History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v5.c72.23

v5.c72.23

The germs of this idea are found even in the Upanisads. The Chāndogya Up. (in the famous Śāṇḍilya-vidyā, III. 14. 1) remarks 'All this is Brahman. A man should meditate on that (all this) as beginning, ending and subsisting in it (Brahman). Now man is a creature of his will. According to whatever is his will (or thought) in this world, so will he become after departing from this world.'⁴³³ The Praśna Up. III. 10 contains a similar idea. It is here asserted that it is thought power or the will that raises the soul higher and higher, and that the human mind should try to realize the idea that behind all physical transformations the Universe is one and is informed by one all-pervading Essence. Similarly, the Bhagavadgītā puts this idea in a much more clear way. 'The man, who remembering me alone in his last moments, departs from this life, comes to me, there is no doubt about this' (8. 5). But in order to guard against the possible inference that it is only the thoughts at the approach of death that matter whatever the past life led by a dying man may have been, the next verse emphasizes that a man's spirit is engrossed by the thoughts that he has entertained throughout life and that a man can think of spiritual matters or about God at the time of death only if he has been thinking about such matters or about God throughout his life. That verse (8.6) is 'whichever form (or thing) a man remembers when he leaves the body at death, to that alone he goes, having been always (throughout his life) engrossed in meditating over it"