The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s10.2

v2.c40.s10.2

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.