s his present flesh has no
sort of connection with his former one, he does not love those to whom
he was related in his other lives. These affections are as much a part
of the body as the hand or the eyesight; with one you put off the
other.'

Thus all love, to the learned, even the purest affection of daughter to
mother, of man to his friend, is in theory a function of the body--with
the one we put off the other; and this may explain, perhaps, something
of what my previous chapter did not make quite clear, that in the
hereafter[2] of Buddhism there is no affection.

When we have put off all bodies, when we have attained Nirvana, love and
hate, desire and repulsion, will have fallen from us for ever.

Meanwhile, in each life, we are obliged to endure the affections of the
body into which we may be born. It is the first duty of a monk, of him
who is trying to lead the purer life, to kill all these affections, or
rather to blend them into one great compassion to all the world alike.
'Gayuena,' compassion, that is the only passion that will be left to
us. So say the learned.

I met a little girl not long ago, a wee little maiden about seven years
old, and she told me all about her former life when she was a man. Her
name was Maung Mon, she said, and she used to work the dolls in a
travelling marionette show. It was through her knowledge and partiality
for marionettes that it was first suspected, her parents told me, whom
she had been in her former life. She could even as a sucking-child
manipulate the strings of a marionette-doll. But the actual discovery
came when she was about four years old, and she recognised a certain
marionette booth and dolls as her own. She knew all about them, knew
the name of each doll, and even some of the words they used to say in
the plays. 'I was married four times,' she told me. 'Two wives died, one
I divorced; one was living when I died, and is living still. I loved her
very much indeed. The one I divorced was a dreadful woman. See,'
pointing to a scar on her shoulder, 'this was given me once in a
quarrel. She took up a chopper and cut me like this. Then I divorced
her. She had a dreadful temper.'

It was immensely quaint to hear this little thing discoursing like this.
The mark was a birth-mark, and I was assured that it corresponded
exactly with one that had been given to the man by his wife in just such
a quarrel as the one the little girl described.

The divorced wife and the muc