The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s10.15

v2.c40.s10.15

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.