The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c24.55

v1.c24.55

Despite the importance which legitimately attaches to it, the moral element in the Rigveda and the subsequent literature is of comparatively small extent, and the vast majority of the Vedic hymns are not concerned in the remotest degree with questions of morals. The chief requirement for man, in the opinion of the poets, is not that he should be good or be conscious of sin and attain forgiveness, but that he should have faith in the gods and pay them their honours due, nor should he fail in so doing to remember his obligation towards the priest, who alone can rightly perform the sacrifice for him and create the hymn of praise. The personification of Faith is a very essential thing in the eyes of the priest:⁷ it is Faith which makes a man believe in the existence of such a god as Indra, and which makes him appreciate the need of sacrifice to Indra and of generosity to the priests. Faith becomes a very real goddess in the Rigveda: she receives formal obligations and is exhalted by a priesthood, who had her to thank for their daily food. The priests soon realized that the patron must be induced to realize that he gained something from his offerings which must have gravely reduced his possessions: they promise the offerer long life for his gifts;¹ they assure him that what the god—and his priest—takes does not in any wise diminish his goods, an idea found in the latest as well as the earliest² literature, they promise immortality to the giver of gold, the sun to givers of horses.³ No exaltation is too high for Faith: it is through her that Naciketas in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad insists on his father giving him to death, when his father offered a sacrifice of all he had, but yet did not propose to include his son in it. On the other hand a poet⁴ makes clear the causal nexus of life in the sequence, Faith, Consecration for Sacrifice, the Sacrifice, the Sacrificial Fee: all that is lacking is the eternal life in the world to come, which is the share of the sacrificer. A technical term, Iṣṭāpūrta, denotes the merit won by offering and gifts to the priest a distant precursor of the later Karman: in the funeral hymn⁵ the dead man is bidden to unite himself with the Fathers, with the fruit of his offerings and gifts; the gods are bidden to unite him with his Iṣṭāpūrta, when he has attained their abode,⁶ and it is declared that the liberal giver⁷ is he who gazes on the third step of Viṣṇu set in the sky: no more clear way of attaining heaven has often been offered to man. But it must be remembered that the man must be rich: the true sacrificer is he who gives all his wealth to the priest as the fee, or who at least gives, like Kaurama among the Ruçamas,⁸ a hundred jewels, ten chaplets, three hundred horses, and ten thousand cattle. In return for this generosity the sacrificer, however, gets something, which in the eyes of the priest doubtless seemed worth more than even immortality, the glory of mention of his generosity in a Vedic hymn.