Karma and Rebirth

Author(s): T G Kalghatgi
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 51

T. G. Kalghatgi
It is therefore necessary to investigate this article of faith of the trans. migrations of souls from the historical and the psychological points of view. It is necessary to survey the field of inves'igation and thought that have covered centuries of philosophical and religious thinking.
II
In primitive times man began with vague awareness of the life beyond. He was vaguely aware that some life persists even after death. In the tribal religion we find traces of ghost worship and totemism which have their roots in animistic conceptions. James Frazer says that there is a necessary connection with the forms of worship and the belief in immortality. Among savage races, a life after death is not a matter of speculation and conjecture, hope and fear; it is a practical certainty which the individual as little dreams of doubting as he doubts the reality of his conscious existence. He assumes that man continues to live even after death. He finds that during sleep he is not aware of himself, yet after he gets up he finds himself in the same body. Similarly in dreams he finds himself moving about in different places. After he wakes up again he is in the same body. Therefore, he concludes that he is enclosed in the body and is different from the body. There is the beginning of the distinction of man's soul from the body. Frazer says that the primitive man assumes without inquiry that there is a life after death, and acts upon it without hesitation, as if it were one of the ascertai. ned truths within the limits of human experience. Many savage tribes believe that death is an unnatural thing and it comes only by unnatural incidents like accidents. Even after death the person continues to live and inhabit the body. There have been customs of keeping necessary equipment and food for the person even after his burial. We find this in the Egyptian mummies. The ghost theory of the origin of religion also points out that the individual survives death and continues to inhabit the body and nearby places even after death. Some Meanderal skeletons have been found deposited in graves and equipped with materials useful for the dead in the other world. On the basis of these burial practices we may say that Meandertal man must have had a belief in an after-life.
Yet the primitive man is not able to conceive the immaterial and purly spiritual being. Soul is vaguely considered as an ethereal image of the body and has the power of flashing about quickly from place to place. As to the nature of after-life and its locality we can hardly expect to be able to reduce savage beliefs to a coherent system. There is a general belief that in the interval between death and the burial the spirit hovers about in the
1. Mischa Titiev : Introduction to Anthropology (New York, 1961), p. 118.