The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s10.84

v2.c40.s10.84

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.