are
right'; and there and say, 'This belief is foolishly wrong and idiotic.'
I am not, unfortunately, one of these writers. I have no such confident
belief in my own infallibility of judgment as to be able to sit on high
and say, 'Here is truth, and here is error.'

I will leave my readers to make their own judgment, if they desire to do
so; only asking them (as they would not like their own beliefs to be
scoffed and sneered at) that they will treat with respect the sincere
beliefs of others, even if they cannot accept them. It is only in this
way that we can come to understand a people and to sympathize with them.

It is hardly necessary to emphasize the enormous effect that a belief in
transmigration such as this has upon the life and intercourse of the
people. Of their kindness to animals I have spoken elsewhere, and it is
possible this belief in transmigration has something to do with it, but
not, I think, much. For if you wished to illtreat an animal, it would be
quite easy, even more easy, to suppose that an enemy or a murderer
inhabited the body of the animal, and that you were but carrying out the
decrees of fate by ill-using it. But when you love an animal, it may
increase that love and make it reasonable, and not a thing to be ashamed
of; and it brings the animal world nearer to you in general, it bridges
over the enormous void between man and beast that other religions have
made. Nothing humanizes a man more than love of animals.

I do not know if this be a paradox, I know that it is a truth.

There was one point that puzzled me for a time in some of these stories
of transmigration, such as the one I told about the man and wife being
reborn twins. It was this: A man dies and leaves behind children, let us
say, to whom he is devoutly attached. He is reborn in another family in
the same village, maybe. It would be natural to suppose that he would
love his former family as much as, or even more than, his new one.
Complications might arise in this way which it is easy to conceive would
cause great and frequent difficulties.

I explained this to a Burman one day, and asked him what happened, and
this is what he said: 'The affection of mother to son, of husband to
wife, of brother to sister, belongs entirely to the body in which you
may happen to be living. When it dies, so do these affections. New
affections arise from the new body. The flesh of the son, being of one
with his father, of course loves him; but a