Man is for ever making his own world. Each act, each word, even each thought, adds something to the spiritual fabric which he is perpetually producing. He cannot escape the results of his own conduct. The values for good or evil mount up from hour to hour, and their issues must be fulfilled. When this {218} conception was carried through the universe, the whole sphere of animated existence was placed under its sway. The life of any single person upon earth was only an incident in a chain of lives, stretching into the distant past as well as into the immeasurable future. His condition hereafter would be determined by what he had done before he entered the state that would match his deed. Then his condition here was also determined by what he had wrought in a previous lot. His personal qualities, his health and sickness, his caste and rank, his wealth or poverty, all precisely matched some elements in the moral product of his past. These were, of course, never all precisely of one kind. They were of mingled good and evil, and each of these would in course of time have its appropriate consequence of joy and pain. For every shade of guilt there was a fitting punishment, exactly adjusted in severity and duration, either in degradation and suffering upon earth, or in some one of numerous hells below. And similarly all good was sure of its reward, as happiness and prosperity awaited it here, or were allotted in still richer measure for their due periods in the heavens that rose tier above tier beyond the sky. The doctrine of Transmigration has appeared in various forms, in very different cultures. But nowhere has it swayed whole civilisations as it has done in the East. It has expressed for innumerable multitudes the {219} essential bond of morals and religion. There were not wanting, indeed, teachers who criticised and rejected it when Gotama the Buddha passed to and fro five hundred years before our era. But while he repudiated the authority of the Vedas, the ceremonies of sacrifice, the claims of the Brahmans, and the immortality of the gods, he retained the doctrine of Karma at the very core of the system of ethical culture which he offered as the way out of the weary circle of re-birth. The whole meaning of the universe, its cosmic periods of dissolution and evolution, was still moral; and the scene of our existence came once more into being that the unexhausted potencies of countless products of the Deed from the lowest hell to the topmost heaven might realise their suspended energy. And when Buddhism became a religion through the interpretation of the person of its founder in terms of the Absolute and Eternal, this law of the phenomenal world of space and time remained beyond even his power to set aside or change.