resistance, that such highly evolved mental compounds as are bound up with the complex human consciousness cannot be disintegrated instantaneously, but require due allowance of time for their degeneration and ultimate dissolution and transmigration.[1]
- ↑ Examination of The Laws of Manu, the authority of which is unquestioned by orthodox Hindus, seems to confirm the esoteric interpretation, following the translation by Sir William Jones as revised by G. C. Haughton (in Institutes of Hindu Law or the Ordinances of Menu, London, 1825), and that by G. Bühler (in The Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxv, Oxford, 1886).
Manu at first sets forth the fundamental laws that ‘Action, which springs from the mind, from speech, and from the body, produces either good or evil results; by action are caused the [various] conditions of man, the highest, the middling, and the lowest’; and that ‘[A man] obtains [the results of] a good or evil mental [act] in his mind, [that of] a verbal [act] in his speech, [that of] a bodily [act] in his body’. (Bühler’s trans., xii. 3, 8.)
Manu then proceeds to expound how man is not a simple but a complex being:
‘That substance, which gives a power of motion to the body, the wise call kshētrajna [i.e. ‘the knower of the field’—Bühler’s trans.], or jīvātman, the vital spirit; and that body, which thence derives active functions, they name bhūtātman, or composed of elements:
‘Another internal spirit, called mahat, or the great soul, attends the birth of: all creatures embodied, and thence in all mortal forms is conveyed a perception either pleasing or painful.
‘These two, the vital spirit and reasonable soul, are closely united with five elements, but connected with the supreme spirit, or divine essence, which pervades all beings high and low.’ (Jones’s trans., xii. 12–14.)
From what follows, Manu apparently implies that it is this ‘vital spirit’, or animal soul, which alone is capable of transmigrating into sub-human forms, and not ‘the reasonable soul’, or super-animal principle:
‘When the vital soul has gathered the fruit of sins, which arise from a love of sensual [i.e. animal or brutish] pleasure, but must produce misery, and, when its taint has thus been removed, it approaches again those two most effulgent essences, the intellectual soul and the divine spirit:
‘They two, closely conjoined, examine without remission the virtues and vices of that sensitive [or animal] soul, according to its union with which it acquires pleasure or pain in the present and future worlds.
‘If the vital spirit had practised virtue for the most part, and vice in a small degree, it enjoys delight in celestial abodes, clothed with a body formed of pure elementary [i.e. ethereal] particles;
‘But, if it had generally been addicted to vice, and seldom attended to virtue, then shall it be deserted by those pure elements, and, having a coarser body of sensible nerves, it feels the pains to which Yama shall doom it:
‘Having endured those torments according to the sentence of Yama, and its taint being almost removed, it again reaches those five pure elements in the order of their natural distribution.’ (Jones’s trans., xii. 18–22.)
