‘And the wicked man answers:—“I did not, sire; I neglected in my folly to think of these things.”
‘Then king Yama pronounces his doom:—“These thy evil deeds are not the work of thy mother, father, relations, friends, advisers. Thou alone hast done them all; thou alone must gather the fruit.” And the warders of hell drag him to the place of torment, rivet him to red-hot iron, plunge him in glowing seas of blood, torture him on heaps of burning coal; and he dies not, till the last residue of his guilt has been expiated.’
And this Buddhist theory of every man’s destiny being dependent on his own acts is quite in keeping with Brāhmanical ideas. ‘In that (new body) he is united with the knowledge gained in the former body, and then again goes on working for perfection; for even against his will he is forced on (from one body to another) by his former works’ (Bhagavad-gītā VI. 43, 44). And again:—‘The act committed in a former birth (pūrva-janma-kṛitaṃ karma), that is called one’s destiny;’ and again, ‘As from a lump of clay a workman makes what he pleases, even so a man obtains whatever destiny he has wrought out for himself’ (Hitopadeṡa, Introduction). In Brāhmanism the influence of Karma or ‘act’ in determining every being’s form at the time of his own re-birth is universal.
Thus also the Nyāya of Gautama (III. 132) affirms that the new body (after death) is produced through the irresistible force of actions done in the previous body (pūrva-kṛita-phalānubandhāt tad-utpattiḥ). The cosmogony of the same philosophy (Vaiṡeshika branch), taught that the concurrence of eternal atoms to form the world was the result of Adṛishṭa or the ‘unseen force’ derived from the acts of a previous world.
We are reminded, too, of our poet’s own sentiment: ‘Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are;’ and of Don Quixote’s saying, ‘Every man is the son of his own works;’ and of Wordsworth’s, ‘The child is father of the man;’ and of Longfellow’s, ‘Lives of great men all remind us, we can make ourselves sublime.’
In short, we are the outcome of ourselves. Nor can ceremonies avail aught, nor can devotion to personal gods avail aught, nor can anything whatever possess the slightest efficacy to save a man from his own acts.
It is said that Buddhism leaves the will unfettered; but surely fatalism is taught when the force of one’s own deeds in previous births is held to be irresistible.
The only creator, then, recognized by true Buddhists is Act-force. ‘My action is the womb that bears me,’ says the Aṅguttara Nikāya. It is this Act-force that creates worlds. It is this Act-force, in conjunction with Upādāna ([p. 109]), that creates all beings in any of the six classes into which they are divided—gods, men, demons, animals, ghosts, and the dwellers in hell. We often talk of the force of a dead man’s acts—of his being dead and yet speaking. It is this force which in Buddhism resists death; for no force can ever be lost.
And what does the modern Positivist philosopher assert? He maintains that both body and mind are resolved into their elements at death. The only immortal part of us consists in the good deeds, words, thoughts, and influences we leave behind us, to be made use of by our descendants and improved on for the elevation of humanity. And the aggregate of these, combined with the force of will, constitute, according to the Buddhist, a power strong enough to re-create not only human beings but the whole material world.
It was thus that the force of Gautama’s own acts had constantly re-created him through a long chain of successive personalities, terminating in the perfect Buddha, who has no further births to undergo.