Henri Olcott was the first president of
the Theosophical Society, and in his book "Buddhist Catechism", he wrote the following about the skandhas:
Question: What is it that is born?
Answer: A new aggregation of
Skandhas, or personality *, caused
by the last generative thought of the dying person.
Question: How
many Skandhas are there?
Answer: Five.
Question: Name
the five Skandhas.
Answer: Rûpa, Vêdanâ, Saññâ, Samkhârâ, and Viññâna.
Question: Briefly
explain what they are.
Answer: Rûpa, material qualities; Vedanâ, sensation;
Saññâ, abstract ideas; Samkhârâ, tendencies of mind; Viññâna, mental powers, or
consciousness.
Of these we are formed; by them we are conscious of
existence; and through them communicate with the world about us.
Question: To
what cause must we attribute the differences in the combination of the five
Skandhas which make every individual differ from every other individual?
Answer: To the ripened Karma of the individual in his
preceding births.
Question: What
is the force or energy that is at work, under the guidance of Karma, to produce
the new being?
Question: Upon what is the doctrine of re-births founded?
Answer: Upon the perception that
perfect justice, equilibrium and adjustment are inherent in the universal
system of Nature. Buddhists do not believe that one life —even though it were
extended to one hundred or five hundred years— is long enough for the reward or
punishment of a man's deeds.
The great circle of re-births will
be more or less quickly run through according to the preponderating purity or
impurity of the several lives of the individual.
Question: Is this new aggregation of Skandhas —this new personality— the same being
as that in the previous birth, whose Tanhâ has brought it into existence?
Answer: In one sense it is a new
being; in another it is not. In Pâlî it is — "nacha so nacha añño," which means not the same nor yet
another. During this life the Skandhas are constantly changing; and while the man A. B., of forty,
is identical, as regards. personality, with the youth A. B., of eighteen, yet,
by the continual waste and reparation of his body, and change of mind and character,
he is a different being.
Nevertheless, the man in his old age
justly reaps the reward or suffering consequent upon his thoughts and actions
at every previous stage of his life. So the new being of a re-birth, being the
same individuality as before, with but a changed form, or new aggregation of
Skandhas, justly reaps the consequences of his actions and thoughts in the
previous existence.
Question: But the aged man remembers the incidents of his youth, despite his
being physically and mentally changed. Why, then, is not the recollection of
past lives brought over by us from our last birth into. the present birth?
Answer: Because memory is included
within the Skandhas; and the Skandhas having changed with the new
reincarnation, a new Memory, the record of that particular existence, develops.
Yet the record or reflection of all the past earth-lives must survive; for, when
Prince Siddhârthâ became Buddha, the full sequence of his previous births was
seen by him.
If their several incidents had left
no trace behind, this could not have been so, as there would have been nothing
for him to see. And any one who attains to the fourth state of Dhyâna
(psychical insight) can thus retrospectively trace the line of his lives.
Question: What is the ultimate point towards which fend all these series of
changes in form?
Answer: Nirvâṇa.
(This is found in the
second part, in the section "Dharma or doctrine.")
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE
In the following
editions, Colonel Olcott added this footnote in his book:
* Upon
reflection, I have substituted "personality" for
"individuality" as written in the first edition. The successive
appearances upon one or many earths, or "descents into generation,"
of the tanhaically-coherent
parts (Skandhas) of a certain being are a succession of personalities.
In each birth the personality differs from that of the previous or next succeeding
birth.
Karma, the deus ex machinâ, masks (or shall we say reflects?)
itself, now in the personalities of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on
throughout the string of births.
But though personalities ever shift, the one line of
life along which they are strung like beads, runs unbroken; it is ever that particular line, never any
other. It is therefore individual —an individual vital undulation— which is
careering through the objective side of Nature, under the impulse of Karma and
the creative direction of Tanhâ, and persists through many cyclic changes.
Professor Rhys-Davids calls that which passes from
personality to personality along the individual chain, 'character' or 'doing'.
Since "character" is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, but the sum
of one's mental qualities and moral propensities.
Would it not help to dispel what Professor Rhys-Davids
calls "The desperate expedient of a mystery" [Buddhism, p. 101], if we regarded the life-undulation as
individuality and each of its series of natal manifestations as a separate
personality?
We must have two words to distinguish between the
concepts, and I find none so clear and expressive as the two I have chosen.
The perfected individual, Buddhistically speaking, is
a Buddha, I should say; for a Buddha is but the rare flower of humanity, without the least supernatural admixture.
And, as countless generations —"four asankheyyas and a hundred thousand
cycles"— Fausboll and Rhys-Davids’ Buddhist
Birth Stories, (13) are required to develop a man into a Buddha, and the iron will to become one runs throughout
all the successive births, what shall we call that which thus wills and
perseveres?
Character or individuality?
An individuality but partly
manifested in any one birth, but built up of fragments from all the births.
The denial of "Soul" by
Buddha (see Sanyutta Nikâya,
the Sutta Pitaka) points to the
prevalent delusive belief in an independent personality; an entity, which after
one birth would go to a fixed place or state where, as a perfect entity, it could
eternally enjoy or suffer.
And what he shows is that the 'I am
I' consciousness is, as regards permanency, logically impossible, since its
elementary constituents constantly change and the "I" of one birth
differs from the "I" of every other birth.
But every thing that I have found in
Buddhism accords with the theory of a gradual evolution of the perfected man—viz., a Buddha—through numberless
natal experiences.
And in the consciousness of that
individual who, at the end of a given chain of births, attains Buddhahood, or
who succeeds in attaining the fourth stage of Dhyâna, or mystic
self-development, in any of his births anterior to the final one, the scenes of
all these serial births are perceptible.
In the Jâtakatthavannanâ —so well translated by Professor
Rhys-Davids— an expression continually recurs which, I think, rather supports
such an idea, viz.: "Then
the Blessed One made manifest an
occurrence hidden by change of birth," or "that which had been
hidden by," etc.
Early Buddhism then clearly held to
a permanency of records in the Âkâsha, and the potential capacity of man to
read the same when he has evolved to the stage of true individual enlightenment.
At death, and in convulsions and
trance, the javana chitta is
transferred to the object last created by the desires. The will to live brings
all thoughts into objectivity.
(This is found in Appendix A, p.137)
OBSERVATION
If you did
not understand very well the Colonel Olcott’s explanation, don’t worry, since
it is quite confusing, but in summary he says that after reflecting it, he came
to the conclusion that it is the individuality that reincarnates, but in
different personalities, and it is not the same personality (the
"character") that reincarnates as proposed by Western scholars of the
Orient.
And
Blavatsky, in her book The Key to Theosophy, wrote:
« Even in his Buddhist
Catechism, Col. Olcott, forced to it by the logic of Esoteric
philosophy, found himself obliged to correct the mistakes of previous
Orientalists who made no such distinction, and gives the reader his reasons for
it. »
(p.134)
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