The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.172

v1.c17.172

The origin of this doctrine may have been helped by the widely prevalent view among tribes of animists that the souls on death or even in life can pass into other forms, animal or vegetable. We have seen that in the Rigveda in one hymn the soul is regarded as going to the waters or the plants; and we have no reason to doubt that such ideas were prevalent among the aboriginal tribes with which the Āryans mixed. But these vague ideas are totally inadequate to account for the belief in transmigration, and the theory must, it would seem, have been a discovery of the schools of seekers after the nature of truth, who arrived at it on the one side from the popular beliefs of the peoples among whom they lived, and on the other from the conception of the Brāhmaṇas that death could be repeated in the other world. The doctrine led directly to pessimism, but the Upanishads are not themselves pessimistic; and we obtain thus a valuable evidence of their priority to the rise of Buddhism, which is saturated with the doctrine of the misery of the universe. The extraordinary success of the doctrine shows that it was in harmony with the spirit of the Indian people, and suggests what is otherwise probable, that by the end of the period of the Brāhmaṇas the influence of the Āryan strain was waning, and that the true Indian character of the intellectual classes was definitely formed.