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The Ninth Lesson: The Religions of India. Part I.1299
accused bad Karma, which was not possible of exhaustion in the present life,
but which would remain over as “unused-Karma”—as an unpaid debt—and
which would entail effects which would serve as a nucleus for new Karma,
and so on, and on, binding the soul to the Wheel of Causation, or Samsara
forever and ever, with only the shred of a chance to escape.
This doctrine in all of its unrelieved severity was poured out to this
primitive people, as yet unprepared to consider it philosophically or to
weed out the “half-truths;” which appeared among its blossoms. To them
it was the grim Law, as terrible as was the Law of Causation as stated many
centuries afterward by Gautama Buddha, which again held the race to this
side of the shield of Truth. There was no escape from the Law—”as among
a thousand cows a calf finds its mother, so does the previously done deed
follow after the doer thereof,” says the writings. The root of the teachings
regarding Desire, which afterward was re-taught by Gautama, is found in
these early teachings. Desire was the Root of Evil. And Desire was held to
have sprung from Avidya, or Ignorance, which was the Seed of Evil. And so
Samsara, or the Cycle of Existences, was thought to have arisen from Avidya,
or Ignorance, which had crept upon the all, and overshadowed its Wisdom.
This was the beginning of the Hindu conception of Maya, or the Illusory
Cause of the Phenomenal Universe. And, then came the other teaching that
by Vidya, or Wisdom, the chains of Samsara could be destroyed. And so
the race began to take life very seriously, and to endeavor to attain Wisdom,
in order to escape Samsara.
Van Deussen thus concisely states these fundamental conceptions
regarding Samsara, and the escape therefrom: “Life is held to be precisely
meted, in quality and quantity, as an expiation (absolutely just and
adequate) for the deeds, thoughts and actions of the previous existence.
This expiation is accomplished by deeds of action and enjoyment, which
in turn is converted into fresh works and therefore cause of Karma, which
must be expiated afresh in a subsequent existence, so that Atonement or
Expiation is like a clock-work that in running-down always rewinds itself