The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE EQUINOX neither Flame nor Air; nor the vast Aether nor the Infinity of Thought, not Utter Void nor the co-existence of Cognition and Non-cognition is there:—not this World nor Another, neither Sun nor Moon. That, Brothers, I declare unto you as neither a Becoming nor yet a Passing-away:—not Life nor Death nor Birth; Unlocalised, Unchanging and Uncaused:—That is the end of Sorrow.* Gotama therefore had to hedge. Unquestionably the Soul- idea must go, but in order to account for the Universal law of Causation Karma must remain, and further, surreptitiously perform all the old duties the individual Atman had carried out. He had abandoned the animism of a low civilization, it is true, but he could not, for a want of the exemption from morality itself, abandon the fetish of a slightly higher civiliza- tion, namely ethics. He saw that though mankind was tired of being ruled by Spirits, they were only too eager to be ruled by Virtues, which gave those who maintained these fictitious qualifications a sure standpoint from which to rail at those who had not. Therefore he banned Reincarnation and Soul and substituted in their place Transmigration and Karma (Doing) the Sankhara or Tendencies that form the character (individuality!) of the individual. Ananda Metteya in “ Buddhism”+ explains transmigration in contradistinction to reincarnation as follows. Two men standing on the shore of a lake watch the waves rolling land- wards. To the one who is unversed in science it appears that the wave travelling towards him retains its identity and shape, it is to him a mass of water that moves over the surface impelled by the wind. The other, who has a scientifically trained mind, knows that at each point upon the surface of the lake the particles of water are only rising and then falling in * The Book of Solemn Utterances, t Vol. i, No. 2, p. 293. 136