Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/47

Rh the gross body which has been cast off and which undergoes changes of its own. But there is this difference: the after-death change is merely the result of the action of accumulated past Karma and does not, as in earthly life, create new Karma, for which a physical body is necessary. (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity are in agreement in holding that man’s destiny is decided on Earth, though the last differs from the first two, as explained above, on the question whether there is more than one life on Earth.) There is no breach (Uchchheda) of consciousness, but a continuity of transformation. The Death-Consciousness is the starting-point, followed by the other states of consciousness already described. Karma at length generates a fully-formed desire or mental action. This last is followed by the consciousness taking up its abode in a suitable matrix, whence it is born again as a Birth-Consciousness. What is so born is not altogether different from what has gone before, because it is the present transformation of it; and has no other independent existence.

There are thus successive births of (to use Professor de la Vallée Poussin’s term) a ‘fluid soul-complex’, because the series of psychic states continues at intervals of time to enter the physical womb of living beings. It has been said by the authority cited (Way to Nirvāṇa, p. 85) that the birth-consciousness of a new celestial or infernal being makes for itself and by itself, out of unorganized matter, the body it is to inhabit. Therefore the birth of such beings will follow immediately after the death of the being which is to be reborn as an infernal or celestial being. But the case is said to be different, as a rule, where there is to be ‘reincarnation’, that is ‘rebirth’ in the flesh. Conception and birth then presuppose physical circumstances that may not be realized at the moment of the death of the being to be ‘re-incarnated’. In these cases and others it is alleged that the dying consciousness cannot be continued at once into the birth-consciousness of a new being. The Professor says that this difficulty is solved by those Schools which, maintaining the intermediary existence (Antarābhāva), hold that the dying consciousness is continued into a short-lived