A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

104 REINCARNATION.India. And that it should come through Alexandria issignificant, as the Buddhistic records show Buddnistclearly^missionary activity in Alexandria and Asia Minor.Pythagorasis said to have been the first Greek whotaught the doctrine of palingenesis among the Hellenes.As an Aryan ra,ce, already burning their dead andwas easybelieving in the doctrine of an individual soul, itfor the Greeks to accept the doctrine of reincarnation,through the Pythagorean teachings. According to Apulejus,Pythagoras had come to India, where he had beeninstructed by the Brahmins.So far we have learned that wherever the soul was heldto be an individual, the real man, and not a vivifying partof the body only, the doctrine of its pre-existence hadinevitably come, and that externally those nations thatbelieved in the independent individuality of the soul hadalmost always signifieditby burning the bodies of thedeparted though one of the ancient Aryan races, the;Persian, developed a peculiar method of disposing of thebodies of the dead at an early period, and without anySemitic influence the ; very name by which they call their"towers of silence" comes from the root Dah = toburn.In short, the races who did not pay much attention tothe analysis of their own nature never went beyond thematerial body as their all in all, and even when driven byhigher light to penetrate beyond, they only en me to theconclusion that somehow or other, at some distant periodof time, this body will become incorruptible.On the other hand, that race which spent the best partof its energies in the inquiry into the nature of man as athinking being the Indo-Aryan soon found out thatbeyond this body, beyond even the shining body which