The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c32.s7.21

v2.c32.s7.21

The Vedic oath is often recorded: the king at the great consecration recorded by the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa must swear to his priest to be true, at the cost otherwise of all his merit in sacrifice and gifts to the priests since the beginning of his life, his good deeds, his offspring, passing from him on the occasion of his falsehood.⁴ But a still older form of oath recorded⁵ is by cows, or waters, or Varuṇa,⁶ and the Indian to this day swears in some cases by Ganges water which he holds in his hand. The legal literature⁷ allows oaths for a Brahman by his truth, for a Kṣatriya by his teams and weapons, and for a Vaiçya by his cows, grain and gold, but these are not recorded for the Vedic period, and the first is modern in appearance as compared with the Vedic oaths. Later, too, we find that the touching of oneself in the oath was not rare, as showing the spirits the person to be punished if the oath were not kept: this usage is proved for late Vedic times by the provision that the touch in such a case is, like the offering to Rudra, a ground for purification by means of water.⁸ Possibly, too, the curses recorded that a man’s head shall fly off, which is paralleled by the Buddhist malediction that the head should split in seven pieces, may be connected with this idea of touching the head.⁹ A joint curse is that of the Tānūnaptra rite, which is an oath of fidelity of the priest and the sacrificer in the Soma sacrifice, with a curse on the violator of the oath. There is in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa¹⁰ an echo of the famous story of the lotus theft, in which the various persons accused of stealing the lotus fibres declared themselves guiltless by the device of invoking the most dreadful misfortunes on the head of the thief, while the true thief, the god himself, revealed his nature by invoking nothing but good. The classical instance of a broken oath is that of Soma, who is punished for failing to keep his promise to dwell with the twenty-seven wives whom he received from Prajāpati, by the disease Rājayakṣma, perhaps consumption.¹