The Buddha himself instances a definite limit to the capacity to recall to memory past existences, up to which limit he himself attained. Here we have the best possible proof that we have to do, not with a supernatural enlightenment, a species of omniscience, but simply with an intellectual technique which as being purely intellectual, presupposes a certain grade of cognition. If we may put any confidence in the texts, there were in the days of the Buddha, and in those days of which the “Chants of the monks and nuns” tell us, quite a large number of persons who had acquired this faculty. If some one here interjects, “Such a thing is impossible!” he resembles a man at the foot of a hill to whom another standing on the top has described what he sees from that point of vantage, and who retorts, “It is quite impossible that you should see all this. I have eyes in my head as well as you. I look upon the same world as you do and I perceive nothing whatever of all this. Consequently your imagination must be playing tricks with you.” So much for the real answer. The abstract answer presents itself in the light of an intellectual necessity. Kamma is that which gives continuity to the _I_-process. As such it presents itself to me the individual immediately as consciousness. Consciousness, rightly comprehended, tells me that the _I_-process gives to itself its own coherence; which means that it is self-acting; which in turn means that it is beginningless. I experience the self-perpetuation, the burning of the _I_-process in consciousness. But just as Kamma conducts from one moment of existence to the next, so does it conduct from one existence to the next. Should one wish to render this procedure in comprehensible language, one can come at it no otherwise than simply by saying, “Consciousness passes over from existence to existence.” “Kamma” in itself conveys no more meaning than, for example, the word _I_, which indicates anybody and everybody without distinction, and only acquires _actual_ significance with reference to myself. In exactly the same way “Kamma,” the force in virtue of which every single living creature has being, acquires _actual_ significance only as my own consciousness. Kamma _as such_ has being only as consciousness. It is in this sense that those passages are to be understood, so obscure to our scholars, in which the Buddha speaks of _viññāṇa_ (consciousness) as that which plants itself in the new womb. Addressing his disciple Ānanda, he says, “If, Ānanda, consciousness did not pass into the womb, would it then be possible for the (new) individuality to differentiate itself?”[6] Among the Theras of Ceylon the established expression for the Kamma that passes over from one existence to the next is _paṭisandhiviññāṇa_, a word which means “the again-linking-up consciousness,” the consciousness that ever and again supplies the bond between existence and existence.