The Pandavas and the Kauravas.

One of our subscribers writes to us from Nantes:

“Reading a book that treats of some works in Sanskrit, I found, in a passage of a poem called Maha-Barata, an exposition of the belief of those remote times. Great was my admiration upon finding there reincarnation, a doctrine which, at the time, seems to have been well understood. Here is the fact that led the God Krishna to explain to the chief of the Pandavas the theory of the brahmins.

“Civil war having broken out between the descendants of Pandu, legitimate heirs to the throne, and the descendants of Kuru, who usurped it, the Pandavas come, at the head of an army commanded by the hero Arjuna, to attack the usurpers. The battle was long and victory was still uncertain; an armistice allowed the two armies to renew their strength; suddenly the trumpets sounded and the two combatants set off to march to the fight. White horses draw the chariot of Arjuna, beside whom Krishna stands. Suddenly the hero stops in the midst of the space that separates the two armies and embraces them with his gaze: “Brothers against brothers, he says; kinsmen against kinsmen, about to strangle one another over the corpses of their brothers!” He is seized by a profound melancholy and by a sudden pain.

“Krishna! he exclaims, behold our kinsmen armed, standing, disposed to strangle one another. See! my limbs tremble, my face grows pale, my blood freezes; a mortal cold circulates in my veins and my hair bristles with horror. The faithful bow falls from my hand, incapable of holding it; I waver; I can neither advance nor retreat and my soul, intoxicated with pain, seems to want to abandon me. God of the golden hair, ah! tell me, shall I be happy when I have murdered all my own? What will victory, the empire, life signify, when those for whom I would obtain and preserve it have perished in the combat? O celestial conqueror, were the threefold world the price of their death, I would not want to slaughter them for this miserable globe. No, I do not want it, even though they prepare to kill me pitilessly.

“— Those whose death you weep, answered the god, do not deserve that you weep for them; whether they live or die, the wise man has no tears for life nor for death. The time in which I did not exist, in which you did not exist, in which these warriors did not exist, never existed, and never will come the hour that will announce our death. Introduced into our bodies, the soul passes through youth, mature age, decrepitude and, passing to a new body, there begins anew its journey. Indestructible and eternal, a god unfolds from his hands the Universe in which we are. Who will annihilate the soul that he created? who, then, will destroy the work of the Indestructible? The body, fragile envelope, alters, corrupts itself and dies; but the soul, the eternal soul that we cannot conceive, never perishes. To the combat, Arjuna! Advance your steeds into the combat; you do not destroy the soul; the soul will not be slain; it is never born, never dies, it knows neither present, past, nor future; it is ancient, eternal, ever virgin, ever young, immutable, unalterable. What does it mean to fall in combat, to slaughter the enemies, but to leave a garment or to remove the garment of someone? Go! fear nothing; cast off without scruple a worn-out garment; see without terror your enemies and your brothers leave the perishable bodies and their souls clothe themselves in new forms. The soul is a thing that the sword does not penetrate, that fire cannot consume, that the waters do not deteriorate, that the south wind does not dry up. Cease, then, to groan.” Observation. – Indeed, the idea of reincarnation is very well defined in this passage, as, moreover, all the Spiritist beliefs were in Antiquity. Only one principle was lacking: that of charity. To the Christ it was reserved to proclaim this supreme law, source of all terrestrial and celestial felicities.