maintains that, according to the Buddha’s teaching, consciousness transmigrates unchanged.  The Buddha summoned Sati and rebuked his error in language of unusual severity, for it was evidently capital and fatal if persisted in.  The Buddha does not state what transmigrates, as the European reader would wish him to do, and would no doubt have replied to that question that it is improperly framed and does not admit of an answer.

His argument is directed not so much against the idea that consciousness in one existence can have some connection with consciousness in the next, as against the idea that this consciousness is a unity and permanent.  He maintains that it is a complex process due to many causes, each producing its own effect.  Yet the Pitakas seem to admit that the processes which constitute consciousness in one life, can also produce their effect in another life, for the character of future lives may be determined by the wishes which we form in this life.  Existence is really a succession of states of consciousness following one another irrespective of bodies.  If ABC and abc are two successive lives, ABC is not more of a reality or unity than BCa.  No personality passes over at death from ABC to abc but then ABC is itself not a unity:  it is merely a continuous process of change[433].

The discourse seems to say that tanha, the thirst for life, is the connecting link between different births, but it does not use this expression.  In one part of his address the Buddha exhorts his disciples not to enquire what they were or what they will be or what is the nature of their present existence, but rather to master and think out for themselves the universal law of causation, that every state has a cause for coming into being and a cause for passing away.  No doubt his main object is as usual practical, to incite to self-control rather than to speculation.  But may he not also have been under the influence of the idea that time is merely a form of human thought?  For the ordinary mind which cannot conceive of events except as following one another in time, the succession of births is as true as everything else.  The higher kinds of knowledge, such as are repeatedly indicated in the Buddha’s discourse, though they are not described because language is incapable of describing them, may not be bound in this way by the idea of time and may see that the essential truth is not so much a series of births in which something persists and passes from existence to existence, as the timeless fact that life depends upon tanha, the desire for life.  Death, that is the breaking up of such constituents of human life as the body, states of consciousness, etc., does not affect tanha.  If tanha has not been deliberately suppressed, it collects skandhas again.  The result is called a new individual.  But the essential truth is the persistence of the tanha until it is destroyed.