Love of life and the desire to find a field of activity are so strong in most Europeans that it might be supposed that a theory offering an endless vista of new activities and new chances would be acceptable.
But as a rule Europeans who discuss the question say that they do not relish this prospect.
They may be willing to struggle until death, but they wish for repose-conscious repose of course-afterwards.
The idea that one just dead has not entered into his rest, but is beginning another life with similar struggles and fleeting successes, similar sorrows and disappointments, is not satisfying and is almost shocking.
We do not like it, and not to like any particular view about the destinies of the soul is generally, but most illogically, considered a reason for rejecting it.
It must not however be supposed that Hindus like the prospect of transmigration.
On the contrary from the time of the Upanishads and the Buddha to the present day their religious ideal corresponding to salvation is emancipation and deliverance, deliverance from rebirth and from the bondage of desire which brings about rebirth.
Now all Indian theories as to the nature of transmigration are in some way connected with the idea of Karma, that is the power of deeds done in past existences to condition or even to create future existences.
Every deed done, whether good or bad, affects the character of the doer for a long while, so that to use a metaphor, the soul awaiting rebirth has a special shape, which is of its own making, and it can find re-embodiment only in a form into which that shape can squeeze.
These views of rebirth and karma have a moral value, for they teach that what a man gets depends on what he is or makes himself to be, and they avoid the difficulty of supposing that a benevolent creator can have given his creatures only one life with such strange and unmerited disproportion in their lots.
Ordinary folk in the East hope that a life of virtue will secure them another life as happy beings on earth or perhaps in some heaven which, though not eternal, will still be long.
But for many the higher ideal is renunciation of the world and a life of contemplative asceticism which will accumulate no karma so that after death the soul will pass not to another birth but to some higher and more mysterious state which is beyond birth and death.
It is the prevalence of views like this which has given both Hinduism and Buddhism the reputation of being pessimistic and unpractical.
It is generally assumed that these are bad epithets, but are they not applicable to Christian teaching? Modern and medieval Christianity-as witness many popular hymns-regards this world as vain and transitory, a vale of tears and tribulation, a troubled sea through whose waves we must pass before we reach our rest.
And choirs sing, though without much conviction, that it is weary waiting here.
This language seems justified by the Gospels and Epistles.
It is true that some utterances of Christ suggest that happiness is to be found in a simple and natural life of friendliness and love, but on the whole both he and St Paul teach that the world is evil or at least spoiled and distorted: to become a happy world it must be somehow remade and transfigured by the second coming of Christ.
The desires and ambitions which are the motive power of modern Europe are, if not wrong, at least vain and do not even seek for true peace and happiness.
Like Indian teachers, the early Christians tried to create a right temper rather than to change social institutions.
They bade masters and slaves treat one another with kindness and respect, but they did not attempt to abolish slavery.
Indian thought does not really go much further in pessimism than Christianity, but its pessimism is intellectual rather than emotional.
He who understands the nature of the soul and its successive lives cannot regard any single life as of great importance in itself, though its consequences for the future may be momentous, and though he will not say that life is not worth living.
Reiterated declarations that all existence is suffering do, it is true, seem to destroy all prospect of happiness and all motive for effort, but the more accurate statement is, in the words of the Buddha himself, that all clinging to physical existence involves suffering.
The earliest Buddhist texts teach that when this clinging and craving cease, a feeling of freedom and happiness takes their place and later Buddhism treated itself to visions of paradise as freely as Christianity.
Many forms of Hinduism teach that the soul released from the body can enjoy eternal bliss in the presence of God and even those severer philosophers who do not admit that the released soul is a personality in any human sense have no doubt of its happiness.
These mystical states are commonly described as meditation but they include not merely peaceful contemplation but ecstatic rapture.
They are sometimes explained as union with Brahman, the absorption of the soul in God, or its feeling that it is one with him.