Soul Body And Person In Ancient India

Author(s): Karin Preisendanz
Publisher: Karin Preisendanz

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der the presupposition that we are our "souls," that is, our now continuously conscious individuating "free souls," the notion of such a "power of life" only implied in the passage underlying analysis (8) would here respond to and express the human hope for survival, that is, the continuation of some personal and conscious life after death.
VII.
To sum up the resulting hypothetical picture of the notions involved in analysis (8): After death, the eye, " i.e., sight, the central vital faculty of seeing (or the specialized "perceptive soul"), the breath-like "vital soul" called atman (or: the specialized "breathing-soul"), and the solid bodily element of (wo)man return to those natural elements from which they have arisen: the "eye" to the sun, breath-like dtman to the wind, and the compact bodily parts or bones to the plants; the latter can be conceived as the origin or source of the former if one considers that the substance or essence which nourishes and builds up the solid bodily element of (wo)man is extracted from edible plants, directly or indirectly in the case of the consumption of meat and animal products. The unnamed individuating "free soul," which I suggest is the addressee of the second person imperative statements in the verse under analysis, an entity constituting the essentially independent individual, has become completely "free" now, restrained merely by some order of things or determination () (dharman) which is not further explicated. Given the limits of the present contribution it is not possible to elaborate on the difficult term (dharman) and on possible interpretations of its precise meaning in the present context. It can merely be pointed out that according to one possible direction of interpretation dharman regulates the fate of the "free soul" after death with respect to its cosmic place of residence: heaven and earth, mentioned in the verse, are the two worlds, or rather, world layers, of the ancient Vedic cosmology, which are in the course of the develop ment of cosmological concepts supplemented by a third layer, the so-called in termediate space located between them. The waters mentioned here also refer to a specific macrocosmic realm, namely, the primordial cosmic waters from which the world as we know it arose in the beginning; these waters are still present to day in the form of the heavenly ocean and are also surging beneath the (flat) carth: every night the sun submerges in these waters and thus earth plunges back, as it were, into the primordial dark and unfathomable watery chaos.12 Un
A precise analysis of the historically most relevant verse in the Rgvedic crema tion hymn 10.16 (analysis [8]), with the purpose of clarifying the notion of atman in this context, brings with it a closer look at the involved notion(s) about life after death and the varieties of this notion in ancient India, a topic already touched upon in the discussion of some of the Atharvavedic prayers and closely connected with notions of powers of life, including ideas about their relationship with the body and the elusive person. As Flew suggests, the supposedly universal hope for survival after death may even be considered as a major motivation behind the assumption of an immortal "soul." I have already alluded to the fact that the cremation hymn RV 10.16 as a whole may combine various conceptions of the afterlife. One of them is the archaic notion of immortality as reconstitution in the case of especially meritorious persons, e.g, if the dead person belonged to the small elite of especially praiseworthy sacrificers or heroic Warriors, it was believed that the deceased would be transferred to heaven, to enjoy all kinds of physical pleasures there together with the gods or his(/her?) equally meritorious forefathers. One may take verse 3 of hymn 10.16 (cf. analysis 8), to allude to this so-called reconstitution variant of immortality because elsewhere in the hymn there is evidence for this belief. The enjoyment of heavenly pleasures may have been imagined to take place by means of the present body in reconstituted form or even by means of the same unscathed body which has only seemingly been harmed by the funeral fire: on the one hand the cre
the "dead man himself or the soul of the dead man going into these three worlds (or of
one's choosing of one or the other of the mentioned worlds) (cf. O'Flaherty 1981: 47). On speaking about the dead person in the sense of his/her "free soul cf. Arbman 1926.
107ff. 60 Cf. also Arbman 1926: 144, 156-157, 161-162, 178, 181 and 184-190 about the annihilation
of the body-soul() together with the body. Bodewitz's suggestion that the term atman already refers to the self of man here (a role which according to Bodewitz is consequently also taken by prdna because of the parallel with RV 10.90.13) (cf. Bodewitz 1992: 51) is therefore problematic. - The fact that the eye and the dran return to their source (cf. also Arbman 1926: 161, 179, 182 and 198 on the return to its origin of the body-soul") seems to rule out the belief that the free soul and the body-souls reunite after death
(on this possibility cf. Arbman 1926: 157-158). 101 Cf. n. 158 above on some considerations. 16 Cf. Bodewitz 1982 on the various stages of Vedic cosmogony and especially the role of the
waters.
1 That is not only during dreams and presumably during deep sleep or swooning 1 It is impossible to decide whether the poet-priest intended to address the "free soul"
termed as here or whether he believed in some other free soul" going under a different name (6.8., manas), or whether he had already a "unitary soul" in mind, no matter what it
may have been called. WS Cf. Flew 1967: 149. 1 cf. Oldenberg 1917, 530-535, to be modified by the observations in Arbman 1927b: 339
341, 345-349 and 361-368. Cf. Bodewitz 1994:26-27 and 33-38 on the late appearance of this positive idea about life after death in the Rgoeda (pace Horsch 1971: 106) and
Schmithausen 1995: 47. 16 Cf. Flew 1967: 140. IM RV 10.16.5 (cf. also Arbman 1927:36) refers to this rare, but nevertheless hoped-for situa
tion. W Cf. Arbman 1927 75, 90, 93–94 and 173.
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