will have no
way of escape.... Your ancestors and fathers will (now) cut
you off and abandon you, and not save you from death.[5]

Indeed, so practical is this Chinese belief, held to-day as in those
long-past ages, that "the change that men call Death" seems to play a
very small part in the thoughts and lives of the people of the Flowery
Land.

These quotations, which might be multiplied a hundred-fold, may
suffice to prove the folly of the idea that immortality came to "light
through the gospel". The whole ancient world basked in the full
sunshine of belief in the immortality of man, lived in it daily,
voiced it in its literature, went with it in calm serenity through the
gate of Death.

It remains a problem why Christianity, which vigorously and joyously
re-affirmed it, should have growing in its midst the unique terror of
Death that has played so large a part in its social life, its
literature, and its art. It is not simply the belief in hell that has
surrounded the grave with horror, for other Religions have had their
hells, and yet their followers have not been harassed by this shadowy
Fear. The Chinese, for instance, who take Death as such a light and
trivial thing, have a collection of hells quite unique in their varied
unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than
of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its
antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless
condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy,
mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from
the thraldom of the senses during earthly life, looks on the
disembodied state as eminently desirable, and as most conducive to
unfettered thought.

Ere passing to the consideration of the history of man in the
post-mortem state, it is necessary, however briefly, to state the
constitution of man, as viewed by the Esoteric Philosophy, for we must
have in mind the constituents of his being ere we can understand their
disintegration. Man then consists of

_The Immortal Triad_:

Atma.
Buddhi.
Manas.

_The Perishable Quaternary_:

Kama.
Prana.
Etheric Double.
Dense Body.

The dense body is the physical body, the visible, tangible outer form,
composed of various tissues. The etheric double is the ethereal
counterpart of the body, composed of the physical ethers. Prana is
vitality, the integrating energy that co-ordinates the physical
molecu