Soul Body And Person In Ancient India

Author(s): Karin Preisendanz
Publisher: Karin Preisendanz

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mation fire is requested to heal the damage afflicted to the corpse by beasts of prey, I on the other hand it is implored not to burn the body, not even to scorch the skin together with the solid body underneath. The hymn also refers to the ritual substitutes that are cremated along with the corpse in the form of sacrificial animals or their most tasty parts and in this way offered to the funeral fire.172 Certainly, the burning of the body must have been clearly observed, but it is reinterpreted here as an act of "cooking." that is, as the positive act of causing the body to attain a "well-done state, in the sense of a mature, complete and purified state, ready to be handed over to the forefathers.!
However, regarding the passage of analysis (8) this interpretation is problematic as one would have to assume that the constituent elements of the dead person that were dispatched to the sun, the wind and the plants respectively would have to be extracted from these locations to allow for a complete reconstitution of the body for the purpose of enjoying physical pleasures in heaven. Furthermore, the passage also mentions earth and the waters as two further cosmic destinations that have to be considered. The verse thus seems to express alternative and very much different fates after death, one of them being a reconstituted bodily existence in heaven, another a new bodily existence on this earth, and still another continued existence with a different body in the heavenly waters. The second notion can be inferred from the ancient texts in two forms. One of them is the belief that a deceased male assumes renewed physical existence in his own family-line, normally (and preferably) as his own grandson, a belief well-known from other cultures and manifest in the custom of naming the grandson, and not the son, after the grandfather, although usually not before the latter's death" ("terrestrial immortality"). Further, there was the belief that the ancestors returned to this world after some time, to dwell in the vicinity of the habitations of their descendants in the bodily form of birds. In both cases reconstitution of the very same body would certainly not be meaningful. This
also holds good if the reference to "earth" in analysis (8) would be a reference to the old Indo-European idea of a dark subterranean realm where the common" dead are bound to go to after death. Allusions to this general realm of the dead can be found plentifully elsewhere in Vedic literature, which makes the latter assumption more probable than the two alternatives mentioned above; this would entail the idea that the deado dwell in this realm in the form of their "free souls, maybe accompanied by their "mental souls" (manas)," i.c., experience existence as some kind of shadow-beings of themselves when compared to their former personalities, and in any case not in their reconstituted bodily form. Finally, also in the case of the third notion, namely going to the waters," which may refer to continued existence on or rather as heavenly bodies, especially the stars, located within the cosmic waters, I reconstitution of the earthly body with all its vital forces does not make much sense. It may very well be that the "eye," dtman and compact bodily parts of the deceased person were imagined to return to their sources forever in the case of continued existence in or rather under the earth (i.e., in the subterranean realm of the dead) and in the heavenly) waters which is based on the continuation of the respective "free soul." In the case of continued existence in heaven with a reconstituted body, however, which - as the hoped for and preferred fate after death - forms the main concern of the hymn with its many references to the body of the dead person, the after-death allocation of the compact bodily parts to the macrocosmic element of plants would not apply. As regards the initial two allocations of constituents of the person to the wind and the sun, it is conceivable that they also apply to this variant of afterlife because a "vital soul" (or "breathing-soul") (atman) and a vital faculty of sight (or "perceptive soul") could have been imagined to be newly created from these macrocosmic elements after the body has been reconstituted in or has miraculously been transferred in purified form to the heavenly realm. The two newly formed constituents would then join this body and perform their functions in it, for the benefit of the "free soul" which has reached there by the
170 CE. RV 10.16.6. Cf. also Arbman 1927a: 36 and 93. 171 Cf. RV 10.16.1; cf. also Oldenberg 1917: 585, Arbman 1927: 37 and 93, and Horsch 1971:
112. 172 Cf. RV 10.16.4 and 7; cf. also Oldenberg 1917: 577-578 and 587. 11CE, RV 10.16.1-2; cf. also Arbman 1927a: 37 and 93. On the conflicting statements in RV
10.16 cf. also O'Flaherty 1981: 48-49. On the responsibility of the surviving relatives to ensure the completeness of the bodies of their ancestors cf. Arbman 1927:37-39 and 1265 on their role in the reconstitution of the body of a recently deceased relative cf. Arbman
1927: 91-92. IN Cf. Witzel 1984: 145. For a possible explanation of how this process was imagined cf.
Arbman 1926: 164-165. Cf. also Horsch 1971: 116-117, with n. 20, and 120 for references
to later Vedic literature, and Schmithausen 1995: 49-50 for further literature. 179 Cf. Bodewitz 1994:31. 14 Cf. Oldenberg 1917: 564, Arbman 1927a: 174-175, Horsch 1971: 117, n. 21, Witzel 1984:
145 and Schmithausen 1995: 51. On the appearance of the free soul" in the form of a bird even during the lifetime of a person d. Arbman 1927: 181.
177 Cf. Oldenberg 1917: 538-540 and 541-555. Arbman 1927a: 55 and especially Arbman
1927 and 1928. Cf. also the critical examination of some relevant Rgvedic passages in Bodewitz 1994, referring to the stratification proposed in the unpublished thesis by Hyla S.
Converse, with the resulting corroboration of Arbman's thesis. 178 CE. above p. 136. On the complete lack of life and consciousness, or at least the lack of
their presence in the full sense, in the "free soul" ef. Arbman 1926: 189 and 201-202, on the endowment of the free soul" with life and intellectual capacity, and the development
of a unitary notion of a 'soul" cf. pp. 202-204 and 206-211. 19 Cf. again Flew 1976: 141. 1 Cl. Oldenberg 1917: 565-566; cf. also Parpola 1985: 58-64 and Schmithausen 1995: 50.
The return to the plants may be a reference to the customary burial of the bones after cremation, itself a reference to the subterranean realm of the dead (and possibly to the earlier practice of burial), and at the same time reflect the awareness of the organic transformation of the compact bodily parts into new living plant-matter (cf. also Horsch 1971: 116. n. 18b).
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