PART V
DEATH AND DISSOLUTION
Yama
It is only seemingly a paradox to affirm that a strong will to live entails an equally strong will to die. If the will to live is a realistic will to live a real life and not a whimsical desire for an imaginary life, we must recognize that inasmuch as real life is lived under the existential condition of death, death itself has to be taken into account and equally willed. To desire to live and not to desire the same degree of death that life may contain is not a realistic desire to live but a mere product of our imagination, which seeks to grasp at an illusory “life.” Fear of death, by the same token, is of the same nature as fear of life. To wish for an X without wishing for all that the X contains is not really to wish for it, but to wish for an idealized and altogether different X.
We do not find so explicit an argument in the Vedas, but their all-pervading mood seems to correspond very closely to what we have just been saying. The Vedic attitude, which is strongly life-affirming, has as its corollary the acceptance of death. But we cannot reduce life and much less death to neat rational schemes. There are equally real human attitudes to life and death which are not rational and, further, we have to ask what kind of life we really love and what kind of death we really fear.
One thing that is clear is the integration between life and death in the shruti. That integration is examined in this part, whose connection with the preceding part requires no further comment.
To extricate the Vedic experience of death from its cosmological background, with which it is almost inseparably interwoven, is particularly difficult. In order to interpret correctly the human experience of death which permeates the Vedas, we must take into account the evidence provided by the history of religions for the periods that precede and follow the Vedic age, but we cannot include here such a preface to our study. We try to present only the results that a particular method produces. This method is based on involvement and distance: involvement in Vedic culture, so as to see it as far as possible through the eyes of Vedic Man, and distance from it, looking at it from without with critical awareness.
The difficulty here is compounded because, unlike other fields of human experience, the actual subject of this chapter is not empirical Man but rather man living in another realm outside this perceptible universe. Thus the cosmological model in which this “otherworld” is situated has to be understood first. Yet the cosmological model not only affects but also conditions that very insight into the eschatological problem.
We would like, then, to extricate, insofar as possible, the anthropological experience of Vedic wisdom regarding the central problem of death from the cosmological world view of that time. We are not assuming that there are two separable experiences, the cosmological and the anthropological. What we are saying is that the anthropological experience, that is, the subjective conviction (in this instance regarding death), can be expressed independently of the particular cosmological substructure. We certainly do not want to suggest that a pure demythologization is possible; rather, we are trying as it were to wrap the Vedic experience in another myth, the present-day one, so that through such a “transmythization” we may try to understand, or even reenact, the experience disclosed in the shruti.
Modern Man wonders about death and weaves innumerable theories about it; he seems to be sure about only one thing: its factual reality and thus its inevitability. In spite of startling news produced now and then by the scientific shamans of our age, contemporary Man seems at a loss when he is confronted with one of the most ancient myths of mankind: the possibility of avoiding death. Because death is seen to be inevitable, modern society tends to wipe out from the memory of the living all dealings with the dying and the dead. The fundamental Vedic attitude is almost the opposite: it does not reckon with death’s inevitability and it does not try to smuggle death away from everyday life.
According to this vision, which is common to other cultures as well, death is not inevitable; it is only accidental. You die if your life is snatched away before you reach maturity, or before you marry, or if something unexpected happens to you which prevents you from achieving what you yourself or society was expecting of your life. Death is limited to this rupture, this misfortune, this accident. Thus it is always an unnatural event, and it is always akala mrtyu, untimely death.
On the other hand the old Man, “the Man of long life,” as the Vedas call him, the one who has lived his life, who has fulfilled his life span, his ayus, 1 does not die; he does not experience a break and, thus, a trauma; he has simply consumed the torch and exhausted the fuel. The flame of his life goes on and it burns in his sons, his daughters, his children’s children, his friends, his work, and in his ideas which are scattered to the four winds. Even his body, with its own energy, has already enriched the earth on which he has walked, the rivers in which he has bathed, and the living beings with whom he has been in communication and communion. Only the last gifts of his body and breath still remain to be given away. The old Man does not die; he simply finishes his commerce with life and achieves the transmission of all that he himself has received, as the Upanishads describe. 2 He cancels the constitutive rna, the debt of gratitude for the gift of his existence. 3 The natural extinction of one particular carrier of life or the completion of one’s own life is not death.
Indeed, not every Man who is old in years reaches long life, maturity, and thus immortality. It is not a question of mere number of years but of growth, for which the passing of years--the hundred autumns--is certainly required but of which it is not the only condition. Time, in fact, is more than its measurement by the passing of days and seasons; it is the qualitative coefficient of human growth itself. To disentangle the immortal from the mortal, to liberate himself from the claws of death, is the task of every Man. On the one hand there is the asu or life-principle, the power of life or vital strength, which is assimilated in some traditions to the ahamkara, the selfish ego of unfulfilled desires and unachieved projects. This ego is not pure, later periods will say, inasmuch as it consists of unburnt karmas; it is this ego that is afraid of death, because it must certainly die. There is, on the other hand, the personal atman, that spark of the paramatman, which does not die. Jiva, in spite of the variety of meanings given by different schools, could also be another word for immortal Man.
The notion that the old Man who has reached the end of his life span and finished the task entrusted to him does not die is more convincing for Vedic Man than for modern Man because of the deeper sense of collective consciousness which the former enjoys in comparison with contemporary Man. 4 The Vedic Covenant is directed not to Men but to Man, not to disconnected individuals but to the rich web of personhood, which is, as we shall see, neither singular nor plural. Because the coefficient of individuality is very low, individual death presents a very small problem for the old Man whose vitality, or rather whose body, just fades away. Against this background we may perhaps acquire an adequate perspective that will enable us to envisage this central human problem as experienced in the beginnings of Indo-European civilization; we may also perhaps learn something of our own attainable immortality.
It would not be proper to reduce the rich range of the Vedic experience to only a few features. It contains, moreover, a double complexity: horizontal and vertical. The complexity is horizontal insofar as the millennium of human experience concentrated in the shruti--without of course considering the prehistory from which it originated--is far too wide to allow oversimplifications. We have, for instance, already stressed the tension between the self-understanding of Man in the Samhitas and in the Upanishads. What may be valid for one may be contested by the other and the eschatological ideas of one period may not tally with those of the other. By saying that the complexity is also vertical we want to indicate the fascinating fact that the Vedic Revelation discloses itself at very widely differing levels of human experience, ranging from the most simple, primitive, and literal understanding of an afterlife as a copy or rather an idealization of this one, to a sophisticated and highly refined vision of forms of survival which transcend imagination and even thought.
The hymns and texts that follow may give some idea of this experience. We divide this part into two sections; one describes the phenomenon of death, the break, the departure. It contains three subsections which should be easily understandable. The first one contains myths dealing with the mystery of the beyond. The second one has an immediate existential flavor. It mostly consists of prayers dealing with the concrete struggle with death; these prayers represent the everlasting tension between the living and the dying as well as between living and dying. The third one deals with the moment immediately after death. It is a moment for effective action, not one of theoretical reflection. It is the last of the human rites and the antyeshti completes the triangle composed of birth (with initiation, which is the spiritual birth), marriage, and death. For this reason we include the rite here as we have done in other instances.
The second section is limited to basic texts that describe the state of mind of Man when confronted with the idea of another world. We adduce only those eschatological representations directly connected with death and dissolution, without entering into other types of cosmographies. The first subsection has a particular interest as it describes the anthropological and theological settings of the end of the world, represented respectively by the myth of the deluge in the Shatapatha Brahmana and the assertion of the Gita that God is both the origin and the dissolution of the world. The two remaining subsections deal with conceptions of hell and heaven.