35. Here (in Yama’s court), the soul is pronounced to reap the reward of its acts, whereby it ascends either to the blissful heaven above, or descends to the painful hell below.
36. After having enjoyed the bliss of heaven, or suffered the torment of hell, it is doomed to wander in this earth again, to reap the reward of its acts in repeated transmigrations.
37. The soul springs up as a paddy plant, and brings forth the grains of intelligence; and then being assembled by the senses, it becomes an animal, and lastly an intelligent being.
_i.e._ The insensible vegetable, entering into the animal body in the form of food, is converted to a sensible but irrational soul; but entering as food in the body of man, it turns to a rational and human soul. The one Universal soul is thus diversified in different beings. (It is the plant and food that sustains and nourishes all souls. Gloss).
38. The soul contains in itself the germs of all its senses, which lie dormant in it for want of its bodily organs. It is contained in the semen virilis of man, which passing into the uterus, produces the fœtus in the womb of the female.
39. The fœtus then becomes either well-formed or deformed, according to the good or evil deeds of the person in its past state; and brings forth the infant of a goodly or ill shapen appearance.
40. It then perceives the moonlike beauty of youthful bloom, and its amorous disposition coming upon itself; and feels afterwards the effects of hoary old age, defacing its lotus-like face, as the sleets of snow, shatter and shrivel the lotus leaflets.
41. At last it undergoes the pains of disease and death, and feels the same insensibility of Euthanasia as before, and finds again as in a dream its taking of a new form.
42. It again believes itself to be carried to the region of Pluto, and subjected to the former kinds of revolution; and thus it continues to conceive its transmigration, in endless births and various forms.
43. Thus the aerial spirit goes on thinking, for ever in its own etherial sphere, all its ceaseless metempsychosis, until its final liberation from this changeful state.