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KARMA AND REBIRTH
Karma and Rebirth CHRISTMAS HUMPHREYS
CURZON PRESS
© Curzon Press 1994 Published in 1994 by Curzon Press Ltd. St John’s Studios Church Road Richmond Surrey TW9 2QA This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” ISBN 0-203-98601-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0 7007 0163 X (Print Edition) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
Preface to New Edition
Karma and Rebirth was first published in 1943, at a time when the Second World War was at its height. The doctrine, known to the East from time immemorial, was new to the West, and the effect of its acceptance on those grieving for their loved ones was immense. The news of someone’s death, from a wound of cold finality, was seen as only the premature happening of an event which is periodic for us all. If love is indeed ‘the fulfilling of the law’ the force of these twin aspects of the nameless Absolute, which the Buddha called ‘the Unborn’, will surely, in a life as yet to come, heal the apparent severance. But today it seems that the twin doctrine is helping an ever-widening public to drop the fear of death, to see that justice rules the world and all within it, and that we are indeed, in the smallest detail, at least potential masters of our destiny. 1983
T.C.H.
Contents
Introduction I
7
The Law of Karma
12
Karma in Action
26
III
What Karma is not
42
IV
What Karma Explains
50
Some Difficulties Considered
60
Rebirth
68
Who Believes in Karma and Rebirth?
82
Karma and Rebirth Applied
88
The Ending of Karma and Rebirth
99
II
V VI VII VIII IX
6
Introduction
There are many books on the twin doctrines of Karma and Rebirth, but the tendency of each new publication is to present the subject as more and more mechanical, until so nearly does this timeless, universal Law approximate to a soulless Fate that what is in fact a reign of law becomes a reign of terror, and compassion, described in The Voice of the Silence as ‘the Law of Laws, eternal Harmony’, is utterly ignored. The cause of this degradation is probably twofold; first, the general tendency of Western thought to materialize whatever spiritual principles swim into its ken, and secondly, the increasing departure from the available sources of our knowledge of the doctrine, with the corresponding reliance of each writer on previous textbooks and his own ideas. In the result, most Western writers on the subject confine themselves to the ‘lower knowledge’ described by the Vedanta philosophers, which is sufficient for those too lazy to awaken in themselves the higher centres from which alone the ‘higher knowledge’ may be seen. But though the law of Karma must, on its own plane, remain to us unknowable, a thoughtful study of the sources from which our knowledge is derived will give the
8 INTRODUCTION
genuine student a vision of essential principles which, if not yet of the ‘higher knowledge’ reserved for the few, may serve to awaken the higher centres through which, as windows on to the Absolute, the Truth may finally be known. The present volume is therefore a humble attempt to reconsider the subject in the light of such ‘authorities’ as are available and from a more spiritual and therefore less mechanical point of view. The doctrine is too old and too widely held to be regarded as the property of any one religion, but the Scriptures of the Hindus and Buddhists provide the oldest availa