efit the dead. Even within Buddhism these practices
cannot be dismissed as a late or foreign corruption. In the
Khuddaka-patha which, if not belonging to the most ancient part of the
Buddhist canon, is at least pre-Christian and purely Indian, the dead
are represented as waiting for offerings and as blessing those who give
them. It is also curious that a recent work called _Raymond_ by Sir O.
Lodge (1916) gives a view of the state after death which is
substantially that of the Chinese. For its teaching is that the dead
retain their personality, concern themselves with the things of this
world, know what is going to happen here and can to some extent render
assistance to the living[106]. Also (and this point is specially
remarkable) burning and mutilation of the body seem to inconvenience the
dead.

Early Chinese works prescribe that during the performance of ancestral
rites, the ghosts are to be represented by people known as the
personators of the dead who receive the offerings and are supposed to be
temporarily possessed by spirits and to be their mouthpieces. Possession
by ghosts or other spirits is, in popular esteem, of frequent occurrence
in India, China, Japan and Indo-China. It is one of the many factors
which have contributed to the ideas of incarnation and deification, that
is, that gods can become men and men gods. In Europe the spheres of the
human and divine are strictly separated: to pass from one to the other
is exceptional: a single incarnation is regarded as an epoch-making
event of universal importance. But in Asia the frontiers are not thus
rigidly delimitated, nor are God and man thus opposed. The ordinary dead
become powers in the spirit world and can bless or injure here: the
great dead become deities: in another order of ideas, the dead
immediately become reincarnate and reappear on earth: the gods take the
shape of men, sometimes for the space of a human life, sometimes for a
shorter apparition. Many teachers in India have been revered as partial
incarnations of Vishnu and most of the higher clergy in Tibet claim to
be Buddhas or Bodhisattvas manifest in the flesh. There is no proof that
the doctrine of metempsychosis existed in Eastern Asia independently of
Indian influence but the ready acceptance accorded to it was largely due
to the prevalent feeling that the worlds of men and spirits are divided
by no great gulf. It is quite natural to step into the spirit world and
back again into this.