தமிழர் மதம்
35
can we catch sight of a moving body in proportion to its velocity and the position from which we view it. Sooner or later it may pass out of our view and may reappear and disappear again and again as the scenes and actors in a dramatic representation do. The sun vanishes from our sight every evening and manifests itself every morning; yet we believe the same sun, and not a new sun quite different from the one we saw yesterday, has risen to our view. In like manner, every finite soul passes away every time its flimsy garment-like body wears out and reappears in a new body refreshed and recuperated. This state of things wil continue until man learns the art of prolonging the life in a single body and with that conquering death he enters into an eternal union with the Supreme Being and becomes there the receptacle of its ineffable and everlasting bliss.
Now, this fact of soul's birth and rebirth was, as evidenced by the old Tamil classics, discovered at first only by the Tamilian sages and was communicated by them to the Aryans and others who came to them for instruction in the destiny of man. Nevertheless many a scholar of oriental learning wrongly thinks that the discovery of soul's rebirth was first made by the Aryans alone. But in the whole range of such Rig Vedic hymns as were brought by the Aryans there is not even a stray reference to the doctrine of rebirth to uphold their assertion. The minds of the Aryan settlers were so overwhelmed with the anxiety of meeting their needs for the present life that they could bestow no thought on the question relating either to their past lives or their future; this can be made plain to every one who would take trouble to glance at the Rig Vedic hymns of the Aryans. They were too much concerned with the present to extend their vision either to what had gone before or what would come on hereafter. But, not so were the ancient Tamils who were so highly advanced in civilization and in mental, moral and religious culture that every problem relating to the destiny of man engaged their serious attention and was solved by them in such a way that the reasonableness of its solution and the bearing of which solution on the practical life of man constitute the marvels of the Tamilian thought.
