Life and Travel in Lower Burmah: A Retrospect

by C. T. Paske

Their doctrine pointed clearly to a prescribed course through which all must pass according to their deeds; even the very best—those ascetics who had been crowned with all the virtues inculcated in Buddhism—must be born again and again, though under far more favourable circumstances than those whose life had been careless and indifferent. The absolutely wicked would be born again in one of the many hells situated in the centre of the earth, coming up, perchance, in the form of petroleum, to be tortured in another form through those terrible periods, the limits of which were assigned at billions of years. Billions! Let those think of it whose religion teaches of an eternity: of the two, the latter, as being undefined and imaginary, is less perplexing to the mind, if equally impossible to grasp.

The doctrine of transmigration is essentially an Eastern one. That remarkable people, the Egyptians, with their inbred polytheism—their divinities, Ptah, Osiris, Isis, Horus, and many others, not to mention a still greater number of “companion-gods,”—were confirmed believers in it. Hence arose the practice of embalming, the idea being, that the soul, having in a period of several thousands of years completed the wanderings assigned to it, might return to its original dwelling, to be absorbed in Osiris, the manifestation of Light.

The practice, which dates from very remote antiquity, is frequently alluded to in the Scriptures. Joseph commanded his servants to embalm his father; and he in his turn was similarly embalmed, having died at the very respectable age of one hundred and ten years, and placed in a sarcophagus.

One frequently hears the doctrine of transmigration attributed to Pythagoras; but we might with about as much reason credit the Pope with the invention of the Old Testament! The Philosopher merely imbibed the notion from the Egyptians, and, as it appeared in harmony with his own system, he carried it back to Europe and spread it among his converts.

In Hinduism too, a religion that recognizes three gods—Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Siva, the Destroyer—metempsychosis is paramount. An ordinary life being too brief a span for the completion of a mortal’s allotted task, he had to be born again as often as necessary for the fulfilment of whatever remained for him to perform.

Not many years ago a severe epidemic broke out in a certain district of India, almost depopulating that part of the country, which the year following was subject to an extraordinary visitation of rats. The authorities having, as in duty bound, made arrangements for the speedy extermination of these pests, the Brahmans interposed in their behalf, on the plea that the souls of departed were thus revisiting their old haunts, guided thither by the force of association.

For the same reason a high-caste Brahman will neither kill anything himself, nor will he eat anything that has succumbed to a violent death, be it flesh, fish, or fowl. Life to him is sacred in all its many forms, for therein may reside the troubled spirit of a departed relative.

An old friend of mine, a Brahman of exceeding uprightness and more than ordinary intelligence, constantly upbraided me with the sinful cruelty of shooting and fishing. Out of my great respect for him, I bore his harangues with a patient shrug, worthy of Shylock, knowing full well that any attempt to argue the point would be worse than useless; for it would be easier to train an old oak, high-top bald with dry antiquity, as an espalier or cordon, than to influence such a one to the extent of “the twentieth part of one poor scruple,” the more so, that he was consistently acting up to his own belief.

The children of Nature who hunted the buffalo in the prairies of the Far West do not appear to have entertained any serious idea of transmigration; they looked death boldly in the face, believing it to be a mere translation to happier hunting-grounds.

The Incas of Peru worshipped everything that appeared in the vault of heaven, including sun, moon, stars, lightning, and rainbow, and their worship was as devout as it was original.