Indian Philosophy v1.c8.s8: XI Eschatology

Indian Philosophy v1.c8.s8

Language: English

XI Eschatology

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The Vedic Aryans entered India in the pride of strength and joy of conquest. They loved life in its fullness. They therefore showed no great interest in the future of the soul. Life to them was bright and joyous, free from all the vexations of a fretful spirit. They were not enamoured of death. They wished for themselves and their posterity a life of a hundred autumns.² They had no special doctrines about life after death, though some vague conceptions about heaven and hell could not be avoided by reflective minds. Rebirth is still at a distance. The Vedic Aryans were convinced that death was not the end of things. After night, the day; after death, life. Beings who once had been, could never cease to be. They must exist somewhere, perhaps in the realm of the setting sun where Yama rules. The imagination of man with his shuddering fear of death had not yet made Yama into a terrible lord of vengeance. Yama and Yamī are the first mortals who entered the other world to lord over it. When a man dies he is supposed to reach Yama’s kingdom. Yama had found for us a place, a home which is not to be taken from us. When the body is thrown off, the soul becomes endowed with a shining spiritual form and goes to the abode of gods where Yama and the fathers live immortal. The dead are supposed to get to this paradise by passing over water and a bridge.¹ A reference to the paths of the fathers and the gods is found in x. 88. 15. This might be, as has been suggested, due to the distinction of the ways in which the smoke ascends in cremation and sacrifice. The distinction is yet in an undeveloped form.

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² R.V., x. 18.

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¹ x. 6. 10; ix. 41. 2.

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The departed souls dwell in heaven revelling with Yama. They there live an existence like ours. The joys of heaven are those of earth perfected and heightened. “ These bright things are the portion of those who bestow largesses ; there are suns for them in heaven ; they attain immortality ; they prolong their lives.”² Stress is sometimes laid on the sensuous character in the Vedic picture of future life. But as Deussen observes: “Even Jesus represents the kingdom of heaven as a festal gathering where they sit down to table³ and drink wine,⁴ and even a Dante or a Milton could not choose but borrow all the colours for their pictures from this world of earth.”⁵ The gods are supposed to become immortal through the power of the Soma. To become like gods is the goal of our endeavour. For the gods live in a spiritual paradise enjoying a kind of unalloyed bliss. They neither hunger nor thirst, neither marry nor are given in marriage. In their ideal descriptions of the other world, the contrast between the life on earth and the life hereafter arises. The blessed gods live for ever. We are children of a day. The gods have happiness in heaven above where Yama rules; we have misery for our lot on earth. What should we do to gain immortality? We have to offer sacrifices to gods, since immortality is a free gift from heaven to the god-fearing. The good man who worships the gods becomes immortal. "Sage Agni! The mortal who propitiates thee becomes a moon in heaven."¹ Already the difficulty is felt. Does he become the moon or does he become like the moon? Sāyaṇa explains it as: "He becomes like the moon, the rejoicer of all";² others contend that he becomes the moon.³ There are indications that the Vedic Aryan believed in the possibility of meeting his ancestors after his death.⁴

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² i. 25. 6.

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³ Matt. vii. 11.

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⁴ Matt. xxvi. 9.

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⁵ *The Philosophy of the Upaniṣads*, p. 320.

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¹ ii. 2; x. 1. 3.

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² Āhlādaka sarveṣām.

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³ Candra eva bhavati.

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⁴ i. 24. 1; vii. 56. 24.

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The question arises what happens to us if we do not worship the gods. Is there a hell corresponding to a heaven, a separate place for the morally guilty, the heretics, who do not believe in gods? If the heaven is only for the pious and the good, then the evil-minded cannot be extinguished at death nor can they reach heaven. So a hell is necessary. We hear of Varuṇa thrusting the evil-doer down into the dark abyss from which he never returns. Indra is prayed to consign to the lower darkness the man who injures his worshipper.⁵ It seems to be the destiny of the wicked to fall into this dark depth and disappear. We do not as yet get the grotesque mythology of hell and its horrors of the later purāṇas. Heaven for the righteous and hell for the wicked is the rule. Reward follows righteousness, and punishment misconduct. I do not think that the joyless regions veiled in blind darkness into which the ignorant pass after death are only the world in which we live, though that is Deussen's view. We have no inklings as yet of saṃsāra or even gradations of happiness. There is a passage in the Ṛg-Veda⁶ which reads: "After he has completed what he has to do and has become old he departs hence; departing hence he is once more born; this is the third birth.” This has reference to the Vedic theory that every man has three births: the first as a child, the second by spiritual education, and the third after death. We meet with the belief in the soul as a moving life principle.¹ In x. 58, the soul of an apparently unconscious man is invited to come back to him from the trees, the sky and the sun. Evidently it was thought that the soul could be separated from the body in certain abnormal conditions. All this, however, does not imply that the Vedic Aryans were familiar with the conception of rebirth.

Linked texts (1)

Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit