Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/33

Rh the Art of Dying; for Death, as well as Life, is an Art, though both are often enough muddled through. There is a Bengali saying, ‘Of what use are Japa and Tapas (two forms of devotion) if one knoweth not how to die?’ Secondly, it is a manual of religious therapeutic for the last moments, and a psychurgy exorcising, instructing, consoling, and fortifying by the rites of the dying, him who is about to pass on to another life. Thirdly, it describes the experiences of the deceased during the intermediate period, and instructs him in regard thereto. It is thus also a Traveller’s Guide to Other Worlds.

The doctrine of ‘Reincarnation’ on the one hand and of ‘Resurrection’ on the other is the chief difference between the four leading Religions—Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity, in its orthodox form, rejects the most ancient and widespread belief of the Kúklos geneseōn, or Sangsāra, or ‘Reincarnation’, and admits one universe only—this, the first and last—and two lives, one here in the natural body and one hereafter in the body of Resurrection.

It has been succinctly said that as Metempsychosis makes the same soul, so Resurrection makes the same body serve for more than one Life. But the latter doctrine limits man’s lives to two in number, of which the first or present determines for ever the character of the second or future.

Brahmanism and Buddhism would accept the doctrine that ‘as a tree falls so shall it lie’, but they deny that it so lies for ever. To the adherents of these two kindred beliefs this present universe is not the first and last. It is but one of an infinite series, without absolute beginning or end, though each universe of the series appears and disappears. They also teach a series of successive existences therein until morality, devotion, and knowledge produce that high form of detachment which is the cause of Liberation from the cycle of birth and death called ‘The Wandering’ (or Sangsāra). Freedom is the attainment of the Supreme State called the Void, Nirvāṇa, and by other names. They deny that there is only one universe, with one life for each of its human units, and then a division of men for all eternity into those who are saved in Heaven or are in Limbo and those who are lost in