Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/107

Rh and uncleanliness as well. The pigsty environment symbolizes worldly existence dominated by these characteristics.

(3) The ant symbolizes (as it does amongst the nations of the West) industry, and the lust for worldly possessions; and the ant-hill environment the dwelling under the corresponding conditions of life.

(4) The insect or grub symbolizes an earthly or grovelling disposition, and its hole the dwelling in an environment dominated by such disposition (see text, p. 179).

(5) The calf, kid, lamb, horse, and fowl forms mentioned (see text, pp. 178–9) symbolize, in like manner, corresponding characteristics common to those animals and to the highest of the animal beings, man, such as almost all civilized races have associated therewith, and popularly illustrated in animal mythology like that which Aesop made the basis of his Fables. In the Old Testament the visions of the prophet Ezekiel and in the New Testament the Revelation of John show how similar animal symbolism affected even the Bible. And, in our view, should the Buddhist and Hindu exotericists re-read their own Scriptures in the light of the Science of Symbols their opposition to Esotericism would probably be given up.

Accordingly, the animal symbols in the Sidpa Bardo—despite evident corruptions of the text and of the esoteric rebirth doctrine denoted by these symbols—should rightly be taken to imply that, in accordance with its karma, a human principle of consciousness, unless winning Emancipation, will, under the normal karmic conditions of gradual progression which govern the majority of mankind, continue to be born in a human form in this creation-period, with the mental traits or characteristics symbolized by animals. Under exceptional or abnormal karmic conditions of retrogression, it may, on the other hand, during the course of ages, gradually lose its human nature and fall back into sub-human kingdoms.

As the translator explained, we need but look round us in the human world to find the bloodthirsty tiger-man, the murderer; the lustful swine-man; the deceitful fox-man; the thieving and imitating monkey-man; the grovelling worm-man; the industrious and oft-times miserly ant-man;