tktt: The Buddhist Teachings On The Above

“Enq:  What does Buddhism teach with regard to the Soul?

 
Theo:  It depends whether you mean exoteric, popular Buddhism, or its esoteric teachings. The former explains itself in the Buddhism Catechism in this wise:  “Soul it considers a word used by the ignorant to express a false idea. If everything is subject to change, then man is included, and every material part of him must change. That which is subject to change is not permanent, so there can be no immortal survival of changeful thing.”  This seems plain and definite.

 
But when we come to the question that the new personality in each succeeding rebirth is the aggregate of “Skandhas”, or the attributes, of the old personality, and ask whether this new aggregation of Skandhas is a new being likewise, in which nothing has remained of the last, we read that: 

 

“In one sense it is a new being, in another it is not. During this life the Skandhas are continually changing, while the man A. B. of forty is identical as regards personality with the youth A. B. of eighteen, yet by the continual waste and reparation of his body and change of mind and character, he is a different being.

 
Nevertheless, the man in his old age justly reaps the reward or suffering consequent upon his thoughts and actions at every previous stage of his life. So the new being of the rebirth, being the same individuality as before (but not the same personality), with but a changed form, or new aggregation of Skandhas, justly reaps the consequences of his actions and thoughts in the previous existence.”

 
This is abstruse metaphysics, and plainly does not express disbelief in Soul by any means.

 
Enq:  Is not something like this spoken of in Esoteric Buddhism?

 
Theo:  It is, for this teaching belongs both to Esoteric Buddhism or Secret Wisdom, and to the exoteric Buddhism, or the religious philosophy of Gautama Buddha.”

 
H. P. Blavatsky

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