Krishna here declares, in unequivocal terms, that the embodied Self in every one is set on a great pilgrimage in which It comes to identify itself with varied forms, temporarily to gain a limited but determined, set of experiences. He says that neither He Himself nor Arjuna nor the great kings of the age that have assembled in both the armies, are mere accidental happenings. They do not come from nowhere and, at their death, do not become mere non-existent nothingness. Correct philosophical thinking guides man’s intellect to the apprehension of a continuity from the past — through the present — to the endless future. The Spirit remaining the same, It gets seemingly conditioned by different body-equipments and comes to live through its self-ordained environments.

It is this conclusion of the Hindu philosophers that has given them the most satisfactory THEORY OF REINCARNATION. The most powerful opponents of this idea do not seem to have studiously followed their own scriptures. Christ Himself has, if not directly, at least indirectly, proclaimed this doctrine when He told His disciples: “John, the Baptist, was Elijah.” Origen, the most learned of the Christian Fathers, has clearly declared: “Every man received a body for himself according to his deserts in former lives.”

There was no great thinker in the past who had not, nor any in the present who has not accepted, expressly or tacitly, these logical conclusions about the DOCTRINE OF REINCARNATION. Buddha constantly made references to his previous births. Virgil and Ovid regarded the doctrine as perfectly self-evident. Josephus observed that the belief in reincarnation was widely accepted among the Jews of his age. Solomon’s BOOK OF WISDOM says: “To be born in sound body with sound limbs is a reward of the virtues of the past lives.”

And who does not remember the famous saying of the learned son of Islam who declared, “I died out of the stone and I became a plant; I died out of the plant and became an animal; I died out of the animal and became a man. Why then should I fear to die? When did I grow less by dying? I shall die out of man and shall become an angel!!”

In later times, this most intelligent philosophical belief has been accepted as a doctrine by the German philosophers Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Lessing. Among the recent philosophers, Hume, Spencer, Max Mueller, have all recognised this doctrine as incontrovertible. Among the poets of the West also, we find many burnished intellects soaring into the cloudless sky of imagination and within their poetic flights they too have intuitively felt the sanction behind this immortal doctrine-Browning, Rossetti, Tennyson and Wordsworth, to mention but a few names.

The REINCARNATION THEORY is not a mere dream of the philosophers, and the day is not far far off when, with the fast-developing science of Psychology, the West will come to rewrite its Scripture under the sheer weight of observed phenomena. An uncompromising intellectual quest for understanding life cannot satisfy itself if it is thwarted at every corner by “observed irregularities.” We cannot, for long, ignore them all as mere ‘chances.’ The prodigy Mozart is a spectacular instance which cannot be explained away; to be logical we must accept the idea of the continuity of the embodied souls. This genius. wrote Sonatas at the age of four, played in public at the age of five, composed his first Opera at the age of seven! Without the REINCARNATION THEORY, we will have to label this wondrous incident as an accident and throw it into the dust-bin of chance and bury it there!!

Examples are often noticed, but rarely recorded as evidences, to prove this great THEORY OF REINCARNATION. The modern world, as I said, has yet to discover this great and self-evident LAW OF LIFE.

Therefore, to an uninitiated student, this theory may seem too staggering for quiet appreciation. When Krishna declared that none of them, including himself, Arjuna and the great kings, even after their deaths on the battle-field “shall cease to exist in future,” Arjuna, a typical man-of-the world could not grasp it as a self-evident fact. His questioning eyes made the Lord explain again the idea through an example in the following stanza.

“WHY DO THEY DESERVE NO GRIEF? FOR THEY ARE ETERNAL IN ESSENCE. HOW?”… THE LORD SAYS:

Why are they not to be grieved for? Because they are eternal. How? Na tu eva, but certainly it is not (a fact); that jatu, at any time; aham, I ; na asam, did not exist; on the contrary, I did exist. The idea is that when the bodies were born or died in the past, I existed eternally. [Here Ast. adds ghatadisu viyadiva, like Space in pot etc.-Tr.] Similarly, na tvam, nor is it that you did not exist; but you surely existed. Ca, and so also; na ime, nor is it that these ; jana-adhipah, rulers of men, did not exist. On the other hand, they did exist. And similarly, na eva, it is surely not that; vayam, we; sarve, all; na bhavisyamah, shall cease to exist; atah param, after this, even after the destruction of this body. On the contrary, we shall exist. The meaning is that even in all the three times (past, present and future) we are eternal in our nature as the Self. The plural number (in we) is used following the diversity of the bodies, but not in the sense of the multiplicity of the Self.