Page:The Kural or The Maxims Of Tiruvalluvar.pdf/34

somewhere in the universe to uncoil itself as time and opportunity offer themselves. The storing up is certainly in part in the character of the man who does the action. But another and sometimes the major part of it is in Nature and in the memory of consciousness of fellow-men. Now the innumerable actions, conscious and unconscious, of a man's life go on accumulating this potential energy until the very end of his life on earth, if not even beyond. Some of this potential energy is being turned to kinetic every moment of his life, but all the same a large portion remains unspent at the moment of death and accompanies the soul in its transmigration into another body. It is this energy waiting to materialise itself in the new life of the soul that our philosophical writers call by the name of karma or Ûj. The idea of the all but omnipotent force of this karma can now be rightly grasped by the reader, whether he is convinced of the truth of it as a fact or not. It is powerful because it forms part and parcel of a man's character as the original tendencies with which he is born. And the portion of it that has formed part of