A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c6.s3.t2.14

c6.s3.t2.14

28. It is quite true that in the major part of the Rigveda, the idea of Transmigration seems conspicuous by its absence. The cheerful and joyous attitude of the Indian Aryans made it impossible for them to think too much of the life after death. They believed in the world of the gods, and they believed in the world of the fathers, and they did not care to believe in anything else. It was sufficient for them to know that the godly men went to a Heaven which overflowed with honey,¹ and that the commonalty went to a world where Yama had the privilege first to go and to gather a number of men about him,—a not uncovetable place, it seems, “ of which it was impossible that anybody could be robbed.”² Even though, then, we grant that the idea of Transmigration is not very conspicuous in the greater portion of the Rigveda, it remains at the same time equally true that, in certain other places, an approach is being made to the idea of Transmigration. The first stage in the evolution of this idea consists in taking an animistic or hylozoistic view of the world. In a verse of the 16th hymn of the tenth Maṇḍala which is devoted to the description of a funeral occasion, the eye of the dead man