The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6). Duncker Max

division of castes. The pious feeling which penetrated the Indians would, moreover, have found it difficult to resist the conviction that the first place must invariably belong to the relation to the gods. Hence ready credence was given to the priests when they spoke of their order as the first-born and nearest to the gods.

      It was not in the sphere of religion or worship, but in ethics, that the doctrine of the priests attained to a thorough practical influence on the state and life of the Indians, and this complete victory was due to the consequences which the priests derived from it for the life of the soul after death. We are acquainted with the ancient ideas cherished by the Aryas in the Panjab on the future of the soul after death; the spirits of the brave and pious passed into the bright heaven of Yama, where they lived in happiness and joy on soma, milk, and honey; those who had done evil passed into thickest darkness. Yama allowed or refused entrance into his heaven; his two hounds kept watch (p. 64). The descendants duly sprinkled water for the spirits of their ancestors, and their families brought libations at the new moon, when the souls of the fathers came in troops and enjoyed food and drink. In the oldest Brahmanas, Yama holds a formal judgment on the souls. The actions of the dead were weighed in a balance; the good deeds allowed the scale to rise; the evil deeds were threatened with definite punishments and torments in the place of darkness. The body of light which the pious souls are said to have received in heaven, required, according to this new conception, a less amount of food, or no food at all. But the deeper change rests in the fact that the heaven of Yama, the son of the deity of light, can now no longer be the reward of those who have lived a purer life, and approached to the sanctity and perfection of Brahman. They had raised themselves in the scale of existence, and must therefore return into the bosom of the pure being from which they had emanated. The souls which have attained to complete purity pass after death into Brahman. Thus the heaven of Yama was rendered unnecessary, and was, in fact, set aside. The sinner who has not lived according to the vocation which he received at birth, has neither offered sacrifice nor purified himself, must be severely punished, and it is Yama – now transformed from a judge of the dead into a prince of darkness, and having his abode in hell – who imposes on sinners the torments which they must endure after death for their guilt. The fancy of the Indians depicted, in great detail, according to the various torments, the place of darkness, the hell, situated deep below the earth. As among the Egyptians, and all nations living in a hot climate, so in the hell of the Indians fierce heat is the chief means of punishment. In one place is the region of darkness, and the place of tears, the forest where the leaves are swords. In another the souls are torn by owls and ravens; in another their heads are struck every day by the guardians of hell with great hammers. In another and yet worse hell they are broiled in pans; here they have to eat hot coals; there they walk on burning sand and glowing iron; in another place hot copper is poured into their necks.169 For the kings and warriors, on the other hand, the heaven of Indra takes the place of the heaven of Yama; and into this the brave warriors enter. In the Epos, Indra laments that "none of the beloved guests come, who dedicate their lives to the battle, and find death without an averted countenance." We have already seen how Indra meets Yudhishthira in order to conduct him into the heaven of the heroes, the imperishable world, where he will see his brothers and his wife, when they are freed from the earthly impurity still clinging to them.

      The torments provided in hell for the sinners could not satisfy the system which the priests had established in the doctrine of the world-soul. In this the holy and pure being had allowed the world to emanate from itself; the further this world was removed from its origin and source, the more melancholy and gloomy it became. If the gods, the holy and pious men in the past, and the heaven of light of Indra, were nearest to the purity of Brahman, the pure nature of this being became seriously adulterated in the lower stages of removal. In the present world, purity and impurity, virtue and passion, wisdom and folly, were at least in equipoise. The worlds of animals, plants, and dead matter were obviously still further removed from the pure Brahman. If, according to this view, the world was an adulterated, broken, impure Brahman, it received, along with this corruption, the duty of regaining its original purity. All beings had received their origin from Brahman, and to him all must return. From this point of view, and the requirement that every being must work out its way to perfection, in order to be adapted to its perfect origin, the priests arrived at the idea that every creature must go through all the gradations of being as they emanated from Brahman, before it could attain to rest. The Çudra must become a Vaiçya, the Vaiçya a Kshatriya, the Kshatriya a Brahman, and the Brahman a wholly sinless and sacred man, a pure spirit, before he can pass into Brahman. From the necessity that every one should work up to Brahman, arose the monstrous doctrine of regenerations. The Çudra who had lived a virtuous life, was, it was thought, by the power of this virtue and the practice of it, changed in his nature, and born anew in the higher existence of a Vaiçya; the Kshatriya became a Brahman, and so on.170 In this manner the pure and holy life, according as it was freed from all sensuality and corporeality, from the whole material world, succeeded in winning a return to supersensual and incorporeal Brahman. Conversely, the impure, spotted, and sinful were born again in a lower order, and in the worst shape according to the measure of the offence – sometimes they did not even become men at all, but animals – in order to struggle back again through unutterable torments, and innumerable regenerations, to their former condition, and finally to Brahman. Thus a wide field was opened to the fancy of the Indians, on which it soon erected a complete system of regenerations; and into this the theory of hell was adopted. The man who had committed grievous sins, sinks after death into hell, and for long periods is tortured in the various departments there, that thus, after expiation of his sins, he may begin again the scale of migration from the lowest and worst form of existence. One who was guilty of less serious offences was born again according to their measure as a Çudra or an elephant, a lion or a tiger, a bird or a dancer.171 One who had committed acts of cruelty was re-born as a beast of prey.172 One who had attempted the murder of a Brahman was punished in hell one hundred or a thousand years, according to the progress of the attempt, and then saw the light of the world in twenty-one births, each time proceeding from the body of some common animal. He who had shed the blood of a Brahman, was torn in hell by beasts of prey for so many years as the flowing blood had touched grains of sand; and if any one had slain a Brahman his soul was born again in the bodies of the animals held in greatest contempt on the Ganges, the dog and the goat.173 If any one had stolen a cow he was born again as a crocodile, or a lizard; if corn, as a rat;174 if fruits and roots, as an ape.175 He who defiled his father's bed was to be born a hundred times as a herb, or a liana – the creepers embracing the trees;176 the Brahman who is guilty of a fault in the sacrifice is born again for a hundred years as a crow or kite, and those who eat forbidden food will again see light as worms. He who reproaches a free man with being the son of a slave-woman, will himself be born five times from the body of a slave.177 In this manner, partly fanciful, partly pedantic, the priests built up the system of regenerations. According to the law-book of the priests, inorganic matter, worms, insects, frogs, rats, crows, swine, dogs, and asses, were on the lowest stage in the scale of creation; above them came first, elephants, horses, lions, boars, the Çudras and the Mlechhas; i. e. the nations who did not speak Sanskrit. Above these were rogues, players, demons (Raksheras), Piçachas, i. e. blood-suckers, vampyres; above these wrestlers and boxers, dancers, armour-smiths, drunkards, and Vaiçyas; above them the Kshatriyas and the kings, the men eminent in battle and speech, the genii of heaven, the Gandharvas and Apsarasas. Above these were the Brahmans, the pious penitents, the gods, the great saints, and finally, Brahman.

      Thus the new system effaced the specific distinctions between plants and beasts, men and gods. Everywhere it saw nothing but spirits, which have to work their way in a similar manner from greater or less impurity to purity, from incompleteness to completeness and the original source of their existence. The souls, when they had once been created and had emanated from Brahman, found no rest or end till they had returned once more to this their starting-point; and this they

169

In Manu, 4, 88-90 (cf. 12, 75, 76) eight hells are mentioned and described, in each of which the torments grow worse as the offences are more serious. The Buddhists retain these eight hot hells, and add eight cold; Burnouf, "Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme," p. 320, 366, 367, 201. The Singhalese have increased the number to 136, the Siamese to 462. Koppen, "Relig. des Buddha," s. 244. Cf. A. Weber, in "Z. D. M. G." 9, 237.

170

e. g. Manu, 9, 335.

171

Manu, 12, 43, 44.

172

Manu, 12, 59.

173

Manu, 12, 55.

174

Manu, 12, 62, 64.

175

Manu, 12, 67.

176

Manu, 12, 58.

177

Manu, 12, 59. Burnouf, "Introduction," p. 274. Bohlen has already observed that many of these regenerations are merely fanciful, "Indien," 24.