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THE SKANDHAS EXPLAINED BY COLONEL OLCOTT




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?

Answer: Tanhâ — the will to live.


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: Nirvâa.


(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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