Pandus and KurusReincarnation in ancient times
One of our subscribers writes the following from Nantes:
“I found a passage of the Mahabharata in a book that discusses works written in Sanskrit. The text is about people’s beliefs in those remote days. I was greatly surprised in finding reincarnation there, a doctrine that seemed to be well understood at that time. This is the fact that allows the god Krishna to explain the theory of the Brahmans to the chief of the Pandus:
“Since the war had broken between the descendants of the Pandu, legitimate heirs to the throne, and the descendants of Kuru, the takers, the Pandus commanded by the hero Arjuna charged against the takers. It was a long and still uncertain battle. A truce allowed both armies to recover their strengths. Suddenly the trumpets sounded and both groups prepare for battle. White horses pulled the car of Arjuna, having the god Krishna by his side. The hero suddenly stopped between the two fields and extends his eyes to the enemy. Brothers against brothers, he says to himself; relatives against relatives to the point of slaying one another over the cadavers of their brothers! He then says, taken by a profound melancholy and a deep pain:
- - Krishna! These are our beloved relatives, standing and ready to destroy one another. Look! My body trembles, my face is pale, my blood is cold; a deadly cold runs in my veins giving me the goose flesh before the gruesome image. My hand cannot hold the bow; I hesitate; I cannot move forward or backward and my soul, taken by horror, seems to abandon me. Oh god of golden hair, tell me! Shall I be happy after I killed all my relatives? What shall be of the victory, the power and life when the very ones that I want to preserve have died in combat? Oh celestial conqueror, even if the price of their deaths were a triple world I would not like to have them dead for this miserable globe. No, I do not want that even if they are prepared to kill me ruthlessly.
- - Those whose death you cry – responded the god – those do not deserve your pain; may they live, may they die, the wise man has no tears for life or death. There was no time when I did not exist, when you did not exist or when these warriors did not exist, and there will never be a time of death. The soul dressed in our bodies goes through youth, maturity and decrepitude and moving on to new bodies it restarts its journey. An eternal and indestructible god spreads out with his hands the universe where we are. Who would destroy a soul that he created? Who could destroy the works of the indestructible? The body is a fragile envelope that changes, is worn out and dies, but the soul, the eternal soul that we cannot conceive, that one never dies. To the fight, Arjuna! Charge your horses to the fight. The soul does not die. You do not destroy souls; the soul will not die; it cannot die or be born. It knows nothing about the present, the past or the future. It is old, eternal, always virgin, always young, immutable, and unchangeable. What is the meaning of a combat, of killing the enemies if not just to remove someone’s outfit? Go! Have no fear!
Have no scruples to undress a worn piece of outfit; do not feel bad when you see your enemies and your brothers leaving behind their perishable outfits and their souls repainted with new forms. The soul is something that cannot be penetrated by the spear, that is not destroyed by the fire or deteriorated by the waters and it cannot be dried by the southern winds. Stop trembling.”
OBSERVATION: The idea of reincarnation is very well defined in this passage as, in fact, all Spiritist beliefs were in former times. There was only one missing principle: Charity. It was up to Jesus Christ to proclaim this supreme law, source of all earthly and celestial happiness.
