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Albrecht Wezler
The warrior taking to fight in fear
423
The punishment with which he is threatened is according to Manu the evidently irreversible - loss of whatever merit of his good deeds he may have accumulated so far, and this loss is effected by its being taken away by' his master; but the master is not only given this recompense for the detriment he suffers because of the warrior's disloyal act, but he has, at least according to M. 7.94, the additional advantage of getting rid of the effects of his own deeds which pass over to his disloyal servant.
The latter is really bad off now: there is nothing left him but dusksta, i.e. a probably considerable quantity of adharma substance, viz. his own plus that of his master passing over to him in its entirety. Significantly enough, in the verses themselves the possibility has not been taken into account that the master or the warrior may lack any suksta or duşksta; for, the probability or rather improbability of such a lack apart, this shows again that all that matters to the author is not to tackle academic questions but - to emphatically impress loyalty upon the warrior (who cannot in fact ever reckon with the possibility that his master is by chance free of any duskyta: and as for his own, he will himself know that the is not by any means 'undefiled' or entirely lacking in merit).
The result of this punishment is hence that the master has, at this particular point of time, only sukta whereas his servant carries a more or less heavy burden of duskyta only. Nevertheless, it would not be justified to call this twofold passing over of the effects of deeds an exchange of the corresponding substance: for, the parting of his suksta by the warrior, and even that of his duşkita by the master, cannot be said to be a volitional or even conscious act. Even the verb adatte of 7.95 does not necessarily imply that the acquisition concerned is a deliberate, conscious act : it may equally well mean no more than that the master gets this sukyta as the result of a passing over of which he is entirely ignorant, not to speak of having willed it.
4.4. Now it is clear that only a person who - if he does not also himself believe in some kind of afterlife, then at least can be sure that the warriors in their turn believe in it can hope to really threaten them with such a punishment. The question, however, is the precise nature of these ideas about life after death. And it is clearly also connected with that raised above (cf. end 5 4.2) regarding the correct explanation of the coexistence of the two divergent conceptions of karma, e.g. in the times of the various commentators of the Manusmrti.
In contradistinction to M. 6.79, the idea expressed in 7.94 and 95 cannot itself be traced back, to all appearances, to Vedic texts. But it does not require hard thinking in order to realize that this idea bears close resemblance to that of M. 6.79, or its Vedic sources, and, to be sure, not only as regards the basic substantialism common to both. For clearly in both cases the effects of good and bad deeds are regarded as a (subtle) substance which can pass over from the person to whom it originally belongs to somebody else. It is, therefore, rather tempting to assume that the idea expressed in M. 7.94 and 95 goes back likewise to the period of the Brāhmaṇas and early Upanişads; and I should like to propose this hypothesis with the important reservation, however, that all I want to say is that the general idea of the effects of one's deeds as something capable of passing over belongs to that period.
Now M. 6.79, or rather its Vedic sources - as referred to by Bådarayana and quoted by Sankara - are part of a stratum of literature which documents the beginnings of the theory of rebirth, and that of karma closely connected with it. i.e. which belongs to a period when these theories were still far from being generally accepted. Therefore, it is legitimate to see whether the idea expressed in M. 7.94 and 95 could similarly date from the same time, i.e. whether it has anything at all to do with the theory of rebirth. There is only one way to try to answer this question, viz. to test this idea as to whether it presupposes or implies the theory of rebirth. The result cannot but be that neither this idea as such nor
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75. This is why Bühler's rendering of pratipadyate in M. 794 (cf. $ 1) takes upon himself is not acceptable after all.
76. The substantialism, etc., being presupposed by me.