When the woman awoke she remembered it all, and the desire of life returned to her again, and all the world was changed because of the new life she felt within her. But she told no one then of the dream or of what was to happen.
Only she took the greatest care of herself; she ate well, and went frequently to the pagoda with flowers, praying that the body in which her lover was about to dwell might be fair and strong, worthy of him who took it, worthy of her who gave it.
In due time the baby was born. But alas and alas for all her hopes! The baby came but for a moment, to breathe a few short breaths, to cry, and to die; and a few hours later the woman died also. But before she went she told someone all about it, all about the dream and the baby, and that she was glad to go and follow her lover. She said that her baby's soul was her lover's soul, and that as he could not stay, neither would she; and with these words on her lips she followed him out into the void.
The story was kept a secret until the husband died, not long afterwards; but when I came to the village all the people knew it.
I must confess that this story is to me full of the deepest reality, full of pathos. It seems to me to be the unconscious protestation of humanity against the dogmas of religion and of the learned. However it may be stated that love is but one of the bodily passions that dies with it; however, even in some of the stories themselves, this explanation is used to clear certain difficulties; however opposed eternal love may be to one of the central doctrines of Buddhism, it seems to me that the very essence of this story is the belief that love does not die with the body, that it lives for ever and ever, through incarnation after incarnation. Such a story is the very cry of the agony of humanity.
'Love is strong as death; many waters cannot quench love;' ay, and love is stronger than death. Not any dogmas of any religion, not any philosophy, nothing in this world, nothing in the next, shall prevent him who loves from the certainty of rejoining some time the soul he loves.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] The hereafter = the state to which we attain when we have done with earthly things.