The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c34.s2.82

v2.c34.s2.82

Even, however, as a Preta there is extremely little trace of the belief of the soul as a ghost which comes to visit men. It is possible, as we have seen, that dreams of the dead were ascribed to visits of their ghosts, though this is not directly recorded; the Rigveda¹ expressly refers to Fathers who sit in the regions of earth or in the dwellings of men; the Taittirīya Saṁhitā² declares that the man who draws blood from a Brahman must fail to attain the world of the Fathers for as many years as the blood wets grains of sand. It seems possible that in the case of a dead man, whose soul is to live in the world of earth, because the southern fire first reaches his body, the soul is regarded as remaining away from the world of the Fathers in heaven; reference is made in that view also to the Fathers, who live in the air, and whom we may imagine as ghosts there, but too much faith may not be placed in this conception.³ We hear of the appearance of Uccaiççravas Kaupayeya to instruct his nephew on a mystery of the Sāman.⁴ But the normal view is that men and the Fathers do not appear together,⁵ and the Vedic literature hardly shows a trace of the belief in ghosts which abounds in the Buddhist: the idea that evil spirits are caused by men needing proper burial, which is common in modern India, and that ghosts exist everywhere and send disease, is one which is not to be found in the Atharvaveda, which in its innumerable references to demons, Rakṣases, Piçācas, and others, deals with them in such manner as to show that the belief that many of them were merely hostile spirits of the dead was not a living one.⁶ The Buddhist view, on the contrary, deals solemnly with ghosts:⁷ it treats the stealing of their property on the same footing as stealing the property of beasts, it provides for cases of sexual intercourse with such ghosts; ghosts abide in the lonely woods, on the banks of rivers, in a sugar field. They are often at the cross-roads and they crowd into their old home in eager search for kind friends to give them a little food. But in the main it is clear the ghosts are not normal things: it is not a case of simple belief in the constant presence of the dead among the living which the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa denies.⁸ They are guilty souls suffering punishment, naked or covered barely by their hair, without protection against the heat, which fills them, from water, shade, or wind, hungry and thirsty, for the water even of the Ganges turns to blood in their mouths. A city of ghosts is recorded by the Divyāvadāna⁹ of the Buddhists, an island inhabited by ghosts in a Jātaka,¹⁰ and the classical Sanskrit literature contains striking pictures of the ghosts which throng the places of sepulture of the dead. But how far these views were held in the Vedic period it is impossible to say : ¹ there is no reasonable doubt that some of the Buddhist ghosts are transmutations of tree and water spirits due to the growing animism which treated the spirit as merely living in, and not having its life in, the tree or the waters. But it is worth noting that in many cases the Buddhist ghosts are to die and go to hell in a certain period : ² it is natural to see in this the record of the condition before final damnation of the Preta.