journey to another life and return to this, instead of being rough and underground, would be smooth and heavenly.’[1]
With the assistance of symbols and metaphors, Pindar, Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Socrates, like Plato and the Greek Mysteries, also taught the rebirth doctrine.
On a golden funereal tablet dug up near the site of Sybaris there is the following line of an inscription: ‘And thus I escaped from the cycle, the painful, the misery-laden.’[2] This, like known Orphic teachings, is purely Buddhistic and Hindu, and suggests that in ancient Greece the rebirth doctrine was widespread, at least among Greeks of culture who had been initiated into the Mysteries.
Symbolism similar to that used by Plato has been used by the recorders of the Buddhist Scriptures as well, as, for example, in the account of the Northern School of the birth of the Buddha Himself. This latter from the Tibetan Vinaya Pitaka or Dulva (the most trustworthy and probably oldest part of the Bkah-hgyur), III, folio 452a of the copy in the East India Office, Calcutta, runs thus:
‘Now the future Buddha was in the Tushita Heaven, and knowing that his time had come, he made the five preliminary examinations: first, of the proper family [in which to be born]; second, of the country; third, of the time; fourth, of the race; fifth, of the woman. And having decided that Mahāmāyā was the right mother, in the midnight watch he entered her womb under the appearance of an elephant. Then the queen had four dreams: first, she saw a six-tusked white elephant enter her womb; second, she moved in space above; third, she ascended a great rocky mountain; fourth, a great multitude bowed down to her.
‘The soothsayers predicted that she would bring forth a son with the thirty-two signs of the great man. “If he stay at home, he will become a universal monarch; but if he shave his hair and beard, and, putting on an orange-coloured robe, leave his home for the homeless state and
