“Even in his Buddhist Catechism, Col. Olcott, forced to it by the logic of Esoteric philosophy, found himself obliged to correct the mistakes of previous Orientalists who made no such distinction, and gives the reader his reason for it.
Thus he says:
“The successive appearances upon the earth, or ‘descents into generation’, of the tanhaically coherent parts (Skandhas) of a certain being, are a succession of personalities. In each birth the PERSONALITY differs from that of a previous or next succeeding birth.
Karma, the DEUX EX MACHINA, masks (or shall we say reflects?) itself now in the personality of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on throughout the string of births.
But though personalities ever shift, the one line of life along which they are strung, like beads, runs unbroken; it is ever that particular line, never any other.
It is therefore individual, an individual vital undulation, which began in Nirvana, or the subjective side of nature, as the light of heat undulation through aether began at its dynamic source; is careering through the objective side of nature under the impulse of Karma and the creative direction of Tanha (the unsatisfied desire for existence); and leads through many cyclic changes back to Nirvana.
Mr. Rhys-Davids calls that which passes from personality to personality along the individual chain ‘character’, or ‘doing’.
Since ‘character’ is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, but the sum of one’s mental qualities and moral propensities, would it not help to dispel what Mr. Rhys-Davids calls ‘the desperate expedient of a mystery’ (Buddhism, p. 101) if we regarded the life-undulation as individuality, and each of its series of natal manifestations as a separate personality?
The perfect individual, Buddhistically speaking, is a Buddha, I should say; for Buddha is but the rare flower of humanity, without the least supernatural admixture.
And as countless generations (‘four asankheyyas and a hundred thousand cycles’, Fausboll and Rhys-Davids’ BUDDHIST BIRTH STORIES, p. 18) are required to develop a man into a Buddha, and the iron will to become one runs throughout all the successive births, what shall we call that which thus wills and preserves? Character?
One’s individuality: and individuality but partly manifested in any one birth, but built up of fragments from all the births?” (Bud. Cat., Appendix A. 137.)”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 