber who has ouce done an act of 

 mercy, may come to life in a king's body as the result of his 

 virtue, and then suffer torments for ages in hell or as a ghost 

 without a body, or be re-born many times as a slave or an 

 outcast, in consequence of his evil life. 



" There is no escape according to this theory, from the result 

 of any act ; though it is only the consequences of its own acts 

 that each soul has to endure. The force has been set in motion 

 by itself and can never stop ; and its effect can never be foretold. 

 If evil, it can never be modified or prevented, for it depends on 

 a cause already completed, that is now for ever beyond the soul's 

 control. There is even no continuing consciousness, no memory 

 of the past that could guide the soul to any knowledge of its fate. 

 The only advantage open to it is to add in this life to the sum of 

 its good actions, that it may bear fruit with the rest. And even 

 this can only happen in some future life under essentially the 

 same conditions as the present one ; subject, like the present one, 

 to old age, decay, and death ; and affording opportunity, like the 

 present one, for the commission of errors, ignorances, or sins, 

 which in their turn must inevitably produce their due effect of 

 sickness, disability, or woe. Thus is the soul tossed about from 

 life to life, from billow to billow in the great ocean of trans- 

 migration. And there is no escape save for the very few who, 

 during their birth as men, attain to a right knowledge of the 

 Great Spirit : and thus enter into immortality, or, as the later 

 philosophers taught, are absorbed into the Divine Essence." 

 (Rhys Davids. Hibbert Lectures, pp. 85 86.) 



The state after death, thus imagined by the Hindu philoso- 

 phers, has a certain analogy to the purgatory of the Roman 

 Church ; except that escape from it is dependent not on a divine 

 decree modified, it may be, by sacerdotal or saintly intercession, 

 but by the acts of the individual himself ; and that while 

 ultimate emergence into heavenly bliss of the good, or well- 

 prayed for, Catholic is professedly assured, the chances in favour 

 of the attainment of absorption, or of Nirvana, by any indi- 

 vidual Hindu are extremely small. 



