re is no self, must not consciousness come to an end when the
elements fall asunder which chance has brought together, and must not
the hour of death be also the hour of complete emancipation? This,
however, it was impossible to hold in India at the time of Gautama;
the belief in transmigration was too firmly fixed, he never thought
of disputing it. That belief indeed is what chiefly makes the
suffering of the world so lamentable. To Indian eyes the pain
actually in the world was magnified a hundred-fold by the dark
imagination of its connection with the past and with the future. What
a man suffered was the result of acts done in many former lives, all
spent in the vain misery of desire; and the sad prospect was extended
before him that death would not end his pains, but that he would be
born again and again to suffer ever anew so long as desire continued.
But if this is the case, then the soul would seem to be a durable and
persistent thing which is able to go through many lives and much
suffering without being brought to an end. On the theory of
transmigration the soul is not a mere shadow-name of an aggregation
of qualities, but the one durable thing which survives when all that
is accidental and temporary falls away from it. The doctrine of the
Skandhas and that of transmigration are thus opposed, and the
doctrine of the _nidanas_ or the chain of causation is the bridge
which satisfied Gautama's own mind, but which he was doubtful about
presenting to others, to bring them into harmony. He aimed at showing
by his catalogue of these obscure processes how the actions done in a
life set up a tendency to a corresponding existence in another life
which begins after the former one ends. Though there is no soul to be
transmitted, the moral effects of former lives are transmitted to
their successors.

The essential doctrine of the Buddha, however, is determined by the
belief in transmigration. His cry of triumph at the time of his
enlightenment is to the effect that the long series of suffering
existences through which he has passed has now come to an end, and
that he will not be born again. And what he preaches with constant
iteration is the misery of this awful succession of births to renewal
of suffering, and the infinite blessedness of escaping from this
cycle. The disciple, when converted, is to be able to say: "Hell is
destroyed for me, and rebirth as an animal or a ghost or in any place
of woe. I am converted, I am n