More distinctly and with special insistance that the mouth of Brahman is the best part of him, the law book of the priests tells us: Brahman first allowed the Brahmans to proceed from his mouth; then the Kshatriyas from his arms; next the Vaiçyas from his thigh; and lastly, the Çudras from his foot.167 The duties fixed by Brahman for the Brahmans were sacrifice, the study and teaching of the Veda, to give justice and receive it. The duty of the Kshatriyas is to protect the people; of the Vaiçyas to tend the herds, till the fields, and carry on trade; the Çudras were only pledged to serve the three other orders.168 It is a duty for the Kshatriyas and Vaiçyas to be reverent, submissive, and liberal to the Brahmans or first-born caste. The vocation of man is to adapt himself to the existing order of the world, to fulfil the particular mission assigned to him at birth. Any rebellion against the order of the castes is a rebellion against the divine order of the world.
This new view of the world, at which, beginning from the conception of the Holy and the world-soul, the meditation of the priests had arrived, was at variance with the old faith. The new idea of God and the doctrine of the world-soul, in its abstract and speculative form, could have but little influence on the kings, the nobles, the peasants, and the people. As a fact, it shattered almost too violently the belief of the Aryas in the ancient gods. With the people Indra continued to be the highest god, and still, as before, the spirits of light, of the wind, of fire were invoked. But even without the new doctrine the forms of the ancient gods were fainter in the minds of the nobles and people, partly in consequence of the change in climate and country, and partly because the old impulses which had given the first place in heaven to the gods of battle no longer moved the heart so strongly, when the Aryas lived in larger states and under more peaceful relations. The atmosphere of the valley of the Ganges also required a more passive life, and the ideas of the people, no less than the fancy of the priests, must have received from the gigantic forms of the landscape, and the rich and marvellous animal world of the new region, a direction and elevation quite different from that felt in the land of the Indus. More especially, the reasons noticed above – the contrast between the Aryas on the one hand and the Çudras on the other – facilitated the reception of the doctrine maintained by the priests of the division of castes. The pious feeling which penetrated the Indians would, moreover, have found it difficult to resist the conviction that the first place must invariably belong to the relation to the gods. Hence ready credence was given to the priests when they spoke of their order as the first-born and nearest to the gods.
It was not in the sphere of religion or worship, but in ethics, that the doctrine of the priests attained to a thorough practical influence on the state and life of the Indians, and this complete victory was due to the consequences which the priests derived from it for the life of the soul after death. We are acquainted with the ancient ideas cherished by the Aryas in the Panjab on the future of the soul after death; the spirits of the brave and pious passed into the bright heaven of Yama, where they lived in happiness and joy on soma, milk, and honey; those who had done evil passed into thickest darkness. Yama allowed or refused entrance into his heaven; his two hounds kept watch (p. 64). The descendants duly sprinkled water for the spirits of their ancestors, and their families brought libations at the new moon, when the souls of the fathers came in troops and enjoyed food and drink. In the oldest Brahmanas, Yama holds a formal judgment on the souls. The actions of the dead were weighed in a balance; the good deeds allowed the scale to rise; the evil deeds were threatened with definite punishments and torments in the place of darkness. The body of light which the pious souls are said to have received in heaven, required, according to this new conception, a less amount of food, or no food at all. But the deeper change rests in the fact that the heaven of Yama, the son of the deity of light, can now no longer be the reward of those who have lived a purer life, and approached to the sanctity and perfection of Brahman. They had raised themselves in the scale of existence, and must therefore return into the bosom of the pure being from which they had emanated. The souls which have attained to complete purity pass after death into Brahman. Thus the heaven of Yama was rendered unnecessary, and was, in fact, set aside. The sinner who has not lived according to the vocation which he received at birth, has neither offered sacrifice nor purified himself, must be severely punished, and it is Yama – now transformed from a judge of the dead into a prince of darkness, and having his abode in hell – who imposes on sinners the torments which they must endure after death for their guilt. The fancy of the Indians depicted, in great detail, according to the various torments, the place of darkness, the hell, situated deep below the earth. As among the Egyptians, and all nations living in a hot climate, so in the hell of the Indians fierce heat is the chief means of punishment. In one place is the region of darkness, and the place of tears, the forest where the leaves are swords. In another the souls are torn by owls and ravens; in another their heads are struck every day by the guardians of hell with great hammers. In another and yet worse hell they are broiled in pans; here they have to eat hot coals; there they walk on burning sand and glowing iron; in another place hot copper is poured into their necks.169 For the kings and warriors, on the other hand, the heaven of Indra takes the place of the heaven of Yama; and into this the brave warriors enter. In the Epos, Indra laments that "none of the beloved guests come, who dedicate their lives to the battle, and find death without an averted countenance." We have already seen how Indra meets Yudhishthira in order to conduct him into the heaven of the heroes, the imperishable world, where he will see his brothers and his wife, when they are freed from the earthly impurity still clinging to them.
The torments provided in hell for the sinners could not satisfy the system which the priests had established in the doctrine of the world-soul. In this the holy and pure being had allowed the world to emanate from itself; the further this world was removed from its origin and source, the more melancholy and gloomy it became. If the gods, the holy and pious men in the past, and the heaven of light of Indra, were nearest to the purity of Brahman, the pure nature of this being became seriously adulterated in the lower stages of removal. In the present world, purity and impurity, virtue and passion, wisdom and folly, were at least in equipoise. The worlds of animals, plants, and dead matter were obviously still further removed from the pure Brahman. If, according to this view, the world was an adulterated, broken, impure Brahman, it received, along with this corruption, the duty of regaining its original purity. All beings had received their origin from Brahman, and to him all must return. From this point of view, and the requirement that every being must work out its way to perfection, in order to be adapted to its perfect origin, the priests arrived at the idea that every creature must go through all the gradations of being as they emanated from Brahman, before it could attain to rest. The Çudra must become a Vaiçya, the Vaiçya a Kshatriya, the Kshatriya a Brahman, and the Brahman a wholly sinless and sacred man, a pure spirit, before he can pass into Brahman. From the necessity that every one should work up to Brahman, arose the monstrous doctrine of regenerations. The Çudra who had lived a virtuous life, was, it was thought, by the power of this virtue and the practice of it, changed in his nature, and born anew in the higher existence of a Vaiçya; the Kshatriya became a Brahman, and so on.170 In this manner the pure and holy life, according as it was freed from all sensuality and corporeality, from the whole material world, succeeded in winning a return to supersensual and incorporeal Brahman. Conversely, the impure, spotted, and sinful were born again in a lower order, and in the worst shape according to the measure of the offence – sometimes they did not even become men at all, but animals – in order to struggle back again through unutterable torments, and innumerable regenerations, to their former condition, and finally to Brahman. Thus a wide field was opened to the fancy of the Indians, on which it soon erected a complete system of regenerations; and into this the theory of hell was adopted. The man who had committed grievous sins, sinks after death into hell, and for long periods is tortured in the various departments there, that thus, after expiation of his sins, he may begin again the scale of migration from the lowest and worst form of existence. One who was guilty of less serious offences was born again according to their measure as a Çudra or an elephant, a lion or a tiger, a bird or a dancer.171 One who had committed acts of cruelty was re-born as a beast of prey.172 One who had attempted
"Rigveda," 10, 90; Manu, 1, 31 and in the Puranas; Muir, "Sanskrit Texts," 5, 371. A. Weber, "Ind. Studien," 9, 7.
Manu, 1, 88-91, and in many other places.
In Manu, 4, 88-90 (cf. 12, 75, 76) eight hells are mentioned and described, in each of which the torments grow worse as the offences are more serious. The Buddhists retain these eight hot hells, and add eight cold; Burnouf, "Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme," p. 320, 366, 367, 201. The Singhalese have increased the number to 136, the Siamese to 462. Koppen, "Relig. des Buddha," s. 244. Cf. A. Weber, in "Z. D. M. G." 9, 237.
Manu, 12, 43, 44.
Manu, 12, 59.
