The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s8.143

v2.c40.s8.143

The body itself is derived from the three elements, recognized in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad⁷ by the rule that the dense parts become the coarse (faeces, urine, bone), the medium the medium (flesh, blood, marrow), constituents of the body, and the finest the mind, breath, and speech, corresponding to food or earth, water, and heat. The soul is nourished by the blood massed in the heart, thus enjoying purer (*pravivikta*) food than the gross body.⁸ The production of the body is traced to the seed of the father,⁹ and different views of the nature of the process of generation can be traced; in the simplest form it is said that the seed is the self of the father, which enters the woman and becomes part of herself;¹⁰ but it is also said, in more exact accordance¹¹ with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, that the seed is merely a stage on the course of the rebirth of the soul, which in the moon has exhausted its good works: it comes down through the ether, the wind, smoke, rain, plants, seed, and the mother's womb, in each of which it of course has merely a temporary habitation: from yet another point of view¹² the cause of procreation is the desire for reunion of the two halves of the same being originally united, but divided as male and female by Prajāpati. But the primitive view of the Upaniṣads is clear that the production of offspring is a religious duty, which was inculcated on the student at the close of the studentship: a chapter on how to secure certain qualities in the child is incorporated in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad¹³ probably for this very reason. On the other hand there is clear proof of the gradual advance of the spirit of asceticism, in complete harmony with the fact that the knowledge of the Ātman shows that all desires for children to continue the race, to discharge the debt to the Fathers, to expiate the faults of their parents in life, are idle and foolish. The Brahmans, who have known the self, are twice declared in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad¹ to have held aloof from the desire of children, ‘What need have we of offspring, whose soul is the universe?’ By a bizarre conception, found here only in the late Garbha Upaniṣad, the embryo in the ninth month is conceived as remembering all its previous births and its good and evil deeds, a remembrance which is taken from it by the pangs of birth.²