The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c5.24

c5.24

The origin of the belief has been attributed to borrowing from aboriginal tribes,† it being a common view in primitive peoples that the spirits of their dead pass into other forms of life. Traces of similar views have also been seen in occasional hints in the *Ṛgveda* of the departure of the elements of the dead to their proper abodes. The real importance of the Indian doctrine, however, is the moral tinge given to it by Yājñavalkya, while its immediate precursor in the Brāhmaṇas is the dread of repeated death, which is expressed in the view that even after death death may await the man who is not proficient in some ritual performance.‡ This conception of Punarmṛtyu, repeated death, for a time evidently played a considerable place in the ideas of the Brāhmaṇas, as is seen by the quite frequent occurrence of the conception in the *Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa* and by its mention in the *Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇa*, and the turning of a ritual conception into a moral one was as natural as the transfer of the repetition of birth in the world beyond to the birth in this world, which was the one thing wanting to make the conception really a doctrine of transmigration. This step is not certainly taken in any passage of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, though a few passages are open to this interpretation. In making the decisive change it is, of course, perfectly possible that the popular ideas of the spirit of the ancestor taking up its abode in some beast or bird or other form, such as that of a snake, may have helped the conception to take root and become easily appreciated. It is indeed doubtful whether without some such backgrond we could explain the extraordinary success of the doctrine in winning the real and lasting adherence of the great mass of the people of India. None the less, it must remain extraordinary that none of the philosophical systems should have attempted to examine the validity of the belief, a fact which stands in striking contrast with the procedure of Plato, who, in the Phaedo, provides a philosophic background for the conception, which he probably took direct from the popular Pythagorean or Orphic conception of the fate of the soul.