Indian Philosophy v1.c8.s8.14

v1.c8.s8.14

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.