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implied in the whole doctrine of rebirth which proclaims thafc no soul belongs to a family or race, that there are no Aryan and un-Aryan, Brahmana and Kshatriya souls, that the souls inherit only its own deeds, together with the morał dispositions engendered therefrom, without entering in any relation with the souls of their ancestors *. The solidarity of the members of the Sangha is based solely on the common striving for deliverance. Castes and birth distinction belong to the laukika vyavahara: Buddhism does not oppose these conventions but considers them quite irrelevant from the point of view of its soteriology.

It is evident that ancestor worship is entirely inconsistent with this ideology, and, as a conseąuence, this fundamental element of Vedism is quite foreign to Buddhism^{1 2}. The theory of samsara appears in the history of Indo-Aryan roligiou as a tot-ally new doctrine without any precedents ³ in the earlier Brah-manism. It was often supposed thad it is not of Aryan origin. Its incompatibility with the Aryan conception of inheritance is, I think, a valid reason in favour of these suppositions.

There are yet other details which point to the relations of the Gandharya theory with un-Aryan matriarchal ideology. In Abhidharmokośa, the celebrated treatise of Vasubandhu, we find an interesting passage describing the reincarnation process in the foilowing way: The Gandharya seeing from a distance its father and mother united in the act of procreation, is oyerpowered by passion for its mother and hatred for its father, when it is a małe Gandharva, or with passion for its father and hatred for its mother, if it is a female Gandharya. Under the influence of these conflicting sentiments, it loses his presence of mind and becomes affected by the illusion that it takes itself an actiye part in

1

   Cf. the arguments against the castes in the AssalSyana Sutta (Majjh. Kik. II, p. 157) and Vajrasucl: tatra jlvas tavad brdhmano na bhavati (Weber, Abh. d. Kgl. Akademie der Wiss. zu Berlin, 1859, p. 218).

2

   There are in Buddhism attemps to reconcile the old ancestral worship with the new universalist morality. They refer to the authority of the Ava-lambana9utra (Yii lan p’en ching, Taishó Issaikyó, Nr. 685). On the mean-ing of the term avalambana — yii lan cf. J. Przyluski, Melanges chinois et bouddhiques, Bruxelles 1932, p. 221.

3

¹ The Vedic conception of the »second death« (punarmrtyu) has no-thing to do with reincarnation.