SOME THOUGHTS ON REINCARNATION/ REBIRTH, DEATH and KARMA---6

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Hari OMThere is a thinking that reincarnation is an Orierntal concept incomaptible with Western thinking and traditional belief. Man is essentially a non-physical reality which manufactures the physical body for its own self-manifestation. Swamy Vivekananda said,"In Western countries as a rule people lay more stress on the body aspect of man; those philosophers who wrote on Bhakti(love of God) in India laid stress on the spiritual side of man; and this difference seems to be typical of the Oriental and the Occidental nations. In England ,when speaking of death,it is said ,a man gave up his ghost;in India, a man gave up his body. The one idea is that man is a body and has a soul; the other that man is a soul and has a body".

 

 

Rebirth ceases to have any relevance for a man who realizes himself as the Atman. But till one attains such realization, one is under the pull of the body and the sense organs and it is this pull that gravitates the soul to new physical formations,'to work out its karma' in the phrase of Vedanta. The experience of the soul`s detachment from the physical body is the beginning of a man`s moral and spiritual life. In the case of a realized person, death has been compared to the casting off of its skin by a snake by Sankaracharya in his famous

Vivekachoodamani. Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa compares a spiritually realized person to ripe cocoanut in which there is complete separation of the kernel from the shell. As already stated, the Gita compares rebirth to a man`s changing of his worn out clothes to new ones. The embodied soul casting off its worn out body enters into another new body. Here wearing out of a body should be construed to mean expiry of its life. On the termination of its

Prarabdha (the sum total of Karmas bearing fruit in that life) a being may die at any age. There is no knowing as to how many bodies a particular Jivatma has cast off till now, how many it has taken anew and how many more it will continue hereafter to cast off till it obtains enlightenment and consequent release from birth and death.

(to be continued)

G.Balasubramanian