We shall have to dwell upon this idea at greater length in another place. Here I conclude with the caution that the Kamma-teaching of the Buddha is not to be confounded with the teaching of the transmigration of the soul found in pantheistic systems. The two have nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with one another except the words “Samsāra” and “re-births.” Language is no more than a servant. It serves one master just as well as another. To seek to deduce community of essence from similarities in terminology is a piece of idle trifling of which many an expositor of Buddhism is most unwarrantably guilty. It is no very difficult matter to “support” the words of the Buddha with quite a host of sayings culled from the works of mystics and pantheists--and scientists also, if one so chooses. But in good sooth, to him who understands, all this only makes needless ballast, and to him who does not understand, needless perplexity. A transmigration of the soul requires something persistent, something eternal, a unity in itself. “As the worm from leaf to leaf”--runs the illustration in the Upanishads--“so goes the soul (the Atman, the true Self) from existence to existence.” For the Buddha there is no such “something in itself.” For the real, genuine thinker life is a thing that at every moment wholly and completely arises anew. Life is this arising itself, just as a flame is the arising itself. _Any kind of persisting something here is not to be found._ Every moment of existence is a new, biological, Kammic value, whereof the prerequisite condition, the adequate cause, resides solely in the previous moment, while itself is prerequisite condition, adequate cause to the moment succeeding. _No continuity_ is present, as a Being, as a true _I_, a something identical with itself, _but with each new moment the continuity is formed anew_; every moment is the last link in a beginningless series; every _now_ the final result of an individual combustion process that, hither descended from past beginninglessness, continues to burn on through future endlessness; the Kamma whereof, as oft as one form falls to pieces, without break seizes hold of a new raw-material. It is no persisting something in itself that passes over; it is the individual tendency, the predispositions, the character, the consciousness, or whatever else one has a mind to call the value in potential energy represented by the _I_-process at its disintegration, that passes over, by _immediately_ taking effect, striking in, imparting the new impulse to the material to which it is uniquely attuned--the material that appeals to it alone of all that is present, and to which it alone of all that is present, answers. Yet once more:-- Kamma is no cord binding the existences together--as little so as the lightning of the firmament is a cord. The notion of a persisting “self” or “soul” is repeatedly and emphatically repudiated.