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This is evidently the hell known to the law-punsters and epic (i. 74. 39) as puttra, 'the put hell' from which the son (putra) delivers (tra). For these ancestors are in the 'hole' because Agastya, their descendant, has not done his duty and begotten sons (i. 45. 13; iii. 96. 15); one son being 'no son' according to law and epic (i. 100. 68), and all the merit of sacrifice being equal to only one-sixteenth of that obtained by having a son. The teaching, again, in regard to the Fathers themselves (the Manes), while not differing materially from the older view, offers novelties which show how little the absorptiontheory had taken hold of the religious consciousness. The very fact that the son is still considered to be as necessary as ever (that he may offer food to his ancestors) shows that the believer, whatever his professed faith, expects to depend for bliss hereafter upon his post mortem meals, as much as did his fathers upon theirs. In the matter of the burial of the dead, one finds, what is antique, that although according to the formal law only infants are buried, and adults are burned, yet was burial known, as in the Vedic age. And the still older exposure of the body, after the Iranian fashion, is not only hinted at as occurring here and there even before the epic, but in the epic these forms are all recognized as equally approved: "When a man dies he is burned or buried or exposed" (nik[r. ][s. Jyate)[31] it is said in i. 90. 17; and the narrator goes on to explain that the "hell on earth," of which the auditor "has never heard" (vs. 6) is re-birth in low bodies, speaking of it as a new doctrine. "As if in a dream remaining conscious the spirit enters another form"; the bad becoming insects and worms; the good going to heaven by means of the "seven gates," viz., penance, liberality, quietism, self-control, modesty, rectitude, and mercy. This is a union of two views, and it is evidently the popular view, that, namely, the good go to heaven while the bad go to new existence in a low form, as opposed to the more logical conception that both alike enter new forms, one good, the other bad. Then the established stadia, the pupil, the old teaching (upanishad) of the householders, and the wood-dwellers are described, with the remark that there is no uniformity of opinion in regard to them, but the ancient view crops out again in the statement that one who dies as a forest-hermit "establishes in bliss" ten ancestors and ten descendants. In this part of the epic the Punj[=a]b is still near the theatre of events, the 'centre region' being between the Ganges and Jumna (I. 87.5); although the later
