Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/58

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Likewise, in a very striking manner, the esoteric teachings concerning the Five Elements, as symbolically expounded in the Bardo Thödol, parallel, for the most part, certain of the teachings of Western Science, as the following interpretation, based upon that made by the translator himself, indicates:

In the First Round of our Planet, one element alone—Fire—was evolved. In the fire-mist, which, in accordance with the karmic law governing the Sangsāra, or cosmos, assumed a rotary motion and became a blazing globular body of undifferentiated primeval forces, all the other elements lay in embryo. Life first manifested itself clothed in robes of fire; and man, if we conceive him as then existing, was incarnate—as the Salamanders of medieval occultism were believed to be—in a body of fire. In the Second Round, as the Element Fire assumed definite form, the Element Air separated from it and enwrapped the embryonic Planet as a shell covers an egg. The body of man, and of all organic creatures, thereupon became a compound of fire and air. In the Third Round, as the Planet, bathed in the Element Air and fanned by it, abated its fiery nature, the Element Water came forth from the vaporous air. In the Fourth Round, in which the Planet still is, air and water neutralized the activities of their Parent Fire; and the Fire, bringing forth the Element Earth, became encrusted with it. Esoterically, the same teachings are said to be conveyed by the old Hindu myth of the churning of the Sea of Milk, which was the Fire-Mist, whence came, like butter, the solid earth. Upon the earth, so formed, the gods are credited with having fed; or, in other words, they, hankering after existence in gross physical bodies, became incarnated on this Planet and so became the Divine Progenitors of the human race.

In the Bardo, on the first four days these Four Elements manifest themselves, or dawn upon the deceased, in their primordial form, although not in their true occult order.