Page:Sacred Books of the Buddhists Vol 1.djvu/18

 unbroken chain of cause and effect binds all existences together. The great problems of the justice of the government of the world, of the earthly sufferings of the innocent, and the apparent happiness of the wicked, were to the Indian mind solved once for all by the firm conviction that what we experience here is the result of something that has happened before, that there is an unbroken heredity in the world, and that we not only benefit by, but also suffer from our ancestors. In order fully to understand the drift of the Gâtakas we must, however, bear in mind one more article of the Buddhist faith, namely that, though ordinary mortals remember nothing of their former existences beyond the fact that they did exist, which is involved in the very fact of their self-consciousness, highly enlightened beings have the gift of recalling their former vicissitudes. It is well known that Pythagoras claimed the same gift of remembering his former lives, or at all events is reported to have claimed it. A Buddha is supposed to know whatever has happened to him in every existence through which he has passed: and it seems to have been the constant habit of the historical Buddha, Buddha Sâkya-muni, to explain to his disciples things that were happening by things that had happened countless ages before. Those lessons seem certainly to have impressed his hearers, after they once believed that what they had to suffer here on earth was not the result of mere chance, but the result of their own former deeds or of the deeds of their fellow-creatures, that they were in fact paying off a debt which they had contracted long ago. It was an equally impressive lesson that whatever good they might do on earth would be placed to their account in a future life, because the whole world was one large system in which nothing could ever be lost, though many of the links of the chain of cause and effect might escape human observation or recollection.

The Buddha, in telling these stories of his former births or existences, speaks of himself, not exactly as the same individual, but rather as the enlightened one,