Saturday, May 8, 2010

reincarnation in In Brahmana Veda

Posted by Manju-Ganesh | Saturday, May 8, 2010 | Category: |










The texts of Brahmanas (900 BC) on the whole do not contain the doctrine of transmigration. In these texts too, the atman longs for the world of the fathers, for immortality, as in Rig Veda. The problem here too is not that of reincarnation or rebirth, but that of death, which is far more explicitly feared: Death is evil, and the essence of evil is death. The central preoccupation of the Brahmans, is therefore, the fear of death and the obsessive search for rituals that can overcome it.25 Not only can the gods become immortal, but also the sacrificer, in fact, "becomes immortal" (Sathapatha Brahmana 2. 2.2.14).
Perhaps the earliest foreshadowing of the doctrine of transmigration is to be found in the Satapata Brahmana, 10.4.3.1-10 This text, however, does not explicitly refer to transmigration. What the authors of the Brahmanas were searching was not rebirth, but liberation from the inevitable problem of death, which is the greatest of all evils. What they feared was not life but death, "old age and death" (janamrtyu), and more precisely 'recurring death' or 're-death' (punarmrtyu).26 The fear that in place of the desired immortality in the next world (of the Fathers), there will be renewed death,27 and as a consequence the turning to performing many rites, like Agnihotra, the Visuvant, the Naciketas fire, the piling of the fire, the study of the Veda, etc., which are to save them from suffering 'repeated deaths'.28 The repeated death refers to death in the next world, not in this: it is applied to the Fathers (Satapata Brahmana, 12. 9.3.12), and from those who are born after death to immortality are distinguished those who are born to die again (Satapata Brahmana, iO. 4.3.iO). The idea that death is a birth (a passage to3 in the next world is not at all rare and the conception that death might there be repeated is a very natural one.29 But the idea of rebirth (transmigration) on the earth was the innovation of the Upanishads.