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T.W. Rhys Davids
Public Domain
First Published 1903
[250]...the priests, already before the rise of Buddhism, had (as appendices to their sacred books on the sacrifice) short treatises setting out, as the highest truth, those forms of speculatioon which they held most compatible with their own mysteries...
[251] The ideas they selected are, as would naturally be expected, those based on the same animistic notions as underlay their own views of the sacrifice. A soul in these texts -- the pre-Buddhistic Upanishads -- is supposed to exist inside each human body, and to be the sole and sufficient explanation of life and motion. In the living body, in its ordinary state, the soul dwells in a cavity in the heart.[1] It is described as being in size like a grain of barley or rice.[2] It is only in later speculation that it grows to be of the size of the thumb, and to be called therefore "the dwarf."[3] In shape it is like a man.[4] Its appearance was evidently found difficult to portray, even in simile; but it is said in different passages to be like smoke-coloured wool, like cochineal, like flame, like a white lotus, like a flash of lightning, like a light without smoke. Beliefs vary as to what it is made of. One passage says it consists of consciousness, mind, breath; eye and ears; earth, water, fire, and ether; heat and no heat; desire and no desire; anger and no anger; law and no law -- in a word, of all things.[5] We see from this that the soul was supposed to be material -- the four elements of matter are there -- but selected mental qualities are also in it. In another curious and deeply mystical old text the elements of matter come first, and we are told of five souls, each inside the other, each the same yet different from the one outside it, each of them in shape as a man, and made respectively of food, breath, mind, consciousness, and joy.
Certain forms of disease were supposed to be due to the fadct that the soul had escaped out of the body; and charms are recorded for bringing it back.[6] In dream sleep also the "soul" is away from the body. "Therefore they say: Let no one wake a man brusquely; for that is a matter difficult to be cured for him if the soul dinf not its way back to him."[7]
During the dream the soul, after leaving the body, wanders at its will, builds up a world according to its fancy, creates for itself chariots and houses, lakes and rivers, manifold shapes, a gorgeous playground wherein it acts and enjoys and suffers, "either rejoicing withwomen, or laughing with its friends, or beholding horrible sights." Till at last, tired out, -- just as a falcon after roaming hither and thither in the sky, tired, flaps its wings and is wafted to its nest, -- so the soul returns from that playground of his to the body, whenin deep, fast sleep it wants no more, and dreams no more.[8]
Such dreams are premonitions of good luck or the reverse, which give rise, in India then, as throughout the world in similar stages of culture, to many foolish fancies.
When the soul has come back to the body, which remains recumbent in dreamless sleep, the soul pervades the whole of it, down to the tips of the hair and nails, by means of seventy-two thousand arteries called Hit¤ (the Good). And oddly enough it is precisely then that the soul is supposed to obtain light.[9]
We are not told how the soul gets out of, and back into, the body. This is not surprising, for the opinions expressed as to how the soul got into its first body -- whether at conception or at quickening or at birth -- are contradictory. All views on this point were no doubt neither more nor less hazy then in India than they are now in the West. There are passages which suppose the soul to have existed, before birth, in some other body;[10] and other passages which suppose it to have been inserted, at the origin of things, into its first body downwards, through the suture at the top of the skull, into the heart.[11] But there is a passage which affirms that the soul was inserted upwards, through the intestines and the belly, into the head. And we find a curious speculation, of which there are three variants, on the transfer of the soul by generation, through the seed.
One of these is the theory that certain human souls, on going to the moon, become food to the gods there, and are thus united to the gods as a consequence of their good deeds. When the efficacy of their good deeds is exhausted, they pass from the gods to the ether, from the ether into the air, from the air into the rain, from the rain on to the earth, from the earth into plants which become food to males, and from the males they pass into females.[12]
At the death of an ordinary man the top part of the heart becomes lighted up, and the soul, guided by that light, departs from the heart into the eye, and through the eye to some other body, exalted or not, according to the deeds the man has done in that body the soul is now leaving. But the soul of the man whose cravings have ceased goes, through the suture of the skull (at the top of the head), to Brahman.[13] In each case there are many stopping-places on the way,[14] but the theories differ both about these and about other details. I have discussed these points elsewhere. And a careful search would no doubt reveal passages even in other parts of the priestly literature acknowledging views which do not happen to be referred to in the older Upanishads, but which bear the stamp of great antiquity -- such passages as Mah¤-bh¤rata, xii. II. 704, where we are told that if, as the dying mandraws up his knees, the soul goes out of him by way of the knees, then it goes to the S¤dhyas.
But there is an almost entire unanimity of opinion in these Upanishads that the soul will not obtain release from rebirth either by the performance of sacrifice in this birth or by the practice of penance. It must be by a sort of theosophic or animistic insight, by the perception, in the absolute knowledge and certainty, that one's own soul is identical with the Great Soul, the only permanent reality, the ultimate basis and cause of all phenomena.
[1]B.rhad. iv. 3.7, v.6; Ch¤nd. viii. 3.3: Tait. i.6. I. Compare KaÂha, ii. 20; iii. I: iv. 6; vi. 17
[2]B.rhad. v. 6: Ch¤nd. iii. 14.3 (this idea is even Vedic).
[3]KaÂha, iv. 12, 13, vi. 17; .Svet. iii. 13. v. S.
[4]Tait. ii.; B.rhad. i. 41; .Sat. Br. xiv. 4.2.1
[5]Brhad. iv. 4. 5. See also iii. 7. 14-22.
[6]Atharva Veda, v. 29. 5; vi. 53- 2; vii. 67. Compare Ait. £r. iii. 2.4.7.
[7]B.rhad. iv. 3.14.
[8]B.rhad. iv. 3: Ch¤nd, viii. 12. 3
[9]B.rhad. ii. I. 19, iv. 3. 20; Ch¤nd, viii. 5.3; Kaus, iv. 19
[10]B.rhad. iii. 2. 13; iv. 4. 6. Compare vi. 4, and Ait. £r.ii 3.2
[11]Tait. i. 6. I; Ait. iii. 12.
[12]B.rhad. vi. 2. 16; vi. 3. 13. Comp. Kaus. i. 2; ait. ii. 1-4; Ait. £r. iii. 2.2.4.
[13]B.rhad. iv. 4; kaus.iii. 3; Ch¤nd. vii. 6.6; Tait. i. 6. I.
[14]B.rhad. vi. 2; Ch¤nd. iv. 15 and v. 9.
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