"The 'I' of to-day has to take all the consequences of the actions (Karma) which the 'I' of yesterday performed. Thus the individualized Karma of future times will reap all that which the individualizing Karma of the present time sows."[AF]
Professor Rhys Davids (Buddhism, p. 103) says: "Identity is preserved in that which alone remains when a man dies; in the result, namely, of his action, speech, and thought, in his good or evil Karma (literally his 'doing') which does not die." This statement would have gained in clearness if he had written "in the result of his good or evil Karma which does not die," in the concluding sentence.
If we allow ourselves to consider Karma, taken in the sense of "doing," as retaining a separateness apart from its diffusion of influences, and being carried on from generation to generation as an individualized compound, then we at once find ourselves in direct conflict with the doctrine of "inseparateness," which is the mainstay of the rationality of Buddhist thought, the basic concept of Buddhism.
If we understand by the Samskâras that phase of a man's soul which is impressed upon other generations by heredity and education, and that which "is preserved by the law of Karma and conditions the continuity of man's existence in the whirl of constant changes," it must be exclusively in the sense that these Samskâras are formative faculties peculiar to, and always to be found (in normal cases) in interconnection with, those temporary aggregations which present themselves to our perceptions as human beings, but which are not permanent.
It is only when the expressions "Karma" and "action" are used in their widest meaning, and include this formative faculty, that they can with propriety be regarded as possessing continuity, but not permanency. The particular formative faculty ceases to be, in those exceptional cases when "it directs itself to the cessation of all conformations."
This self-forming formative faculty, in its normal condition, is the cause of the continuity of being, or becoming. Its disappearance is happiness. We find this Buddhistic truth very clearly stated in the New Testament. "He who loses his life shall find it"—which, being interpreted, is "He who loses the formative faculty shall find the deathless."
Karma, as "thought, speech, and action," must be regarded as the ethical individuality, and the body as the corporeal individuality. As things in themselves they are both impermanent, but the effects of both are lasting. There are physiological and local as well as psychological results to be taken into account.
The body is continually shedding effects, and lives again after death in its diffused elements; so Karma gives off effects and lives again in its moral results; yet both these individualities are inseparably connected as long as the individual's life lasts.
The text so often quoted in this connection should, for purposes of Buddhistic exposition, read: "What a man sows, that will the race (not he) reap." "Herein is that saying true, one soweth and another reapeth" (John iv. 37).