Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/46

xl body of flesh and blood. He urgently desires to have one, in order that he may again enjoy physical life on the earth-world.

The Freudian psycho-analyst will find herein a remarkable passage supporting his doctrine of the aversion of the son for the father. The passage says that, if the deceased is to be born as a male, the feeling of its being a male comes upon the knower, and a feeling of intense aversion for the father and attraction for the mother is begotten, and vice versa as regards birth as a female. This is, however, an old Buddhist doctrine found elsewhere. Professor De la Vallée Poussin cites the following passage: ‘L’esprit troublé par désir d’amour, il va au lieu de sa destinée. Même très éloigné, il voit, par l’œil né de la force de l’acte, le lieu de sa naissance; voyant là son père et sa mère unis, il conçoit désir pour la mère quand il est mâle, désir pour le père quand il est femelle, et, inversement, haine’ (Bouddhisme: Études et Matériaux, Abhidharmakosha, iii. 15, p. 25). The work cited also contains other interesting details concerning the embryo. (See, too, the same author’s La Théorie de douze causes.)

At length the deceased passes out of the Bardo dream-world into a womb of flesh and blood, issuing thence once more into the waking state of earth-experience. This is what in English is called Re-incarnation, or Re-birth in the flesh. The Sanskrit term is Sangsāra, that is, ‘rising and rising again’ (Punariutpatti) in the worlds of birth and death. Nothing is permanent, but all is transitory. In life, the ‘soul-complex’ is never for two consecutive moments the same, but is, like the body, in constant change. There is thus a series (Santāna) of successive, and, in one sense, different states, which are in themselves but momentary. There is still a unifying bond in that each momentary state is a present transformation representative of all those which are past, as it will be the generator of all future transformations potentially involved in it.

This process is not interrupted by death. Change continues in the Skandhas (or constituents of the organism) other than