idea that this consciousness is a unity and
permanent. He maintains that it is a complex process due to many causes,
each producing its own effect. Yet the Pitakas seem to admit that the
processes which constitute consciousness in one life, can also produce
their effect in another life, for the character of future lives may be
determined by the wishes which we form in this life. Existence is really
a succession of states of consciousness following one another
irrespective of bodies. If _ABC_ and _abc_ are two successive lives,
_ABC_ is not more of a reality or unity than _BCa_. No personality
passes over at death from _ABC_ to _abc_ but then _ABC_ is itself not a
unity: it is merely a continuous process of change[433].

The discourse seems to say that tanha, the thirst for life, is the
connecting link between different births, but it does not use this
expression. In one part of his address the Buddha exhorts his disciples
not to enquire what they were or what they will be or what is the nature
of their present existence, but rather to master and think out for
themselves the universal law of causation, that every state has a cause
for coming into being and a cause for passing away. No doubt his main
object is as usual practical, to incite to self-control rather than to
speculation. But may he not also have been under the influence of the
idea that time is merely a form of human thought? For the ordinary mind
which cannot conceive of events except as following one another in time,
the succession of births is as true as everything else. The higher kinds
of knowledge, such as are repeatedly indicated in the Buddha's
discourse, though they are not described because language is incapable
of describing them, may not be bound in this way by the idea of time and
may see that the essential truth is not so much a series of births in
which something persists and passes from existence to existence, as the
timeless fact that life depends upon tanha, the desire for life. Death,
that is the breaking up of such constituents of human life as the body,
states of consciousness, etc., does not affect tanha. If tanha has not
been deliberately suppressed, it collects skandhas again. The result is
called a new individual. But the essential truth is the persistence of
the tanha until it is destroyed.

Still there is no doubt that the earliest Buddhist texts and the
discourse ascribed to the Buddha himself speak, when using ordinary
untechnical