Soon India will be the most populous country in the world, displacing China. On the Indian subcontinent, their ancestral beliefs live on. One of them: reincarnation. “Inevitable is the death of everything that is born, inevitable is the birth of everything that dies”, says the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred text of Hinduism.
Strange creed for the West, estimated as a mere folkloric rarity, as delirium or as a convenient justification for the caste system, which still prevails in the great Asian country.
The idea of being born, dying and being reborn, associated with the traditional belief of many lives in India, is not alien to the observation of natural processes that later lead to metaphysical and spiritual conceptions. In nature, everything becomes and is transformed in circular processes of birth, extinction, rebirth. The most evident example, the vegetal dynamics: the birth of the new leaves of the tree, their autumn decay, their winter perishing, their spring rebirth, in the evolution of the wheel of the seasons. Faced with this phenomenon, why should human beings be exempt from this law of circular rebirth?
In other cultures, cyclical evolution was also intuited: for the Stoics, the universe is born, develops, comes to an end and then a new world reappears. The eternal return. In Greek mythology, the god Dionysus is born from deep underground; he is chased by the titans; he is captured and torn to pieces; and then, at the end, he is reborn. Aztecs and Babylonians, and others as well, had gods who expressed this process of vegetal rebirth in the radiant heat of summer, after the icy blade of winter. And even Christ, as God made man, expresses the death that gives rise to a new life.
But the beliefs of birth, death and rebirth extended to all human beings is typical of India, which today has close to 1,400 million inhabitants. In its big cities, like New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, the Western influence, through the period of British domination or the globalization of communications, is undeniable. But in its deep idiosyncrasies, reincarnation and karma remain safe.
The Buddhists of the origins, and of today, believe that the maximum fulfillment of the individual is to escape from the cycle of births and deaths (Samsara). Because each new existence is subjugated by the desire that never exceeds dissatisfaction; and makes life brief moments of happiness drowned in whirlwinds of fog and pain.
Buddha was born 2,500 years ago, in Nepal, in the shelter of a distinguished family. The story of his life, darned between myth and history, speaks of his awakening, of his seeing the realities of old age, illness, death; of his decision to expand his spirit; of his fight against demons and temptations, and of the useless scourging of his body. And, in the end, serenity. The rest. The meditation. Under a tree. A whole day of the Buddha. In concentration, introspection. With die-cut legs in lotus position. Then, the illumination happened. The understanding that desire reinstates, over and over again, the bite of unhappiness. The only solution is then to break the cycle of being born, dying and a new birth, to escape the insistent suffering.
Liberation only unfolds wings when consciousness understands that everything comes from an ultimate reality, a void that is not “empty” but is spiritual fullness. A divine and superior state incomprehensible to the eye of logic, to which the soul must return.
In the conception of millennial India, there is no belief in the continuity of the same self, of an unalterable identity, but of a subtle body in which the consequences of each action of this existence, and of previous ones, are concentrated. Here the fundamental notion of karma appears, essential in Buddhism and Hinduism.
Hinduism, originated in the land that today is the most populated on the planet, reaches 900 million followers, mainly in India itself, and Nepal. A decentered religion, without a maximum authority, without a single founder, or a sacred and dogmatic scripture.
“The oldest living religion in the world”, according to Óscar Pujol, a Sanskritist, doctor in Sanskrit Philology from the Hindu University of Varanasi and director of the Cervantes Institute in New Delhi. Pujol, like Henrich Zimmer in Philosophies of India, endorses that a good part of the religions and philosophies of India embrace the existence of reincarnation and karma as a core belief. The India of technological sophistication, progress, nuclear missiles or great poverty and textile exploitation that supplies large Western trade chains coexists with the news of its ancestral background.
Karma is the action and its bad or good effects that determine the conditions of a new birth. Karma is a law of cause and effect. Everyone is responsible for their actions and their effects. But this belief was convenient for the caste of the Brahmans and the powerful to explain, as an effect of the metaphysics of karma, the inequality and injustice proper to the castes. Whoever is born in poverty, lack of protection, lack of rights and exposure to abuse is responsible for that degradation, as a consequence of his karma, and not of a perverse social inequality. This is the case today of the Dalits, the most disadvantaged caste, the so-called “untouchables”. Their reality is marginality, discrimination, abuse, exposure to violence without legal protection, which is repeated daily. Approximately ten Dalit women are raped every day.
In the West, as a tendency among those who do not believe in the promise of eternal life of religions, skepticism swims in the belief of total extinction, the illusion of all cyclical rebirth after death.
By contrast, a crowd that exceeds the populations of many Western countries taken separately believes in coming back after death. This difference coexists with globalization and its current breakdown. But the beliefs allow us not only to notice the difference between cultures, but also a cultural distance between those who in the West tremble before death as the absolute end, and the practitioners, for example, of the Kumbh Mela, the fundamental rite of Hinduism. The largest religious concentration of pilgrims in the world held every twelve years, which usually brings together one hundred million people, who yearn to purify themselves in the Ganges and other rivers, to heal themselves and better be reborn.
The difference and distance between the beliefs from which we humans try to face what we do not understand.
* Philosopher, writer, teacher.
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