Accordingly, the esotericists hold it to be unscientific to believe that a human life-flux or consciousness-principle could re-incarnate in the body of a sub-human creature within forty-nine days after its extraction from the human form, as the exotericist believes who accepts literally such a rebirth doctrine
After further exposition of the science of rebirth in its esoteric or rational aspect, Manu arrives at the following summary:
‘Thus, by indulging the sensual [i.e. animal or brutish] appetites, and by neglecting the performance of duties, the basest of men, ignorant of sacred expiations, assume [in their vital spirit form, but not in their reasonable soul form] the basest forms.
‘What particular bodies the vital spirit enters in this world, and in consequence of what sins here committed, now hear at large and in order.’ (Jones’s trans., xii. 52–3.)
Manu evidently exerts himself apart from the main subject of his treatise, as the whole of The Laws suggests, to invest with legal and divine sanction the dogma that the person of a Brāhmin is peculiarly sacred and inviolable, and so gives prominence to the sin of slaying a Brāhmin by mentioning it first; then to the sin of a priest drinking spirituous liquor, and then to the sin of stealing the gold of a priest. In all such instances, as in all which follow them, the implication is, as we have above observed, that the ‘vital spirit’, or animal soul, separated from the two higher elements of man’s complex constitution, which are ‘the reasonable soul’ and ‘the divine essence’, suffers the penalty of migrating in sub-human creatures:
‘The slayer of a Brāhmen [i.e. the vital spirit, or the irrational animal soul, of a Brāhmen-slayer] must enter, according to the circumstances of the crime, the body of a dog, a boar, an ass, a camel, a bull, a goat, a sheep, a stag, a bird, a Chandāla, or a Puccasa’; and so on for other crimes (Jones’s trans., xii. 55–7).
In this connexion, it is interesting to observe a few of the correspondences between cause and effect which other of The Laws suggest. Thus, if a man steal precious things he ‘shall be born in the tribe of goldsmiths [considered to be of very low caste], or among birds called hēmacāras, or gold-makers. If a man steal grain in the husk, he shall be born a rat; if a yellow mixed metal, a gander [which is of like mixed colour]; if water, a plava, or diver. … If he steal flesh-meat, a vulture; … if oil, a blatta, or oil-drinking beetle; … if exquisite perfumes, a musk-rat’. (Jones’s trans., xii. 61–5.)
Understanding Manu in the sense which this note aims to set forth, the esotericists disallow such popular and literal interpretation of Manu’s Laws as the Brāhmins in their own Brāhmin interests promulgate—according to the esotericists—among the common people concerning the doctrines of rebirth and karma.
The student should observe that the italicized non-Sanskrit words in the passages quoted in this note from the translation by Sir William Jones mark his interpolations from commentaries on Manu, especially from the Gloss of Culluca, and that the bracketed words indicate our own interpolations. Because the italicized interpolations tend to bring out the more obscure meanings of the passages cited, preference has been given to the Jones translation, although that by Bühler, which is more literal and therefore more technical, is, in all essentials, substantially the same.
