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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s10: § 10. The Doctrine of Transmigration

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s10

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§ 10. The Doctrine of Transmigration

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The origin of the doctrine of transmigration is one of the most difficult problems of Indian philosophy: its extraordinarily firm hold on the mind of part at least of India, which is shown by the fact that Buddhism rests on the doctrine as an essential presupposition, makes it natural to seek the view in the earliest period of Indian religion, and this desire to find metempsychosis in the beginnings of Indian belief takes two forms. On the one hand there have been seen direct references to metempsychosis in the Rigveda, and on the other there have been traced there ideas which explain the genesis of the conception.

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The references to transmigration which have been seen in the Rigveda are all of the most improbable character: it is to ignore the nature of poetry to press the wish that there may be long life for man among the gods⁴ into the view that it contemplates rebirth: the attempt to find references to it in two of the verses of the riddle hymn of Dīrghatamas⁵ is bold, but not very plausible: the allusion,⁶ in which Vasiṣṭha is made⁷ to refer to his previous birth, is quite impossible, and the same criticism can be applied in every other case.¹ The effort to find such views is naturally not modern merely: the commentaries on the Upaniṣads themselves seek to trace the idea, and the fact that they can adduce nothing worthy of consideration is surely conclusive proof that there was nothing. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad² it is sought by Çaṅkara, without any good ground, and not in accord with the Upaniṣad, to show that Vāmadeva, the reputed author of a hymn³ beginning, ‘I was aforetime Manu, I the sun’, refers to his former births, and in another passage of that text,⁴ in the exposition of the doctrine of transmigration, a verse⁵ celebrating the two ways of the Fathers and of the gods, on which everything meets which moves between father and mother, is pressed by the Upaniṣad itself into service, though the reference is merely to day and night. A third passage in the Aitareya Āraṇyaka,⁶ which refers to a third birth after death, beside that from the father and by initiation, makes also use of a verse⁷ of Vāmadeva, in which lying in the womb the speaker learned all the births of the gods, but it is not proved or even plausible that the Upaniṣad itself refers to transmigration at all: the third birth may most probably have been in the next world,⁸ and in any case the quotation had nothing whatever to do with the subject.

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⁴ RV. x. 14. 4; Windisch, *Buddha's Geburt*, p. 54; Boyer, *JA.* sér. 9, xviii. 451–99.

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⁵ RV. i. 164. 30, 38; Böhtlingk, BSGW. xlv. 88–92.

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⁶ RV. vii. 33.

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⁷ Geldner, *Ved. Stud.* ii. 142.

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¹ Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cxxviii ff. RV. ix. 113 is not good evidence.

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² i. 4. 10.

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³ RV. iv. 26. 1.

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⁴ BAU. vi. 2. 2.

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⁵ RV. x. 88. 15.

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⁶ AA. ii. 5.

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⁷ RV. iv. 27. 1; Çaṅkara on Brahma Sūtra, iii. 4. 51; Windisch, *Buddha's Geburt*, p. 62, n. 2.

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⁸ This is strongly supported by ÇB. xi. 2. 1. 1 (Lévi, *La doctrine du sacrifice*, p. 107), though the other view is taken by Windisch (*Buddha's Geburt*, p. 62), who ignores the ÇB. passage. The language of the text, moreover (*itaḥ prayann eva punar jāyate*), and JUB. iii. 9 ff., seems conclusive against a second birth on earth.

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The effort to find suggestions of the origin of transmigration in Vedic beliefs⁹ is worthy of more consideration. The ideas that the birds are the forms of the Fathers, and that the Fathers creep about the roots of the plants, and the practice of using an insect or other animal, which alighted on a garment spread out with an invocation to the soul of the dead, when his bones cannot be found, to serve in place of his mortal relics, are points adduced by Oldenberg¹⁰ as suggesting the groundwork on which the Indian belief developed. It is not necessary to brush¹¹ these ideas lightly aside, or even to point out that the evidence for them is late, and not of value as proof for the early Vedic religion. What is necessary is to point out that, while the ideas thus recorded are of some value as showing the presence in Indian religion of the belief of the incorporation of the souls of the dead now and then in animals or plants—of the latter there is even a hint in the Rigveda¹² itself—the importance of transmigration lies precisely in the fact that the doctrine is an ethical system, and that it has, therefore, not merely a value totally distinct from the mere belief suggested by the evidence above adduced, but is thereby referred for its real origin to something quite other than popular belief. That it should have been so fully accepted by the people in course of time was doubtless aided by such views as that mentioned: but no such view could create metempsychosis as a system of the marked character of the Indian view.

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⁹ German belief is dubious, Appian, *Hist.* i. 4. 3; Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 254 f.; for the Druids, see Caesar, *B. G.* vi. 14; below, Chap. 29.

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¹⁰ *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 563, 581; cf. Bloomfield, *Rel. of Veda*, pp. 255 ff.

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¹¹ Deussen, *Phil. of Up.*, p. 316.

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¹² x. 16. 3. Other considerations which may have rendered easy the growth of the doctrine are the theory that the sacrifice carries the offerer to heaven and then back to earth until he dies, and that life descended from the sky as rain to produce fruits and nourish and generate life in turn; Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 97, 98. Cf. also Speyer, *Indische Theosophie*, pp. 90 ff. Aboriginal belief of passing of souls into plants, &c., is probable, and may explain the ready adoption of the view; cf. Oldenberg, *Die Lehre der Upanishaden*, pp. 27 ff.; Leumann, *Buddha und Mahāvīra*, p. 15.

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The Brāhmaṇas contain on the whole no acceptance of the doctrine of transmigration: the soul aims at the world of the Fathers as before: the mere fact¹ that as punishment for the cursing of a Brahman, the laying of violent hands on him, or the spilling of his blood, the wrong-doer is kept a hundred, a thousand years, as many years as the grains of dust moistened by his blood, from the world of the Fathers, shows that the view still prevailed that this world was the appointed place for the holy dead even as it is in the Rigveda. Nor in the main is that world distinct from heaven to which a man naturally goes but sometimes fails to reach, confused by the smoke of the fire which burned his body.² The conception of weighing the good and evil of a man in a balance and his following whichever is the greater,³ and that of two fires which hold back the wicked from the way of the gods or of the Fathers,⁴ do not carry us to any definite view other than that of the Rigveda, and the conception of men being discriminated as good or bad in the presence of Yama⁵ is equally unimportant. But a new and important motive appears in the growing fear of death even in the world to come.

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¹ TS. ii. 6. 10. 2.

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² TB. iii. 10. 11. 1.

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³ ÇB. xi. 2. 7. 33.

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⁴ ÇB. i. 9. 3. 2.

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⁵ TA. vi. 5. 13.

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This fear seems, as we have seen, to have developed in accordance with the desire to distinguish the diverse degrees of good acquired by different modes of sacrifice; it was obviously necessary to admit that every sacrificer would receive reward by admission to the happiness of the world to come, but the Brahmans had to consider the claims of the richer of their patrons, and had to promise them more in the world to come than the poorer, who offered and gave less. Hence we find that the need of food in the next world may be severely limited, according to the mode of offering: it can be unnecessary for a spirit to feed oftener than once in fourteen days, in four, six, or twelve months, or even once only in a hundred years, or even never at all. Again it is said that sacrifice to the gods produces less than offering to the self.⁶ Naciketas begs that he may be granted the privilege that his good deeds shall not decay,⁷ while it is said that day and night wear out the good deeds in the next world of one who does not know a certain rite.¹ The fear thus forms itself that in place of the desired immortality in the next world there will be renewed death, and many rites² are said to save from it, the Agnihotra, the Viṣūvant, the Naciketas fire, the piling of the fire, the study of the Veda. There can be no doubt that the repeated death is in the next world, not in this: it is applied to the Fathers,³ and from those who are born after death to immortality are distinguished those who are born to die again.⁴ The idea of the death as being a birth in the next world is not at all rare, as in the passage of the Aitareya Upaniṣad above mentioned, and the conception that death might there be repeated is a very natural one. It remained only to transfer it to the present world and the effect of transmigration was reached. But though this step is taken in the Upaniṣads it is by no means universally to be found there: there is no clear reference in the Aitareya Āraṇyaka or Upaniṣad, and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka⁵ has passages which quite clearly do not recognize it at all.

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⁶ ÇB. xi. 2. 6. 14.

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⁷ TB. iii. 11. 8. 5.

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¹ TB. iii. 10. 11. 2.

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² ÇB. ii. 3. 3. 9; KB. xxv. 1; TB. iii. 11. 8. 6; ÇB. x. 1. 4. 14; xi. 5. 6. 9, &c.; Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 50 ff.

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³ ÇB. xii. 9. 3. 12.

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⁴ ÇB. x. 4. 3. 10.

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⁵ i. 4. 15; 5. 16; iii. 8. 10, &c.

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The earliest notice of the doctrine of transmigration preserved for us, apart from a few very dubious allusions in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,⁶ is to be traced in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad in the section ascribed to Yājñavalkya. It is founded in an idea which is plainly expressed but merely as an incidental view in the Rigveda⁷ that at death the eye of man goes to the sun, the breath to the wind, the speech to the fire, and the members are also dispersed. This conception which has no importance for the Rigveda is developed in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa⁸ in one of the passages which approach the Upaniṣad character, and in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka,⁹ after a long enumeration of the modes of disposal of the parts of man in this way, it is asked where the man then remains. On this Yājñavalkya takes the questioner Ārtabhāga apart and confers with him in secret, and what they conversed about was work, and what they commended that was work. In truth, it is added, a man becomes good by good works, evil by evil. In a subsequent passage¹⁰ the matter is further explained by the doctrine that on death, like a caterpillar—or grass leech—proceeding from one leaf to another, the soul, having shaken off the body and freed itself from ignorance, presumably empirical life, makes a beginning on another body. As a goldsmith chisels out a newer and fairer form from a piece of carving, so the soul fashions for itself another newer, fairer form, whether it be of the Fathers, or the Gandharvas, or the gods, or Prajāpati, or Brahman, or other living beings;¹¹ just as man acts, just as he behaves, so will he be born. He who does good will be born good, he who does evil will be born evil : he becomes holy by holy deeds, evil by evil. Hence is explained the view that man is composed of desire, in proportion to desire is his will, in proportion to his will he performs acts, and according to his acts does it happen to him. Or, as an appended verse has it, having attained the end of his deeds committed on earth, he returns from yonder world to the world of work.

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⁶ ÇB. i. 5. 3. 4.

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⁷ x. 16. 3.

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⁸ x. 3. 3. 8.

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⁹ iii. 2. 13.

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¹⁰ BAU. iv. 4. 2–6.

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¹¹ Hence the doctrine of Karmadevas (BAU. iv. 3. 33), men who become gods by their deeds, and men Gandharvas (TU. ii. 8). An anticipation of Karman is faintly contained in the *iṣṭāpūrta* of the Rigveda, which is an entity preceding its master to heaven; cf. Naciketas’s store of good deeds. Geldner (see Lindenau, ZII. i. 49 *n.*) sees in AV. x. 7. 11 a reference to the persistence of Tapas, which is an element of Karman, but the passage is very obscure.

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That this doctrine does not teach the transmigration from one body to another is asserted by Schrader,¹ but this view can only be taken as a *tour de force*, even apart from the appended verse, which expressly makes the transmigration clear. It is also certain that, apart from the verse which is doubtful in sense,² it is a simple transmigration by reason of character or action. It is a change of the soul³ from one body into another, and the instances cited are better bodies, as they are of better results from good action in the present life : the other beings who are mentioned are, therefore, to be understood of higher beings, in all likelihood, than man. It is only in the later Mādhyandina recension of this passage that the form of a man is inserted. Yājñavalkya, then, considered that transmigration was the fate of men, who had not the knowledge of the identity of the individual and the absolute, which ended the possibility of transmigration of any kind : exactly what sort of fate awaited the bad, he does not say, but clearly they would take on at best the forms of beings inferior to themselves, perhaps men of lower degree, animals, &c.

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¹ ZDMG. lxiv. 333–5.

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² Deussen, *Sechzig Upanishad’s*², p. 476, n. 3; Windisch, *Buddha’s Geburt*, pp. 70, 71.

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³ This is made clear by BAU. iv. 4. 3 ff., which Jacobi (*Die Entwicklung der Gottesidee bei den Indern*, p. 9) wrongly ignores in his contention that Karman was regarded as a transcendent power bringing into being a new psychic complex, no permanent self being known. It is also very dubious if we can accept his view that the origin of Karman in a philosophic sense is to be found in the Mīmāṅsā doctrine of Apūrva, a mysterious entity, which attaches itself to the soul of man when he has offered sacrifice and clings to him until such time as his action bears its fruit (cf. Keith, *Karma-Mīmāṁsā*, pp. 36, 73 ff., 89). This theory was naturally enough evoked by the fact that the sacrifice often did not reap any immediate fruit, and it was, therefore, necessary to provide something to preserve continuity. But we need not believe this bizarre speculation very old; it can hardly have been needed so long as any real belief in the Vedic gods survived; in the Mīmāṅsā that has wholly disappeared. In the Jain theory Karman is definitely material (von Glasenapp, *Die Lehre vom Karman*), but it seems very dubious if Stcherbatsky (*The Central Conception of Buddhism*, p. 34) is right in ascribing a semi-material nature to Karman in Buddhism; the Jains remained on an extremely primitive level of thought which other schools earlier outlived. The idea of Karman, however, was doubtless affected *inter alia* by the conception of sin (*enas*, *āgas*) as clinging in a quasi-physical way to a man.

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The appended verse is interpreted by Çaṅkara to refer to the fact that the soul is not merely rewarded by being transferred to another body, but before that period undergoes reward or punishment for its deeds in the appropriate place. The question of its precise meaning is not important: it may mean¹ merely that he transmigrates after completing one life. But the important fact is that, with the doctrine of action as determining the future life of man, there comes to be combined the doctrine of reward in heaven or punishment elsewhere, which is already seen in the Rigveda and more clearly in the Atharvaveda, and which we need not doubt was a popular belief, and this combination is already found in the two main texts which are our sources for the transmigration doctrine. Of these the Bṛhadāraṇyaka² version is found in the sixth book which occurs in the appendix, and this fact alone indicates its later date. The other version is in the Chāndogya,³ and here as always that Upaniṣad shows its dependence in the case of common material on the Bṛhadāraṇyaka. A somewhat corrupt version is also given in the second Pariśiṣṭa of the Nirukta.

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¹ Deussen, *Phil. of Up.*, p. 332; *Sechzig Upanishad's*², p. 476, n. 3.

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² vi. 2.

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³ v. 3–10.

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The account is divided naturally into two parts. The first is the theory of the five fires, which is an account apparently of the mode in which the soul on death passes immediately, without intermediate reward or punishment, into the new body. The burning of the body on death is here taken by a new turn of thought as the offering of sacrifice, and the essential part of the offering, the action of man, is figured as the waters, which are offered with faith; hence the faith takes the place of the waters as the expression for the part which transmigrates. The faith, which thus ascends in the form of the sacrificial vapour to the gods, is by them offered in the heaven, the atmosphere, the earth, the man, and the woman as sacrificial fires, changing thus first to the Soma, then to rain, then to food, then to seed,⁴ and then to the embryo, and then receiving existence afresh. The mythical character of the whole is obvious, and reminds us that the new doctrine of action as determining the future life was decidedly disadvantageous to the sacrificial priest, and that it was natural to reserve it as a holy mystery.

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⁴ This is a point of difference from the Buddhist theory by which the counterpart of the soul enters directly *ab extra* the womb; Windisch, *Buddha's Geburt*, pp. 29, 32, 76.

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The second part of the account deals with the two ways, that of the gods and of the Fathers, and it teaches the doctrine first of punishment in the next world, and then rebirth on earth for those persons who were not to receive full enlightenment. The Devayāna, originally in the Rigveda the path by which the sacrifice of a man was borne to the gods or by which they came for it, and by which on death he joined the Fathers and the gods in heaven, is transformed into the path by which the soul goes to the gods or to the absolute. On the burning of the body the soul enters the flame, then the day, the bright half of the month, the bright half of the year, the year, the sun, the moon (in the Chāndogya version), the lightning, and finally, led by a spiritual man or, as the Chāndogya has it, a superhuman man, into the world of Brahman. The terms are of course to be understood spatially, but in later India they were interpreted as temporal, and thus in the great epic the death of Bhīṣma is delayed by that warrior so that he may die in the Uttarāyaṇa, the northern course of the sun.¹ In the case of the Pitṛyāna the course is different: the moon is common to both since the moon was often regarded as the home of the dead,² and in the Upaniṣads its waxing and waning were brought into connexion with the movements of the souls: hence the path is the smoke, the night, the dark half of the month, the dark half of the year, the world of the Fathers in lieu of the year, the ether not the sun, the moon, which is now not a stage of transit to the world of Brahman, but the highest place attained by the souls. The arrival of the souls fills up the moon,³ so that in the metaphorical language of the Upaniṣads they are enjoyed by the gods, a view which the Vedānta reduces to the principle that the souls and the gods together delight therein. This time of felicity ends only when the merit of the soul is finished, and then it returns to earth by the process, in its last stages very difficult, of being materialized into ether, wind, smoke, mist, cloud, rain, plants, food, seed, and entrance into the womb of the mother to be followed by rebirth. The way of the Fathers is the lot of those who are bent on sacrifice, works of piety, and asceticism (in the Chāndogya, sacrifice, gifts, and almsgiving), while that of the gods which leads to the Brahman is allotted to the wise who know the doctrine and those who in the forest worship faith (in the Chāndogya, worship faith and asceticism, unless it means 'worship, holding that faith is asceticism'). The lot of the wicked appears to have been the third place which led to birth again as animals, of the lower insect orders, worms, or flies. In the Chāndogya Upaniṣad⁴ the position is differentiated by the division of the classes of souls, which go to the moon, into those of good and those of abominable conduct: the former are reborn as Kṣatriyas, Brahmans, or Vaiçyas, the latter as dogs, pigs, or Caṇḍālas, but the absurdity is retained that the third class remains, described as beings which ever return.

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¹ Cf. Bhagavadgītā, viii. 24; Çañkara on *Brahma Sūtra*, iv. 2. 20; Winternitz, *Gesch. d. ind. Lit.* i. 370.

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² Kauṣ. ii. 8. Its position in the Devayāna is only thus to be explained: it is clearly out of place; cf. JUB. iii. 13. 12.

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³ Cf. Kauṣ. i. 2; BAU. vi. 2. 16; there is a clear reference to the doctrine (RV. x. 85. 5) of the Soma cup of the moon as the food of the gods, to explain its waxing and waning.

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⁴ v. 10.

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The Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad⁵ presents an accommodation version: here the souls are all sent to the moon: their knowledge is there tested, and according to the result they proceed by the Devayāna leading through the worlds of Agni, Vāyu, Varuṇa, Indra, and Prajāpati to that of Brahman, or they return to earth in rebirth as a worm or a fly or a fish or a bird or a lion or a boar or a serpent or a tiger or a man or as something else. The later Upaniṣads add nothing of value to this doctrine: the Kaṭha¹ refers to the rebirth of men as men or plants according to their deeds and knowledge, and the Praçna² follows the Chāndogya with some deviation. It, with the Jaiminīya Upaniṣad Brāhmaṇa,³ recognizes two ways from the start, one by the north course to the world of Āditya, the other by the south course to the moon, from the former there being no return. The mention of Āditya here is an archaic touch in comparison with the world of Brahman, while on the other hand it is more recent than the conception of the goal as the world of Yama, as in the Rigveda. The Jaiminīya version contains the curious assertion⁴ that a man can, after attaining the world of Brahman through the earth, Agni, Vāyu, the atmosphere, the quarters, day and night, the half months, the months, the seasons, the year, the heavenly Gandharvas, the Apsarases, the sky, the gods, the sun, the moon, each of which is the world of Brahman,⁵ choose at will birth in a Brahman or a Kṣatriya family, a clear proof of a doctrine independent of Karman, and a curious parallel to the Buddhist doctrine—found also in Jainism—of the choice of family made by the Buddha while in the Tuṣita heaven.⁶ In the Bhagavadgītā⁷ we find the process carried one degree further and above the world of Brahman, from which once no return was possible, is set that of Kṛṣṇa as all-god. The Muṇḍaka⁸ makes the soul attain release by passing through the sun; Hertel's view⁹ that release is attained after life in the Brahmaloka seems erroneous; attainment of the Brahmaloka is release.

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⁵ i. 2; a difficult passage; see Keith, *Çāṅkhāyana Āraṇyaka*, p. 17; Böhtlingk, *BSGW.* xlii. 198 ff.; xlix. 98 f.; Windisch, *BSGW.* lix. 111 ff.; *Buddha's Geburt*, pp. 63, 67, 71. There are quasi parallels in JB. i. 18 and 49 (Oertel, JAOS. xix. 111 ff.). The path to the moon in the latter version is through the fire, smoke, night, day, waning half of month, waxing half of month, and soul and body unite in the moon or month.

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¹ v. 7.

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² i. 9, 10.

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³ iii. 20–8. In i. 3 ff. the way is to the moon, then to or through the sun.

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⁴ iii. 28. 4.

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⁵ That is, the doctrine of Brahman's world is known, but only in part accepted by being identified with either the world of the sun or the moon. Cf. i. 6.

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⁶ Windisch, *Buddha's Geburt*, p. 66; *Mahāvastu*, i. 1; *Jātaka*, i. 48.

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⁷ viii. 16. On the moon cf. T. Segerstedt, *Monde Oriental*, iv. 62 ff.

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⁸ i. 2. 11.

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⁹ *Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad*, pp. 63, 66, on iii. 2. 6.

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In keeping with the curious vagueness of the Upaniṣads is the failure to make it clear precisely what is the ground which secures for a man union with the absolute in lieu of rebirth. In the Chāndogya¹⁰ the matter is fairly simple; the boon falls to those who know the doctrine of the five fires and the offerings in them which explain man's descent to earth after his death, and to those who practice worship in the forest, holding that faith is their asceticism; at least this is the more natural sense of the terms employed. Return to earth is attributed to those who in the village worship, holding that their sacrifices and their gifts to the priests are their tribute. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka,¹¹ on the other hand, the distinction is between those who practise faith and truth, and those who devote themselves to sacrifice, alms, and asceticism. In the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad¹ the attainment of the absolute is the reward of those who wise, calm, of holy conduct, practise faith and asceticism, which is doubtless intended to be a reproduction of the view of the Chāndogya, though its accuracy is dubious. In the Praçna² the sun and the absolute are assured to those who give themselves up to holy conduct (*brahmacarya*), asceticism, faith, and knowledge, while rebirth is attained by those who hold that sacrifice and gifts are their action. It may fairly be held that the earlier sources do not accept asceticism as any essential part of the equipment for attaining the absolute, while it is assumed as necessary in the later texts.³

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¹⁰ v. 10. 1, 3: the phrases are *çraddhā tapa ity upāsate* and *iṣṭāpūrte dattam ity upāsate*. In both *iti* may be enumerative, and the sense be 'practise faith and asceticism', and 'practise sacrifice gifts and generosity'.

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¹¹ vi. 2. 15, 16.

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¹ i. 2. 11.

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² i. 9, 10.

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³ Thus renunciation of children is recognized in Mahānārāyaṇa (lxii. 7, 11; lxiii. 8, 13), Praçna (i. 13, 15), and in the Sannyāsa Upaniṣads, and is regarded as natural in the knower of the absolute by Yājñavalkya, despite his own two wives (BAU. iii. 5. 1; iv. 4. 22; cf. i. 4. 17).

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The nature of the being which passes through transmigration is not specially discussed in the accounts of the paths. The curious mention of the man, variously described as spiritual (*mānasa*) or as superhuman (*amānava*), who leads the migrating soul from the lightning to the world of Brahman, is transformed by the account of the Nirukta⁴ into a change effected in the soul itself, which becomes a spiritual essence, and with this conception Windisch⁵ compares the fact that the Buddha emerges in spiritual (*manomaya*) form from his mother’s womb, thus avoiding all injury to her, and the gods assume such a form. No certainty, however, is possible, and Deussen⁶ is equally certain that the *mānasa* of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka version is merely a corruption of the *amānava* of the Chāndogya text.

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⁴ Par. ii. 9.

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⁵ *Buddha’s Geburt*, p. 73, n. 4.

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⁶ *Sechzig Upanishad’s*², p. 508, n. 2.

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The nature of the soul which is fated, unlike this class of soul, to return to earth, is not here specifically described in any way, but in another part of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad⁷ we find the description of the fate of the soul on death, from which it appears that all the organs accompany the departing Ātman, that it enters into the Saṁjñāna, and so becomes possessed of knowledge and consciousness, Vijñāna, while, it is added, its learning and actions hold fast to it, and its knowledge of what has been before. With this accords well enough the Buddhist view of the migrating substance which is composed of Vijñāna, and the other four Skandhas of Vedanā, ‘feeling’, Saṁjñā, ‘perception’, Rūpa, ‘corporeal form’, and Saṁskāras, ‘dispositions’, and which also bears the compendious term of Nāmarūpa, ‘name and form’, the former being essentially a brief designation of the four Skandhas other than form. Here, however, and in the orthodox doctrine of Çaṅkara and the Sāṅkhya,⁸ we have express recognition of a factor which is not mentioned expressly at any rate in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, that of corporeal form. It is evident that this view was not absolutely necessary for the theory of the Ātman, and its development went, we may assume, hand in hand with the development of the principle of the fine elements of matter, such fine elements being obviously necessary if they were to be conceived as accompanying an invisible entity like a transmigrating soul. We find, however, in the same Upaniṣad¹ in the dialogue between Yājñavalkya and Ārtabhāga, which is preserved in one tantalizing fragment, that in the case of death a man’s speech departs to the fire, his breath to the wind, his eye to the sun, his mind to the moon, his ear to the pole, his body to the earth, his Ātman to the ether, his hair to the plants and trees, his blood and seed to the waters, but there remains to transmigrate his Karman alone.² It is true that Çaṅkara proves equal to the occasion and disposes of the mention of the disappearance of the Ātman by interpreting the ether as the space in the heart wherein dwells the self, but this explanation is a mere *tour de force*. On the other hand, Windisch³ suggests that the necessary element of personality must be deemed to be given by the persistence of the name, which in the preceding section of the Upaniṣad Yājñavalkya has declared to be the one thing which persists on the death of man, and this interpretation appears to be necessarily correct, while it suggests the origin of the use of the term ‘name’ in the Buddhist conception of Nāmarūpa as the factor which passes through transmigration. Jacobi,⁴ again, suggests that the force of Karman produces a new complex of the elements, holding that the idea of a permanent soul was not yet known, but this is a far-fetched conception. In the vagueness of conception we have nothing to wonder at: the whole conception is seriously regarded so bizarre, that it is not surprising that to clothe it in definite language was beyond the power of the authors of the Upaniṣads.

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⁷ iv. 4. 3 Mādh.; Windisch, *op. cit.*, p. 38; cf. CU. iii. 14. 1; KU. v. 7; Içā 15–17.

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⁸ Windisch, *op. cit.*, ch. v; Oltramare, *L’histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 246 ff.

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¹ iii. 2. 13.

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² In Caraka’s Çārīrasthāna, iii. 14, the transmigrating element is the Sattva, while in each man self-consciousness, mind, senses, and the breaths are derived from the non-transmigrating self.

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³ Windisch, *Buddha’s Geburt*, pp. 69, 70. BAU. iv. 4. 3 ff. must be borne in mind; see above, p. 573.

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⁴ *Die Entwicklung der Gottesidee bei den Indern*, p. 9.

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In the later literature⁵ there exist, despite the prevalence of the Karman doctrine, none the less the inconsistent ideas that on the one hand the sin of the father passes over to the child, apart from the action of the child in former births, and on the other that the saving grace of the Lord avails to break the chain of Karman. Still more naturally in the period of the Upaniṣads, when the doctrine of Karman was far from being a fixed dogma, it is not surprising that many traces of conceptions inconsistent with the Karman belief should appear. Of these the most obvious is the belief in the power of the Ātman by special grace to manifest itself, which is found in the Kaṭha, the Muṇḍaka, and still more clearly in the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad, but equally important is the doctrine that in the son the father is continued in being in such a manner that the son takes over all that his father has, including his Karman,⁶ though the term in the context applies generally to all action and has no moral reference, and that for any evil done by his father the son makes atonement,¹ a view which results in the constant insistence on begetting offspring as a religious duty,² and which in the later period takes the more crude and vulgar form that the mere birth of a son (*putra*) saves the father from the hell named Put, a puerile verbal play in the precise manner of the Upaniṣads. This idea must clearly be reckoned along with those passages which declare that in the son the father is born again, an idea which is in itself not strictly reconcilable with the view that the soul transmigrates on death, since in the elaborate description of the Upaniṣads the tradition from father to son is of so complete a kind that it would seem that there was nothing more which could transmigrate: we have in fact three diverse ideas more or less blended, the birth of the father in the production of a son, the handing over by the father on death to the son of his whole personality, and the migration of the father's soul into some new existence.

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⁵ Hopkins, JRAS. 1906, pp. 581 ff.

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⁶ Kauṣ. ii. 15.

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¹ BAU. i. 5. 17.

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² CU. iii. 17. 5; v. 8, 9; BAU. vi. 2. 13; full details in vi. 4, and the Kāma Sūtra.

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A further breach with the theory of Karman is to be seen in the case of the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad,³ which tells how the man who attains the Brahman after passing by the river of immortality casts away his good and his evil deeds, which his friends and enemies duly share, while he from his lofty position gazes calmly at good and evil deeds, and the contrasts of night and day. This idea, as Hopkins⁴ has shown, has a ritual origin: in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa⁵ we are told how the man who performs the Agnihotra after sunset and before sunrise escapes the fate which normally awaits men in the world to come, where the days and the nights gradually destroy their good deeds, and doom them in due course to that renewal of death which the Brahman regards as the worst of unhappinesses. Thus early it is clear the Karman doctrine had to face the competition of conflicting and doubtless older views, which never could be brought into real coincidence with it.

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³ i. 4.

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⁴ JRAS. 1907, pp. 666 ff.

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⁵ ii. 3. 3. 8–12.

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Another of the many contradictions involved in the theory arises from the view that on the departure of the soul on death it is accompanied by its recognition of the past, that is, that it retains a real personality. The difficulty of disposing of the fact that in practice the soul has no such recollection in its new birth of this previous experience is met by the statement that the child in the womb in its ninth month of existence possesses this knowledge, but through the pangs of birth is deprived of it.⁶ The Buddhist view admits that the Buddha enters with complete memory and intelligence into the womb,⁷ but in his case his miraculous birth prevents the loss of his supreme powers.

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⁶ Garbha Upaniṣad 3, 4; Nirukta, Par. ii.

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⁷ Windisch, *Buddha's Geburt*, p. 88, n. 1.

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The later literature, by no means in harmony with the principles of Karman, assumes that great importance attaches to the thought which is in the mind of man in the moment of death,¹ and we find a faint premonition of this view in the insistence laid in the Praçna Upaniṣad² that man's thought determines his next life. Possibly a similar conception may underlie the prayer put by the Īçā Upaniṣad³ in the mouth of the dying man.

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¹ e.g. Bhagavadgītā, viii. 6.

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² iii. 10; cf. CU. iii. 14. 1; BAU. iv. 4. 5.

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³ 15–17; BAU. v. 15.

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