The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s10.77

v2.c40.s10.77

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.