EDWARD SAID AND ORIENTALISM

(My guest lecture article in Christ university at Bangalore)

   

        Dear Friends,

       Let me spend some time to discuss the ideology about orientalism. Before going to start this lecture, I hereby quote the Karl Marx's famous lines " All philosophers are interpreting the world. However the question is how to change the world". We have to change the world through our ideology. With this in mind, Let me start with Orientalism.

Orientalism is not a concept of abstract. But it is a concrete concept and belongs to eastern polar of the world. However we are not exactly orientalist. Because it mostly refers to the Middle East for long time and its customs. Orientalism is a term used by art historians, literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Middle Eastern and East Asian cultures (Eastern cultures) by American and European writers, designers and artists. In particular, Orientalist painting, depicting more specifically "the Middle East" was one of the many specialisms of 19th century Academic art. Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, the term has arguably acquired a negative connotation. Because he had published a key book in seventies about orientalism and he had learned a lot of lessons and scratched everything from that. What he learnt from this was provided a new outlook all over the world about orientalism. The state of the art of orientalism was born. After this Edward said was emerged as authoritative person of theory of orientalism. Before that, we have to look in to the past life of Said. He was basically a Palestinian and then his family migrated to Egypt. His ultimate life was in U.S and worked as English professor at Columbia University. Said Academic accounts and breadth of experience have created effective ideological switches at his writings. His first book published on 1966 named “Joseph conrad and fiction of autobiography”. It was focused on academic and intellectual circle and after that he became an eminent and reputed intellectual.  Next he published the most prominent and bestseller the Orientalism at 1978. It also refers the bible of Post-colonial studies and razed the rigid image of Western philosophical fountain. Before this they believed and imposed on the world that they are only the donors of the philosophy and intellect. But others are acceptors of that sort of things. After the publication of this book Said did a great and right job for destabilize and deconstruct this. Actually oriental thought starts when Nepolian invaded the Egypt in Nineteen century. After that he continues to invade Algeria and Morocca. Edward said describes, this is the exact starting point of the orientalism and its thought. He has spared no effort to establish and construct the ideology of Orientalism. Moreover he spread and left this ideology over the eastern world in the space of 20 years.

Said was an influential cultural critic and author, known best for the book Orientalism (1978). The book presented his influential ideas on Orientalism—the Western study of Eastern cultures. Said contended that Orientalist scholarship was and continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently politicized, servile to power, and therefore suspect. Grounding much of this thesis in his intimate knowledge of colonial literature such as the fiction of Conrad, and in the post-structuralist theory of Foucault, Derrida and others, Said's Orientalism and following works proved influential in literary theory and criticism, and continue to influence several other fields in the humanities. Orientalism affected Middle Eastern studies in particular, transforming the way practitioners of the discipline describe and examine the Middle East. Said came to discuss and vigorously debate the issue of Orientalism with scholars in the fields of history and area studies, many of whom disagreed with his thesis, including most famously Bernard Lewis. Before we enter this, we have to go through about Egypt and its historical account.  Orient theory traces the back of beyond to the history of civilization and its development. History back to us in front of Egypt.

According to the Herodotus, he said, concerning the Egypt I will now speak at length, because nowhere are there so many marvelous things, nor anywhere else on earth are there to be seen so many works of inexpressible greatness. Already in Herodotus time, the Egypt was recognized as an ancient civilization. Its extraordinary accomplishments commanded the wonder and admiration of foreign visitors. While many of its customs astonished and even shocked them. Yet ancient Egypt was only one of many civilizations that developed independently of each other in different parts the world about five thousand years ago. Yet Egyptian civilization also shared important features with many other civilizations and in some instances with all of them. Kingship, taxes and bureaucracy are only a few traits that are found in all early civilizations. The identification and explanation of such common features help scholars to understand every early civilization better. The concept of early civilization as a distinctive type of society implies an evolutionary view of human history. Social evolutionism has been sharply attacked in recent decades as a myth that was created by western European scholars beginning in the eighteenth century to justify colonial exploitation in many parts of the world. During the past five decades archeologists have spent much time and no spare effort to study how early civilizations developed. Since archaeology’s chief strength is what it can reveal about changes over long periods of time, this seems to be a potentially highly productive approach. However , while these efforts have resulted in major discoveries relating to the development of specific early civilizations, the theoretical  advances do not seem proportional to the amount of energy expended. There are at least two main reasons for this. First the origins of early eastern civilizations everywhere predated the earliest appearance of substantial written records. One needs only to think of the controversies concerning the nature of the social and political organization of the Indus valley civilization that remain unresolved for lack of contemporary written records. Second as a result of prolonged occupation, the earliest levels at many important sites have been buried under thick layers of debris from later periods. Because of this, archeologists are limited in what they can learn about the formative stages of civilization at many key centers. It will take a long time to uncover crucial archeological evidence concerning the initial development of many early civilizations. Thus early civilizations closely linked to the theory of orientalism and its development.

More over the Orientalism" refers to the Orient or East, in contrast to the Occident or West, and often, as seen by the West. "Orientalism" is widely used in art, to refer to the works of the many Western 19th century artists, who specialized in "Oriental" subjects, often drawing on their travels to Western Asia like Machiavelli . Artists as well as scholars were already described as "Orientalists" in the 19th century, especially in France, where the term, with a rather dismissive sense, was largely popularized by the critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary. Such disdain did not prevent the "Society of Orientalist Painters"being founded in 1893, with Jean-Léon Gérôme as honorary president;[4] the word was less often used as a term for artists in 19th century England.

Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly). Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what it was calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic "Oriental" awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.

It will be clear to the reader that by Orientalism mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with "the Orient" as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the orient.

Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of "interests" which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with Ideas about what "we" do and what "they" cannot do or understand as "we" do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with "our" world.

Interestingly, Said (1993, 1994) also presents distance as a requisite of intellectual labour. He does not use the term `detachment', but prefers the more emotive term, `exile'. In the context of the postcolonial debate, Said'sunderstanding of exile is that intellectuals must be both inside and outside the cultures in which they are located. Metaphorically, Said uses the concept to propose a preferred attitude in intellectual labour both to the object of study and to the traditions in which one is situated.Critical sociology accepts the requirement for a degree of emotional distance from the object of enquiry in academic work and we also condone the recent defence that re¯exivity is a proper aspiration for relevant sociology (Beck et al., 1994).

Post-colonialism is an intellectual direction (sometimes also called an “era” or the “post-colonial theory”) that exists since around the middle of the 20th century. It developed from and mainly refers to the time after colonialism. The post-colonial direction was created as colonial countries became independent. Nowadays, aspects of post-colonialism can be found not only in sciences concerning history, literature and politics, but also in approach to culture and identity of both the countries that were colonised and the former colonial powers. However, post-colonialism can take the colonial time as well as the time after colonialism into consideration.

Post-colonial critical theory draws from, illustrates, and explains with examples from the humanities — history, architecture, anthropology, the cinema, feminism, human geography, linguistics, Marxist theory, philosophy, political science, sociology, religion and theology, and post-colonial literature — in presenting the ideology and the praxis of contemporary (neo) colonialism. Some post colonialists are Franz fanon, Vandana shiva, Homi bhava, Parvez hootbai, and Gayathri spivek. They were contributed in each and every track of its thought and they wrote a lot of books and acted upon its inner circles. Their extreme and direct involvement with post colonialism arena was become a new era.

Post-colonial studies entail the critical destabilization of the social, linguistic, and economic theories that support the Western ways of thinking, of perceiving, understanding, and knowing the world; thus is intellectual space created for the subaltern peoples to speak for themselves, in their own voices, and so produce alternative conversations to the dominant “Us-and-Them” discourse, between the colonist and the colonized. Occasionally, the term post-colonialism is applied literally — as the period after colonialism — which is problematic, given that the de-colonized world is filled with “contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and liminal ties”. [2] Hence does post-colonialism also denote the continuation of colonialism by other means — economic, cultural, and linguistic — by the “Mother Country”, which are relationships of colonial power that control the production and distribution of knowledge about the world. The term “decolonisation” seems to be of particular importance while talking about post-colonialism. In this case it means an intellectual process that persistently transfers the independence of former-colonial countries into people’s minds. The basic idea of this process is the deconstruction of old-fashioned perceptions and attitudes of power and oppression that were adopted during the time of colonialism.

First attempts to put this long-term policy of “decolonising the minds” into practice could be regarded in the Indian population after India became independent from the British Empire in 1947.The form of action theory that we are interested in defends the researcher's political engagement with the object of enquiry while placing the responsibility for re¯exivity on the researcher's shoulders and, of course, on the shoulders of the wider research community in which the researcher is located. The term that best captures this for us is`engaged detachment'. By this we mean an attitude to research which recognizes that intellectuals are citizens of societies and therefore have conscious and unconscious attachments to the human formations which they study. In addition, these attachments should be no less the subject of critical, detached scrutiny than the relations and processes that constitute the object of study. Our position is clearly a further re¯ection on Weber's notion of `vocation'. While the value-neutrality argument is typically misunderstood to indicate that academics should remain remote from political involvement, we argue that his concepts of value-relevance and value analysis described engaged detachment. Sociology is, apparently more than other social science and humanities disciplines, prone to fashion and intellectual crisis. These fashions in theory unfortunately obscure what we perceive to be the cumulative nature of sociological enquiry.  As a response to the `cultural turn', we recognize the cumulative achievements of substantial research on cultural history from Elias on the civilizing process, Bourdieu on the cultural ®eld, and Sennett on public space and architectural culture. For us, the attempt to resecure the social also requires a particular political orientation, which we have termed `engaged detachment'. If sociology is to survive as a viable discipline, it must provide public intellectuals with a detached perspective and engaged practices towards communitas.

In the contemporary world, especially the current eastern world is facing lot of challenges and issues because of western superiority. In the application of orientalism, we have to look in to the current trend and observe the impact of its elements on the eastern region. Much more problems are occurring in every day human life and its movements. For example in eighties the WTO had introduced the new discourses in front of us. Globalization, liberalization and privatization. Subsequently these discourses were created lot of post– events, namely global warming, glocalization, marketization, poverty and starvation of developing countries. We should consider that it is not a merely positive thing. But it should be considered by negative connotation and its contra effects. It will be acted on us for long time and deep injective level.

Globalization is a relatively recent term. It appeared in English-language usage only in the 1960s, albeit without the heavy connotations that it began to carry in the 1990s. Other similar expressions, however, already popularized the core meaning of all people on earth living in a single social space, notably Marshall McLuhan’s notion of a ‘global village’ (McLuhan1964). Entering social scientific discourse in the early 1980s, globalization itself subsequently became such a widespread term that it has become something close to a general name for the current era in which we all live, for better or worse. And in fact, the evaluation of globalization oscillates uneasily between utopian promise and dystopian menace. Parallel to this ambivalent attitude has been a very consistent tendency to understand globalization in terms of analytic binaries, especially the spatial distinction between the global and the local, or that between universal and particular (see esp.Robertson 1992).The global in globalization refers both to a Geographic limit, the earth as a physical place, and to an encompassing range of influence, namely that all contemporary social reality is supposedly conditioned or even determined by it. This inescapable and inclusive quality contrasts with the notion of modernization; arguably the prime term that globalization has replaced both in popular and scientific discourse. While modernization excluded various ‘others’ that were deemed either pre-modern/traditional or only on the way to modernization, globalization includes us all, even our‘ others’. Modernization temporalized its universalism: eventually all would/could become modern. Globalization spatializes it: the local has to come to terms with the global. It (re)constitutes itself in the way that it does this. The reverse side of this mutual relation is that the global cannot be global except as plural versions of the local. Hence globalization is always also glocalization (Robertson1995), the global expressed in the local and the local as the particularization of the global. This difference between modernization and globalization allows us to understand the different attitudes toward religion that prevail under the aegis of each term.

In general, liberalization (or liberalization) refers to a relaxation of previous government restrictions, usually in areas of social or economic policy. Most often, the term is used to refer to economic liberalization, especially trade liberalization or capital market liberalization. It is acted on each and every part of our life as very serious. In current aspect such relaxation is not endowed with golden effects. But until this moment such a policy is going to serious adverse effects.

Finally we would say, what we know and make out from all this? Orientalism and its afterthought post colonialism played a vital role in our past history and its journey. It was contributed and stimulated by people in various real time issues. Current social problems are awaking by post-colonial thought in its initial level. Post independent countries are seriously thinking and fighting for that. Think –tanks are doing at various parts of the world, especially developing world or countries. Different socio –cultural problems and injustice events are coming about as daily events. Environmental crisis, Racism, casteism, caste suppression, gender inequality, violence against children, honor and mercy killing and violation of human rights. As a scholar of humanities, we should aware and study about these issues and go through it very deep. It is our only duty to study the literature and art as academic level even though having our own life struggle beyond this. 

Thank you for your time and  Thank you very much Mr. Padmakumar for providing this opportunity.

மனிதனும் இருப்பும் - மறுபிறப்புப் பற்றி - சாரிபுத்திரருக்கும் மஹாகோத்திதருக்கும் இடையே நடந்த உரையாடல்

மனித இருப்பு மற்றும் அதன் இயக்க நிலை குறித்து பௌத்தத்தின் கோட்பாடு
விஸ்தாரமானது. மனிதன் இறந்த பின் என்னவாக மாறுகிறான்? அவனின் இருப்பு என்ன? உடல் என்பது என்ன? புலன் செயல்பாடுகள் எதனை பொறுத்து அமைந்துள்ளன? என்பதற்கானகேள்விகளுக்கு பௌத்தம் பதில் கண்டது. புத்தரின் சமகலாத்தவர்கள் இது குறித்து இரு வேறு கருத்துடையவர்களாய் இருந்தார்கள். ஒரு பிரிவினர்கள் அமரத்வ வாதிகள் என்றும் மற்றொரு குழுவினர் நிலையாமைவாதிகள் என்றும் அழைக்கப்பட்டனர். ஆன்மா இறப்பதில்லை. எனவே வாழ்க்கை அமரத்வமானது. அது மறுபிறப்பை புதுப்பிக்கப்படுகிறது என்றனர் அவர்கள். நிலையாமைவாதிகளின் கோட்பாடு உத்சேதவாதம் என்னும் ஒரே சொல்லாக தொகுக்கப்படுகிறது. மரணம் அனைத்துக்கும் இறுதியானது. மரணத்திற்கு பின் எஞ்சுவது எதுவுமில்லை.

புத்தர் மறுபிறப்பை நம்பினாரா? என்பது இயல்பாக எதிர்பார்க்கப்படுகிறது. ஆனால் புத்தரின் கருத்துப்படி ஓர் உடலை உருவாக்கும் மூலங்கள் நான்காகும்.

1) ப்ரித்வி (2) அபா (3) தேஜ் (4) வாயு.

உடல் மரணமடையும் போது இந்த நான்கு மூலங்களுக்கும் என்ன நேர்கிறது? அவைகளும் மரணமற்ற உடலோடு சேர்ந்து மரணித்து விடுகின்றனவா? அவ்வாறு தான் நடைபெறுகிறது என்று சிலர் கூறுகிறார்கள். இதனை மறுத்தார் புத்தர். அவை வெளியோடு கலந்து அதனை ஒத்த மூலங்களின் தொகுதியோடு இணைந்து விடுகின்றன என்றார்.

இந்த மிதக்கும் தொகுதியில் இருந்து நான்கு மூலங்கள் ஒன்றாக இணையும் போது ஒரு புதிய பிறப்பு தோன்றுகிறது. மறுபிறப்பு பற்றி புத்தர் கருதியது இதுவே. இந்த மூலங்கள் இறந்த ஒரே உடலிலிருந்தவையாயிருக்க வேண்டிய அவசியமில்லை. நிர்பந்தமுமில்லை. அவை இறந்த வெவ்வேறு உடல்களிலிருந்து சேர்ந்த தொகுதியிலிருந்து ஈர்க்கப்பட்டிருக்கலாம். உடல் இறக்கிறது. ஆனால் மூலகங்கள் எப்போதும் வாழ்கின்றன. இம்மாதிரியான மறுபிறப்பிலேயே புத்தர் நம்பிக்கை கொண்டிருந்தார். மஹாகோத்திதரோடு சாரிபுத்திரர் மேற்கொண்ட உரையாடலில் இந்த விஷயம் விளக்கப்பட்டிருக்கிறது. ஒருமுறை புத்தர் சிராவஸ்தியில், அநாதபிண்டிகாரின் ஆசிரமத்திலுள்ள ஜேதவனச் சோலை விகாரில் தங்கியிருக்கையில், மாலை நேர தியானங்களிலிருந்து எழுந்த மஹாகோத்திதர் சாரிபுத்திரரிடம் வந்து தம்மைத் தொல்லைப்படுத்தும் சில கேள்விகளை தெளிவுப்படுத்தும்படி கேட்டார்.

மஹாகேத்திதர் : முதற்பேரானந்தம் தியானம் வெளிவிடும் காரணிகளும் தானிருத்திக் கொள்ளும் காரணிகளும் எத்தனை?

சாரிபுத்திரர் சொன்னார் : ஒவ்வொரு வகைக்கும் விட்டு விடுபவை ஐந்து அவை காமம், குரோதம், சோம்பல், கவலை மற்றும் சந்தேகம். உற்று நோக்கல், உயத்துணரல், ஊக்கமுடிடமை, திருப்தி மற்றும் ஒருமைப்பட்ட மனம் ஆகியவை நிலைத்திருப்பவை.

மஹாகோத்திதர் : பார்வை, சப்தம், சுவை, ஸ்பரிசம், வாசனை ஆகியவற்றின் ஐம்புலன்களை எடுத்துக் கொள்வோம்.ஒவ்வொன்றும் அதன் சுயதளத்திலும், வரம்பிலும் தனித்தும், வேறுபட்டும் இயங்குகின்றன. இவற்றின் அடிப்படை யாது? அவற்றின் ஐந்தளங்களையும், வரம்புகளையும் அனுபவிப்பது எது?

சாரிபுத்திரர் சொன்னார் மனம். அப்படியானால் புலன்களின் இந்த ஐந்து செயல்திறன்களும் எதனை பொறுத்துள்ளன?

உயர்சக்தியை என்றார் சாரிபுத்திரர்.

கோத்திதர் கேட்டார் உயிர்சக்தி எதனை பொறுத்துள்ளது?

வெப்பத்தை என்றார்.

வெப்பம் எதை பொறுத்துள்ளது?

உயிர்சக்தியை என்றார்.

கோத்திதர் கேட்டார் உயிர்சக்தி வெப்பதை பொறுத்துள்ளது என்கிறீர்கள். வெப்பம் உயிர்சக்தியை பொறுத்திருக்கிறது என்று கூறுகிறீர்கள். அதன் சரியான அர்த்தம் தான் என்ன?

நான் உங்களுக்கு ஒரு எடுத்துக்காட்டை கூறுகிறேன். ஒரு விளக்கில் நிகழ்வது போல் ஒளி சுடரை வெளிப்படுத்துகிறது, சுடர் ஒளியை வெளிப்படுத்துகிறது. அதே போல் உயிர்சக்தி வெப்பத்தைப் பொறுத்துள்ளது. வெப்பம் உயிர்சக்தியை பொறுத்துள்ளது. கோத்திதர் கேட்டார் உணர்ச்சியற்ற ஒரு மரத்துண்டைப் போல உடல் தூக்கி எறியப்படும் முன், அதை விட்டு எத்தனை பொருட்கள் சென்று விடுகின்றன.

சாரிபுத்திரர் சொன்னார் உயிர்சக்தி, வெப்பம், தன்னுணர்வு.

மஹாகோத்திதர் கேட்டார் காணும் உணர்வும்,. உணர்ச்சிகளும் செயலற்று நிற்க, உறங்குகிற பிக்குவிற்கும் உயிரற்ற பிணத்திற்குமிடையே என்ன வேறுபாடு?

சாரிபுத்திரர் சொன்னார் பிணத்தில் உடலின் வேதியல் இயங்குசக்திகளும், பேச்சும் மனனும் அடங்கிச் செயலற்று போவதோடு மட்டுமன்றி, உயிர்சக்தி அற்று விடுகிறது. ஆனால் உறங்கும் பிக்குவிடம், சுவாசம் குறைந்து, கூர்நோக்கும் பார்வையும் செயலற்று நின்றிருப்பினும், உயிர்சக்தி நிலவுகிறது. வெப்பம் நிலைத்திருக்கிறது மற்றும் செயல்திறன்கள் தெளிவாகஇருக்கின்றன. அநேகமாக இது தான் இறப்பு அல்லது அழிவு குறித்த தெளிவான விஷயமாகும்.

மஹா கோத்திதருக்கும் சாரிபுத்திரருக்கும் இடையே நடந்த மேற்கண்ட உரையாடல் மனிதனின் மறுபிறப்பு குறித்த தர்க்கத்திற்கு வருகிறது. சாரிபுத்திரர் இறுதியில் சொன்ன வெப்பம் என்பது சக்தி தான். சக்தியே உடலின் இருப்புக்கு காரணமாக அமைகிறது. ஒருவன் இறக்கும் போது இந்த சக்தியின் உற்பத்தி தடைப்பட்டு போகிறது. என்ன மாதிரியான சக்திகள் உடலிலிருந்து விடுபட்டு போயிருக்கின்றனவோஅம்மாதிரியான சக்திகள்பிரபஞ்ச வெளியானது மறுசுழற்சியால் ஆனது. விஞ்ஞானம் இதனை பலமுறை நிருபித்திருக்கிறது. ஆகவே நிலையாமை இருவித அம்சங்களை உடையது. ஒன்று அதன் ஆற்றல் உருவாக்கம், மற்றொன்று மிதந்து செல்லும் வெளியில் இருப்பின் புதிய சேர்க்கை. அநேகமாக அழிவின் இந்த இருவிதமான அம்சங்களை வைத்து தான் புத்தர் தாம் ஒரு முற்றான அழிவு நிலை வாதி அல்ல என்று கூறினார். ஆன்மாவை பொறுத்தவரை அவர் ஓர் அழிவு நிலை வாதி தான். பருப்பொருளைப் பொறுத்தவரை அவர் ஓர் அழிவுநிலை வாதி அல்ல. பருப்பொருளின் மீட்டுருவாக்கத்தில் அவர் நம்பிக்கை கொண்டாரே ஒழிய ஆன்மாவின் மறுபிறப்பில் அல்ல.

மனிதனின் மறுபிறப்பு குறித்த புத்தரின் கோட்பாடு தெளிவானதாகவும், இயங்கியலாகவும் உள்ளது. மிதந்து செல்லும் உடல்களுக்கும், நிலைக்கும் உடல்களுக்கும் இடையே உள்ள வித்தியாசம் மறுபிறப்பு கோட்பாட்டோடு நன்றாகவே பொருந்துகிறது.