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“Manifold the renewals of my birth

Have been.... When Righteousness

Declines, O Bharata, when Wickedness

Is strong, I rise, from age to age, and take

Visible shape, and move a man with men,

Succouring the good, thrusting the evil back,

And setting Virtue on her seat again.”

Rhys Davids justly observed that “to the pious Buddhist it is a constant source of joy and gratitude that ‘the Buddha,’ not only then, but in many former births, when emancipation from all the cares and troubles of life was already within his reach, should again and again, in mere love for man, have condescended to enter the world, and live amidst the sorrows inseparable from finite existence.”47 Perhaps in a more general sense the idea of reincarnation appealed strongly to the imagination of Wordsworth, when he was inspired to write these familiar, yet exquisite, lines:—

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar.”