e perfect Peace, perfect
rest, perfect happiness, he and his, in that heaven where his teacher
went before him long ago.

And if we should say that this Deliverance from life, this Great Peace,
is Death, what matter, if it be indeed Peace?

FOOTNOTE:

[1] These five vows are:

1. Not to take life.
2. To be honest.
3. To tell the truth.
4. To abstain from intoxicants.
5. Chastity.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE POTTER'S WHEEL

'Life is like a great whirlpool wherein we are dashed to and fro by
our passions.'--_Saying of the Buddha._

It is a hard teaching, this of the Buddha about death. It is a teaching
that may appeal to the reason, but not to the soul, that when life goes
out, this thing which we call 'I' goes out with it, and that love and
remembrance are dead for ever.

It is so hard a teaching that in its purity the people cannot believe
it. They accept it, but they have added on to it a belief which changes
the whole form of it, a belief that is the outcome of that weakness of
humanity which insists that death is not and cannot be all.

Though to the strict Buddhist death is the end of all worldly passion,
to the Burmese villager that is not so. He cannot grasp, he cannot
endure that it should be so, and he has made for himself out of Buddhism
a belief that is opposed to all Buddhism in this matter.

He believes in the transmigration of souls, in the survival of the 'I.'
The teaching that what survives is not the 'I,' but only the result of
its action, is too deep for him to hold. True, if a flame dies the
effects that it has caused remain, and the flame is dead for ever. A new
flame is a new flame. But the 'I' of man cannot die, he thinks; it lives
and loves for all time.

He has made out of the teaching a new teaching that is very far from
that of the Buddha, and the teaching is this: When a man dies his soul
remains, his 'I' has only changed its habitation. Still it lives and
breathes on earth, not the effect, but the soul itself. It is reborn
among us, and it may even be recognised very often in its new abode.

And that we should never forget this, that we should never doubt that
this is true, it has been so ordered that many can remember something of
these former lives of theirs. This belief is not to a Burman a mere
theory, but is as true as anything he can see. For does he not daily see
people who know of their former lives? Nay, does he not himself, often