Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/34

xxviii Hell. Whilst they agree in holding that there is a suitable body for enjoyment or suffering in Heaven and Hell, it is not a resurrected body, for the fleshly body on death is dissolved for ever.

The need of some body always exists, except for the non-dualist who believes in a bodiless (Videha) Liberation (Mukti); and each of the four religions affirms that there is a subtle and death-surviving element—vital and psychical—in the physical body of flesh and blood, whether it be a permanent entity or Self, such as the Brahmanic Ãtmā, the Moslem Ruh, and the Christian ‘Soul’, or whether it be only a complex of activities (or Skandha), psychical and physical, with life as their function—a complex in continual change, and, therefore, a series of physical and psychical momentary states, successively generated the one from the other, a continuous transformation, as the Buddhists are said to hold. Thus to none of these Faiths is death an absolute ending, but to all it is only the separation of the Psyche from the gross body. The former then enters on a new life, whilst the latter, having lost its principle of animation, decays. As Dr. Evans-Wentz so concisely says, Death disincarnates the ‘soul-complex’, as Birth incarnates it. In other words, Death is itself only an initiation into another form of life than that of which it is the ending.

On the subject of the physical aspect of Death, the attention of the reader is drawn to the remarkable analysis here given of symptoms which precede it. These are stated because it is necessary for the dying man and his helpers to be prepared for the final and decisive moment when it comes. Noteworthy, too, is the description of sounds heard as (to use Dr. Evans-Wentz’s language) ‘the psychic resultants of the disintegrating process called death’. They call to mind the humming, rolling, and crackling noises heard before and up to fifteen hours after death, which, recognized by Greunwaldi in 1618 and referred to by later writers, were in 1862 made the subject of special study by Dr. Collingues.