[FN#401] The Karma that determines different classes of beings, such as men, beasts, Pretas, etc.

[FN#402] The Karma that determines the particular state of an individual in the world.

[FN#403] A.  ’This harmonizes with the outside opinion that everything occurs naturally.’

Besides, there are some who cultivated virtues in the earlier, and committed crimes in the later, stages of their past existences; while others were vicious in youth, and virtuous in old age.  In consequence, some are happy in youth, being rich and noble, but unhappy in old age, being poor and low in the present life; while others lead poor and miserable lives when young, but grow rich and noble when old, and so on.  Hence outside scholars come to believe that one’s prosperity or adversity merely depends on a heavenly decree.[FN#404]

[FN#404] A.  ’This harmonizes with the outside opinion that everything depends on providence.’

The body with which man is endowed, when traced step by step to its origin, proves to be nothing but one primordial Gas in its undeveloped state.  And the mind with which man thinks, when traced step by step to its source, proves to be nothing but the One Real Spirit.  To tell the truth, there exists nothing outside of Spirit, and even the Primordial Gas is also a mode of it, for it is one of the external objects projected by the above-stated Vijnyanas, and is one of the mental images of Alaya, out of whose idea, when it is in the state of Karma, come both the subject and the object.  As the subject developed itself, the feebler ideas grow stronger step by step, and form erroneous beliefs that end in the production of Karma.[FN#405] Similarly, the object increases in size, the finer objects grow gradually grosser, and gives rise to unreal things that end in the formation[FN#406] of Heaven and Earth.  When Karma is ripe enough, one is endowed by father and mother with sperm and ovum, which, united with his consciousness under the influence of Karma, completes a human form.

[FN#405] A.  ‘As above stated.’

[FN#406] A.  “In the beginning, according to the outside school, there was ‘the great changeableness,’ which underwent fivefold evolutions, and brought out the Five Principles.  Out of that Principle, which they call the Great Path of Nature, came the two subordinate principles of the Positive and the Negative.  They seem to explain the Ultimate Reality, but the Path, in fact, no more than the ‘perceiving division’ of the Alaya.  The so-called primordial Gas seems to be the first idea in the awakening Alaya, but it is a mere external object.”

According to this view (of Dharmalaksana), things brought forth through the transformations of Alaya and the other Vijnyanas are divided into two parts; one part (remaining), united with Alaya and the other Vijnyanas, becomes man, while the other, becoming separated from them, becomes Heaven, Earth, mountains, rivers, countries, and towns. (Thus) man is the outcome of the union of the two; this is the reason why he alone of the Three Powers is spiritual.  This was taught by the Buddha[FN#407] himself when he stated that there existed two different kinds of the four elements—­the internal and the external.