A History of Indian Literature v1.c8.s2.141

v1.c8.s2.141

It would indeed be possible also to fit in these verses, as Oldenberg ² thinks, into the ritual of cremation. As we learn in the books of ritual, in ancient India the bones were collected after the cremation and placed in an urn, and this was buried. Accordingly these verses *could* have been uttered at the burial of this urn of bones. However I do not consider this probable. The words “wide open, Earth, O press not heavily on him” and so on, seem to me, only to be relevant at the erection of a mound over the actual corpse. The custom of burying the bones I consider to be a remnant of an older custom of the burial of the corpses, to which our verses refer.³