The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c39.s3.96

v2.c39.s3.96

The reward of the sacrificer for his efforts is, in the long run, one in the world to come: he may gain many desired things by the sacrifice and its manipulations in the present life, but these things are incidentals in the main offerings, a point in which they distinguish themselves from the occasional offerings, and from magic performances generally. The sacrifice is reduced in a sense to mere magic by the priests, but it is a performance which, unlike a magic rite or an offering set on foot for some definite object, must be performed regularly, and in it the profit acquired in this life is incidental, while the essential reward lies in the world to come. But this reward of immortality there is not to be construed in the sense that man should seek by an early death to obtain the world to come: on the contrary, in that world his place will be the better, the longer he lives: it is the aim of man not merely to achieve immortality, as eternal life hereafter, but also the full age of a hundred years, which is the allotted span of man. Those who die under twenty years of age by a weird conception attain as their abode the days and the nights, those under forty the half months, those under sixty the months, those under eighty the seasons, those under a hundred the year, and those over a hundred years the boon of immortality.⁴ The opposite of immortality is the repeated death, Punarmṛtyu,¹ of which men are in deep fear. The idea is that the passing once through death is not enough: even after death, when man is in enjoyment of the precious boon of immortality, he may be robbed of it, and have once again to face the terrors of dissolution, of which the Vedic Indian shows himself most deeply afraid. The idea of a second death is, however, that of a second death in the future life, not of rebirth on earth and death in the ordinary sense, and the conception obviously could lend itself to the idea that the death might be not once only, but for numberless occasions: though the idea is actually found in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa, where a distinction is made between those born for immortality after death in the world to come, and those born after death only to fall again and again into the power of death,² nevertheless the ordinary conception is merely that of a repetition of death. Moreover it must not be forgotten that this idea occurs in the later Brāhmaṇas such as the Kauṣītaki and the Çatapatha.³