Great Indian Religion

SR No.: 007305
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: G T Bettany
Publisher: Ward Lock Bowden and Co
Publication Year: 1892
Total Pages: 312
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 42 MB

Page 27

YAMA AND A FUTURE LIFE.
15
Vishnu.
most characterised of old by the three steps by which he strode over the world; by his threefold existence as fire on earth, as lightning in the atmosphere, and as the sun in the sky; or as the sun in his three positions of rising, culmination, and setting. Triple power and functions are variously asserted of him, and he is said to assist other gods. Only sometimes is he adored independently, as thus: Our hymns and praises have proceeded to Vishnu, the worker of many wonders: he is the wide-stepping, the exalted, whose primeval, creative wives are indefatigable." Often he is closely associated with Indra. How different a position he afterwards assumes we shall see later on. Most of the goddesses mentioned in the Veda we must omit reference to, as they are of less importance.
YAMA (FROM A NATIVE PICTURE).
It is in the later portions, the ninth and tenth books, Yama and a of the Rig- future life. Veda, that we find a marked reference to the ideas of immortality and a future life, although they are not entirely wanting previously, as in passages where mortals are said to have attained immortality, or to have gone to the gods, who prolong their lives. Sometimes, too, the souls of ancestors, the fathers existing with the gods, are invoked. These ideas are in the later books especially connected with Yama, the divine ruler of the spirits of the dead, by some supposed to represent the first man, and having a twin sister, Yami (Max Müller dissents from this view). Sir Monier Williams thus represents Yama in verse: