EARLY BUDDHISM - HB

About the Book:-The book discusses adopted doctrines--karma transmigration in a chapter to describe essential doctrines of the original Buddhism. They are at the same time the distinctive doctrines: that is to say, the doctrines that distinguish it from all previous teaching in India. But the Buddha, while rejecting the sacrifices and the ritualistic magic of the Brahmin schools, the animistic superstitions of the people, and the pantheistic speculations of the poets of the pre-Buddhistic Upanishads, still retained the belief in transmigration. This belief--the transmigration of the soul, after the death of the body, into other bodies, either of men, beasts or gods--is part of the animistic creed, or is so widely found throughout the world that it was probably universal. In India it had already, before the rise of Buddhism, been raised into an ethical conception by the associated doctrine of Karma, according to which a man's social position in life and his physical advantages, or the reverse, were the result of his actions in a previous birth