Visible shape, and move a man with men,
Succouring the good, thrusting the evil back,
And setting Virtue on her seat again.”
Rhys Davids justly observed that “to the pious Buddhist it is a constant source of joy and gratitude that ‘the Buddha,’ not only then, but in many former births, when emancipation from all the cares and troubles of life was already within his reach, should again and again, in mere love for man, have condescended to enter the world, and live amidst the sorrows inseparable from finite existence.”[47] Perhaps in a more general sense the idea of reincarnation appealed strongly to the imagination of Wordsworth, when he was inspired to write these familiar, yet exquisite, lines:—
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar.”
Regarding the doctrines of Individuality and non-Individuality, which characterise the text of The Diamond Sutra, wherein are found to occur frequently Chinese equivalents for the ordinary concepts of an entity, a being, a living being and a personality, the following passage from The Bhagavad-Gita, suggestive almost of complete harmony with the Buddhist doctrine, may serve to make even a cursory consideration of the subject perhaps more illuminating. The passage, rendered by Sir Edwin Arnold, is as follows:—
“There is ‘true’ Knowledge, Learn it thou in this: