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RELIGION— THE BRAHMIN POSITION
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more, and dreams no more. It is a charming and beautiful picture.
Such dreains are premonitions of good luck or the reverse, which gave rise, in India then, as throughout the world in similar stages of culture, to many foolish fancies.
When the soul has come back to the body, which remains recumbent in dreamless sleep, the soul pervades the whole of it, down to the tips of the hair and nails, by means of seventy-two thousand arteries called Hitā (the Good). And oddly enough it is precisely then that the soul is supposed to obtain light."
We are not told how the soul gets out of, and back into, the body. This is not surprising, for the opinions expressed as to how the soul got into its first body—whether at conception or at quickening or at birth-are contradictory. All views on this point were no doubt neither more nor less hazy then in India than they are now in the West. There are passages which suppose the soul to have existed, before birth, in some other body'; and other passages which suppose it to have been inserted, at the origin of things, into its first body downwards, through the suture at the top of the skull, into the heart. But there is a passage which affirms that the soul was inserted upwards, through the intestines and the belly, into the head. And we find a
| Bịhad. iv. 3 : Chānd. viii. 12. 3. ? Bịhad. ii. 1. 19, iv. 3. 20; Chand. viii. 6. 3: Kaus. iv, 19. 3 Brhad. iii. 2. 13; iv. 4. 6. Compare vi. 7, and Ait. Ar. ii. 3. 2. 4 Tait. i. 6. I; Ait, iii. 12.
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
