being called Gandharva, which lasts for seven days, or seven times seven days (cf. the forty-nine days of the Bardo). This Gandharva creates, with the help of the conceptional elements, an embryo as soon as it can find opportunity. This doctrine, if it has been rightly understood, is apparently another and cruder version of the Bardo doctrine. There cannot, in any philosophic view of the doctrine of Karma, be any ‘hold up’ of what is a continuous life-process. Such process does not consist of independent sections waiting upon one another. And so a ‘soul-complex’ cannot be ready to reincarnate before the circumstances are fit for it. The law which determines that a being shall incarnate is the same as that which provides the means and conditions by, and under, which the incarnation is to take place. Nor is the body of the infernal or celestial being gross matter. This is clear from the present Text.
Dr. Evans-Wentz raises again the debated question of the transmigration of human ‘souls’ into sub-human bodies, a process which this Text, exoterically viewed, seems to assume, and which is, as he points out, the general Hindu and Buddhist belief. It seems to be an irrational, though it may be a popular, belief that a human ‘soul’ can permanently inhabit a sub-human body as its own. For the body cannot exist in such disagreement with its occupant. The right doctrine appears to be that, as man has evolved through the lowest forms of being (Hinduism speaks of 8,400,000 graded kinds of births culminating in man),[1] so by misconduct and neglect to use the opportunity of manhood there can, equally, be a descent along the ‘downward path’ to the same low forms of being from which humanity has, with difficulty, emerged. The Sanskrit term Durlabham, meaning ‘difficult to get’, refers to this difficulty of securing human birth. But such descent involves (as Dr. Evans-Wentz says) the loss of the human nature and the enormous lengths of time of a creation epoch.
If the series (Santāna) of conscious states are determined
- ↑ As plants, aquatic animals, reptiles, birds, quadrupeds, simian forms, and man. See Brihad Vishnu Purāna.
