A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c6.s3.t2.11

c6.s3.t2.11

27. We now pass on to discuss the question of Transmigration in the Upanishads, but we cannot understand its full significance unless we see it on its background, namely, the form which it takes in pre-Upanishadic literature. The question of Transmigration may fitly be regarded as the crux of Early Indian Philosophy. We have been often told that the idea of Transmigration is of a very late origin in Indian thought, that it did not exist at the time of the Ṛigveda, that it was an un-Aryan idea, that, as Professor Macdonell puts it, " it seems more probable that the Aryan settlers received the first impulse in this direction from the aboriginal inhabitants of India,"¹ that even though "the Aryan Indians borrowed the idea from the aborigines, they certainly deserve the credit of having elaborated out of it the theory of an unbroken chain of existences, intimately connected with the moral principle of requital." Having said that the idea of Transmigration is of un-Aryan origin and that it was received from the aborigines by the Indian Aryans, Professor Macdonell is obliged to account for the appearance of the same idea in Pythagoras by saying that the "dependence of Pythagoras on Indian philosophy and science certainly seems to have a high degree of probability......The doctrine of metempsychosis in the case of Pythagoras appears without any connection or explanatory background, and was regarded by the Greeks as of foreign origin. He could not have derived it from Egypt, as it was not known to the ancient Egyptians."² Since the appearance of Herr Rohde's book on *Psyche, Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen* in 1894, we have come to see that the real source of a belief in transmigration among any people, under certain circumstances, lies in their own ethno-psychological development, and not in an unproven or unprovable inter-influence from one country to another. It is upon this fruitful hypothesis that we can see the upspringing and the continuance of the idea of transmigration among the Greeks from Homer downwards through Orpheus to Pythagoras in their own native land; it is upon the same hypothesis that we can see the development of the same idea among the Indian Aryans from the Rigveda through the Brāhmaṇas to the Upanishads, without invoking the aid of any unwarrantable influence from the aborigines of India. And thus, the idea of transmigration, so far from being merely an un-Aryan importation in Aryan thought, appears clearly to devlop stage by stage in Aryan thought itself.