read between these existences it is not individuality. And what he
craves is not eternal personal activity, but unbroken rest in which
personality, even if supposed to continue, can have little meaning.

The character of the successive appearances or tenements of the soul is
determined by the law of Karma, which even more than metempsychosis is
the basis of Indian ideas about the universe. Karma is best known as a
term of the Buddhists, who are largely responsible both for the
definition and wide diffusion of the doctrine. But the idea is Brahmanic
as well as Buddhist and occurs in well-known passages of the Upanishads,
where it is laid down that as a man acts so shall he be in the next
life[132]. The word (which means simply _deed_) is the accepted
abbreviation for the doctrine that all deeds bring upon the doer an
accurately proportionate consequence either in this existence, or, more
often, in a future birth. At the end of a man's life his character or
personality is practically the sum of his acts, and when extraneous
circumstances such as worldly position disappear, the soul is left with
nothing but these acts and the character they have formed as, in Indian
language, the fruit of life and it is these acts and this character
which determine its next tenement. That tenement is simply the home
which it is able to occupy in virtue of the configuration and qualities
which it has induced in itself. It cannot complain.

One aspect of the theory of Samsara which is important for the whole
history of Indian thought is its tendency towards pessimism. This
tendency is specially definite and dogmatic in Buddhism, but it is a
marked characteristic of the Indian temperament and appears in almost
every form of devotion and speculation. What salvation or the desire to
be saved is to the ordinary Protestant, Mukti or Moksha, deliverance, is
to the ordinary Hindu. In Buddhism this desire is given a dogmatic basis
for it is declared that all existence in all possible worlds necessarily
involves dukkha or suffering[133] and this view seems to have met with
popular as well as philosophic assent. But the desire for release and
deliverance is based less on a contemplation of the woes of life than on
a profound sense of its impermanence and instability[134]. Life is not
the preface to eternity, as religious Europeans think: the Hindu justly
rejects the notion that the conduct of the soul during a few score years
can fix its everlasting d