The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1884

by Various

There are two main points in this book which give it its chief interest: (1) "The past history of the human race as now living on this planet;" and (2) "The manner in which, and the circumstances under which, any individual man works out his own salvation." But before entering upon these, we should say a word about the Buddhist statements regarding the nature of man.

Seven is the sacred number in the Buddhist system. As there are seven worlds in the planetary chain, seven kingdoms in Nature, seven root-races of men, in like manner man is a sevenfold being, continuing, through untold millions of years, his existence as an individual, yet changing, one knows not how many times, many of his component elements. As the Buddhist sees the mortal body to be dissolved into its molecules, and these molecules to be transferred with their inherent vitality to other organisms, so some of his higher elements, among them his "astral body," his impulses and desires, under the name, as our author gives it, of animal soul, may separate from the more enduring parts of his composition, and become lost to him in Nature's great store of material substance. As there is an animal soul, the seat of those faculties which we possess in common with the lower beings about us, so there is a human soul, the seat of intelligence; and, higher still, a spiritual soul, possessing powers of which as yet we know but little, yet destined to give us, when it shall be more fully developed, new powers of sense, new avenues for the entrance of knowledge, by which we shall be able to communicate directly with Nature, and become as much greater than the present race of men, as that is greater than the lowest brutes. Above all these elements of man, controlling all, and preserving its individuality throughout, is "spirit." Yet even this, when absorbed into Nirvana, is lost in that great whole which includes all things and is Nature herself. Lost, do I say?—yes, lost for inconceivable ages upon ages, yet destined to come forth again at some moment in eternity, and to begin its round through the everlasting cycle of evolution.

Here, you will say, is materialism. As the intelligent man of early ages looked out upon the world, he felt the wind he could not see, he smelt the odor that he could not feel, and he reasoned with himself, I think, as follows; "There is somewhat too subtile for these bodily senses to grasp it. Something of which I cannot directly take cognizance brings to me the light of sun and stars." These somethings were, in his conception, forms of matter. He saw the intelligence and the moral worth of his friend, and then he saw that friend a lifeless body stretched upon the ground, and he said some thing is gone. This thing was again to him only another and more subtile form of matter. We, with all the aids of modern knowledge and thought, are absolutely unable to say what distinction there is between matter and spirit. The old philosopher was logical. He could find no point at which to draw his line. Therefore he drew no line. He recognized only different manifestations of one substance. In terms of our language, he was a materialist. So is the modern scientist; yet I cannot help thinking that the Buddhist stands much nearer to truth than the materialist of to-day. The various faculties of human sense and human intellect are so many molecules forming, by their accretion, the animal and the human soul. As, at death, the molecules of the body separate and are, by-and-by, absorbed with their inherent vitality into new agglomerations, and become part of new living forms, so the elements of the human soul may be torn apart, and some of them, being no longer man, but following the fortunes of the lower principles, may be lost to us, while other elements, clinging to the spiritual soul, follow its destiny in the after-life. I know a thinking man who believes in nothing but matter and motion; add time and space, and we have the all in all, the Nature, of Buddhism. Yet the Buddhist believes in a state of being beyond this earthly life: a state whose conditions are determined absolutely by the use which the human soul has made of its opportunities in the life that now is, and my friend says he does not. Truly, Buddhism is better than the materialism of to-day.

Let me now turn to the history of humanity as revealed to us in our book. Every monad, or spirit-element, beginning its course by becoming separated from what I conceive as the great central reservoir of Nature, must, before returning thither, make a certain fixed round through an individual existence. If it belongs to the planetary chain, of which our earth is the fourth and lowest link, it must pass seven times through each of the kingdoms of Nature on each one of the seven planets. Of these seven planets, Mars, our Earth, and Mercury, are three. The other four are too tenuous to be cognizable by our present senses. Of the seven kingdoms of Nature, three are likewise beyond our ken or conception; the highest four are the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and man. Our immortal part has therefore passed already through six of the kingdoms of its destiny, and is, in fact, now near the middle of its fourth round of human existence upon the earth. One life on earth is, however, not sufficient for the development of our powers. Every human being must pass through each of the seven branch races of each of the sub-races of each of the root-races of humanity; and must, in short, live, or, as our author expresses the idea, be incarnated about eight hundred times—some more and some less—upon this planet, before the hour will come when it will be permitted to him, by a path as easy of passage for him then, as is that followed by the rays of light, to visit the planet Mercury, for his next two million years of existence.

Through each of these eight hundred mortal lives, man is purifying and developing his nature. When, at the end of each, his body dies, his higher principles leave the lower to gradual dissolution, while they themselves remaining still bound in space to this planet, pass into Devachan, the state of effects. Here, entirely unconscious of what passes on earth, the soul remains, absorbed in its own subjectivity. For a length of time, stated as never less than fifteen hundred years, and shown by figures to average not less than eight thousand, the soul, enjoying in its own contemplation those things it most desired in mortal life, surrounded in its own imagination by the friends and the scenes it has loved on earth, reaps the exact reward of its own deeds. When Nature has thus paid the laborer his hire, when his power of enjoyment has exhausted itself, the soul passes by a gradual process into oblivion of all the past—an oblivion from which it returns only on its approach to Nirvana—and waits the moment for reincarnation. Yet it comes not again to conscious life, unaffected by the forgotten past. Karma,—the resultant of its upward or downward tendencies,—which has been accumulating through all the course of its existence, remains; and the new-born man comes into visible being with good or evil propensities, the balance of which is to be affected by the struggles of one more mortal phase of existence. Thus we go on through one life after another, each time a new person yet the same human soul, ignorant of our own past lives, yet never free from their influence upon our character, exactly as in mature life we have absolutely forgotten what happened to us in our infancy, yet are never free from its influence. In Devachan, which corresponds, says our author, to what in other religions is the final and eternal heaven, we receive, from time to time, the reward of our deeds done in the body, yet still pass on with all our upward or downward tendencies until, many millions of years in the future, during our next passage through life on this planet, we shall come to the crisis in our existence which shall determine whether we are to become gods or demons.

Let me now turn back the page of history. A little more than one million years ago this earth was covered, as now, with vegetable forms, and was the dwelling of animals, as numerous, perhaps, and as various as now; but there was no humanity. The time was come when man, who had passed already three times round the planetary chain, and was nearly half way through his fourth round, should again make his appearance on the scene. Nature works only in her own way, and that way is uniform. The first man must be born of parents already living. As there are no human parents, he must be born of lower animals, and of those lower animals most nearly resembling the coming human animal. Darwin has told us what the animal was, yet the new being was a man and not an ape, because, in addition to its animal soul, it was possessed also of a human soul. We all know that man is an animal. Those modern students of science, who affirm that that is the whole truth of human nature, take a lower view of their own being than the Indian philosophers. Man is an animal plus a human and a spiritual soul.

Behold, now, the earth peopled by man. Through seven races must he pass, each with its various branches. Yet these races are not contemporaneous; for Nature is in no hurry. One race comes forward at a time, reaches the height of its possibility, then passes away during great physical transformations, and leaves but a wreck behind to live, and witness, in some new part of earth, the coming of another race. These races and branch races and sub-branch races are to be animated by the same identical souls. Hence, one race at a time; at first, even, one sub-race only, for the next is to be of a higher order. After each root-race has run its course, the earth has always been prepared by a great geological convulsion for the next. In this convulsion has perished all that makes up what we call civilization, yet not all men then living. Since some souls are slower than others, all are not ready to pass into the second race, when the time for that race has come. Hence fragments of old races survive, kept up for a time by the incarnation of the laggard souls whose progress has been too slow. Thus, we are told, although the first and second root-races have now entirely disappeared, there still remain relics of the third and fourth. The proper seat of this third root-race was that lost continent which Wallace told us, long ago, stood where now roll the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, south and southwest of Asia. Here we have, in the degraded Papuan and Australian, the remainder of the third race. Degraded I call him, because his ancestors, though inferior to the highest races of to-day, were far in advance of him. So it must always be. Destroy the accumulations of the highest race of men now living, and the next generation will be barbarians; the second, savages.

The fourth root-race inhabited the famous, but no longer fabulous, Atlantis, now sunk, in greater part, beneath the waters of the Atlantic. Fragments of this race were left in Northern Africa, though perhaps none now remain there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart of China. From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent, knowledge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of the survivors of the lost Atlantis.

Such is, in brief, an outline of the nature, history, and destiny of man, as the Buddhist relates it. How has he obtained his knowledge? By means which, he says, are within the reach of any one. First, of the history: it is said to be well authenticated tradition. Of the actual knowledge of former races, the Egyptian priests were the repositories, inheriting their information from the Atlantids. Of human nature and destiny the Buddhist would say: Here are the facts, look about you and see. From a theory of astronomy, or botany, or chemistry, we find an explanation of facts, and these facts explained, confirm and establish the theory. So, too, of man, here is the view, once a theory, but now as firmly established as the law of gravitation. Besides, by study and contemplation, the expert has developed, in advance of the age in which he lives, his spiritual soul, and this opens to him sources of information which place him on a higher level in point of knowledge than the rest of mankind, just as the man with seeing eyes has possibilities of information which are absolutely closed to one born blind.