The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c39.s3.117

v2.c39.s3.117

The ritual as it is seen in the texts of the Black Yajurveda does not seem to go beyond these conceptions, but the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa in the tenth book,² doubtless a later addition to the text, which deals with the secret of the fire, develops the theme more philosophically. Prajāpati is the year, for he is essentially, as the creator, time, and the year is at once the symbol of time, and the period in which the working of nature completes a round, and commences again. The year of the piling of the altar, and the carrying of the fire in the fire-pan by the sacrificer, has been already mentioned: the year is symbolic also of birth: Agni must be borne for a year in the fire-pan before he is brought to life as the fire on the altar itself. In the acts of carrying him in the pan the sacrificer takes Agni into himself and in the fullness of time he brings him forth from himself, in accordance with the doctrine that the father of Agni is Prajāpati, the sacrificer himself. But the fact that Prajāpati is time, and that the sacrificer is identical with Prajāpati as time, has another and important side: the effect of time must be that, even if a man attain, as the piling of the altar will aid him to attain, the full life of a hundred years, still he must die, and he dies thus as death itself by his own hands, passing from the realm of material existence and its troubles and limitations to the eternal and abiding happiness of the life to come.¹ But the Brāhmaṇa goes further than this and attributes to Çāṇḍilya the doctrine that the ultimate essence of Prajāpati, of the sacrificer, and therefore of the universe, is mind, from which develop speech, the breath, the eye, the ear, work, fire. The final reality is summed up as the self, made up of intelligence, with a body of spirit, a form of light, and an ethereal nature, which pervades the regions and upholds the universe, though devoid of speech and mental affects. Or, again, it is said that the Puruṣa in the heart is as a grain of rice or granule of millet; like smokeless light, it is greater than the heaven, the atmosphere, and the earth, than all existing things: the self of the spirit is the self of man, and on passing away from life he attains that self. The changed spirit of the speculation in the course of time cannot be better illustrated than by this view, for the Taittirīya Saṁhitā holds closely to the material view that the result of the offering in the next world is to secure the sacrificer his self and his breath therein. The continuance as nearly as possible in the same condition as before of the existence on earth is the ideal of the Saṁhitā: it has been transmuted by the wisdom of Çāṇḍilya ² into a conception which seeks in its grand manner to solve the question of the existence of the universe and of the individual, by finding in them both the expression of a single spiritual principle. The impression of later growth thus engendered is supported, and made beyond reasonable doubt, not merely by the evidence of language, but by the fact that it is precisely this book of the Çatapatha which gives us the conception of the repetition, not once merely, of death in the world to come.³ The philosophy of the Brāhmaṇas is merging into that of the Upaniṣads.