from generation to generation. In the new-born infant, the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is little more than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early, these become actualities; from childhood to age they manifest themselves in dullness or brightness,—weakness or strength, viciousness or uprightness; and with each feature modified by confluence with another character, if by nothing else, the character passes on to its incarnation in new bodies. The Indian philosophers called character, as thus defined, “karma”.…
‘In the theory of evolution, the tendency of a germ to develop according to a certain specific type, e.g. of the kidney-bean seed to grow into a plant having all the characters of Phaseolus vulgaris, is its “Karma”. It is the “last inheritor and the last result” of all the conditions that have affected a line of ancestry which goes back for many millions of years, to the time when life first appeared on the earth.…
‘As Prof. Rhys-Davids aptly says [in Hibbert Lectures, p. 114], the snowdrop “is a snowdrop and not an oak, and just that kind of snowdrop, because it is the outcome of the Karma of an endless series of past existences”.’[1]
XI. The Cosmography
Buddhist cosmography as understood by the lāmas, and continually referred to throughout our text, more especially in connexion with the Doctrine of Rebirth, is a very vast and complex subject; and to consider it here in any detail would involve the esoteric as well as the exoteric interpretation of an enormous mass of doctrines, more or less of Brahmanic origin, concerning the many states of sentient existence within the Sangsāra, of cosmos—some planetary as in this world, some
- ↑ T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London, 1894), pp. 61–2, 95.
The late William James, the well-known American psychologist, independently arrived at substantially the same conclusion as Huxley; for, after explaining his ‘own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism’, he says, ‘I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order the better to describe my general point of view; but, as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that’.—(The Varieties of Religious Experiences, pp. 521–2.)
