On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c5.49

c5.49

The passage indicates that it was the practice of religious teachers to incite their lay-hearers by the promise of rewards in the next birth to commit suicide, and that they distributed tablets of wood or bamboo with inscriptions specifying the manner of the death and the rewards to be gained. The statement is perfectly credible, as religious suicide, or suicide with the hope of rewards in the next birth, was very common in ancient India and even occurred not rarely within [12] the last thirty or forty years.² The Dharmasūtras and the metrical Smṛtis mention the voluntary death by starvation or by other more violent means and even recommend it to the hermits and to the other ascetics,³ and there are passages in the Mahābhārata, where ascetics, kings and others are recommended to put an end to their existence by starvation, jumping down from precipices, voluntary cremation and so forth. The Jainas were and are universally in favour of the ‘death of the sages’, though it has gone out of fashion in our days. And Hiwen Tsiang, Siyuki I, p. 232 (Beal) testifies to the prevalence of the belief that a jump from the Akṣaya Vaṭa, the sacred fig-tree at Allahabad, secured re-birth among the gods, as well as to the fact that it was acted on in the seventh century. Like the majority of the Brahminical teachers who, though giving the old rules, strongly disapprove of suicide, the Buddhists naturally opposed such practices. Their statement that written exhortations to suicide used to be given, furnishes another valuable piece of evidence for the very general use of writing in ancient India.