The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c11.10

c11.10

But now the Hindu, subtle and at the same time naive, given over to rigid schematism and mechanical consistency, as all his intellectual history shows, becomes nervous about the permanence of life after death. What if the effect even of his good deeds should not last forever? What if, instead of the hoped-for immortality in yonder world, there be death again? One text fancies a limited immortality which lasts only a hundred years, that is, the ideal length of the life of man upon earth. The treasure of good deeds is after all finite; day and night, or, as we should say, time may exhaust the stock of one’s good works. In strict logic that must mean death anew. So we read in the Brāhmaṇa texts of fervent wishes and cunning rites potent to ensure imperishableness of one’s good works, and to cut off the possible recurrence of death.² There are also performances intended to secure to the deceased ancestors who, for aught one knows, are in the same danger of re-dying, genuine, instead of temporary and conditional immortality.³ This “death-anew,” or “re-death” (*punarmṛtyu*) as the Hindus call it, is an exceedingly characteristic idea, but it is not yet transmigration of souls. As long as its scene is located entirely in the other world, and as long as it is thought possible to avoid or cure it by the ordinary expedients of sacrifice, so long the essential character of that belief is not yet present. But the transition from one to the other was easy. If men can die in heaven there is no way, short of annihilation, to secure peace for anything that started out by being mortal. Next, the notion of "re-death" in the imagined world beyond was after all too shadowy; it lacked the practical data of experience. It was very natural to transplant the consequences of "re-death" to this earth, the home and hearth of death where men, like fish, die at every wink of the eye. He who must die again comes on to do it on earth where the trick is so well understood—lo and behold, we have the essential of metempsychosis, namely a succession of lives and deaths in the career of one and the same being. I am far from believing that even such smooth reasoning, taken by itself, suffices to account for the presence of this important doctrine in India. The germs of the belief in transmigration are very likely to have filtered into the Brahmanical consciousness from below, from popular sources, possibly from some of the aboriginal, non-Aryan tribes of India. Brahmanical religion has always borrowed immensely from folk beliefs and practices, and has always managed to impart to these borrowings the look of integral Brahmanical doctrine.