Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/94

44 of the animal-beings, no matter how heinous his sins, at one bound.

Given ages of continual retrogression, the life-flux which is now human may cease to be human, the human constituents of it becoming atrophied or latent through lack of exercise, in much the same way as atrophy overcomes the activity of a bodily organ or function which is not used. Thereupon, being no longer kinetically, but merely potentially human—just as a dog or horse or elephant are potentially, but not kinetically, human—that life-flux can and ordinarily would fall back into the sub-human kingdoms, whence it may begin anew to rise upwards to the human state or continue to retrograde even below the brute world.

The late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup, the translator, has left on record his own complementary opinion, as follows: ‘The forty-nine days of the Bardo symbolize ages either of evolution or of degeneration. Intellects able to grasp Truth do not fall into the lower conditions of existence.

‘The doctrine of the transmigration of the human to the sub-human may apply solely to the lower or purely brutish constituents of the human principle of consciousness; for the Knower itself neither incarnates nor re-incarnates—it is the Spectator.

‘In the Bardo Thödol, the deceased is represented as retrograding, step by step, into lower and lower states of consciousness. Each step downwards is preceded by a swooning into unconsciousness; and possibly that which constitutes his mentality on the lower levels of the Bardo is some mental element or compound of mental elements formerly a part of his earth-plane consciousness, separated, during the swooning, from higher or more spiritually enlightened elements of that consciousness. Such a mentality ought not to be regarded as on a par with a human mentality; for it seems to be a mere faded and incoherent reflex of the human mentality of the deceased. And perhaps it is some such thing as this which incarnates in sub-human animal bodies—if anything does in a literal sense.’

This theory, coming from the translator, is unusually