The Arctic Home in the Vedas c7.29

c7.29

But the correspondence between the Indian and the Parsi scriptures does not stop here. There is a strong prejudice, connected with the Pitriyâna, found in the later Indian literature, and even this has its parallel in the Parsi scriptures. The Hindus consider it inauspicious for a man to die during the Pitriyâna, and the great Mahâbhârata warrior, Bhîshma, is said to have waited on his death-bed until the sun passed through the winter solstice, as the Dakṣiṇâyana, which is synonymous with the Pitṛiyâna, was then understood to mean the time required by the sun to travel from the summer to the winter solstice.¹ A number of passages scattered over the whole Upaniṣad literature support the same view, by describing the course of the soul of a man according as he dies during the Devayâna or the Pitṛiyâna, and exhibiting a marked preference for the fate of the soul of a man dying during the path of the Gods, or the Devayâna. All these passages will be found collected in Shankarâchârya’s Bhâṣhya on Brahma-Sûtras, IV, 2, 18-21, wherein Bâdarâyaṇa,² anxious to reconcile all these passages with the practical difficulty sure to be experienced if death during the night of the Gods were held to be absolutely unmeritorious from a religious point of view, has recorded his opinion that we must not interpret these texts as predicating an uncomfortable future life for every man dying during the Dakṣiṇâyana or the night of the Gods. As an alternative Bâdarâyaṇa, therefore, adds that these passages may be taken to refer to the Yogins who desire to attain to a particular kind of heaven after death. Whatever we may think of this view, we can, in this attempt of Bâdarâyaṇa, clearly see a distinct consciousness of the existence of a tradition, which, if it did not put an absolute ban on death during the night of the Gods, did, at any rate, clearly disapprove of such occurrences from a religious point of view. If the Pitṛiyâna originally represented, as stated above, a period of continuous darkness the tradition can be easily and rationally explained; for as the Pitṛiyâna then meant an uninterrupted night, the funeral ceremonies of any one dying during the period were deferred till the break of the dawn at the end of the Pitriyâna, or the commencement of the Devayâna. Even now death during night is considered inauspicious, and the funeral generally takes place after daybreak.