the ephemeral—sometimes professedly aesthetic—butterfly-man; the strong ox-man; or the fearless lion-man. Human life is far richer in possibilities for the workings out of evil karma—no matter how animal-like the karma may be—than any sub-human species could possibly be. The illiterate folk-beliefs so common in Buddhist and Hindu lands, that a human murderer must inevitably be reborn as a ferocious beast of prey, or a sensualist as a pig or dog, or a miser as an ant, are, therefore, like many other popular beliefs, evidently based upon false analogies—some of which have crept into Oriental Scriptures—and upon an unduly limited view of the innumerable conditions offered by human embodiment, from the saint to the criminal, from the King-Emperor to the slum-dweller, or from the man of culture to the lowest savage.
In accordance with our findings, that higher and rational teaching concerning rebirth, which in the Bardo Thödol is, perhaps, confused because of corruptions of text, may now be summarized. If, on the Plane of Uncertainty, the influence of innate or karmic propensities of desire for the grosser sensations of sangsāric existence, such as govern life in a human body, can be dominated through the exercise of the more powerful influence of Right Knowledge, that part of the consciousness-principle capable of realizing Buddahood triumphs, and the deceased, instead of being obsessed with the frightful hallucinatory spectres of his lower or animal nature, passes the interval between human death and rebirth in one of the paradise realms instead of in the Bardo. If such a more enlightened one be very unusually developed spiritually, that is to say if he be a great yogīc saint, he may gain even the highest of the paradises and be reborn among mankind under the guiding power of the ‘Lords of Karma’, who, though still sangsāric beings, are described by the lāmas as being immeasurably higher in evolution than man. When thus directed by the ‘Guardians of the Great Law’, the earth-returning one is said to reincarnate out of compassion, to assist human kind; he comes as a Teacher, as a Divine Missionary, as a Nirmāṇa-Kāya
