The Age of the Sages: The Axial Age in Asia and the Near East

6. Death and Rebirth

6 Death and Rebirth At the end of the previous chapter, we identified a significant period of transition in Indian religious history. The Vedic age was drawing to a close, and the era of classical Hinduism was emerging, a period that coincided with the start of India’s Axial Age. Of course, there is no distinct point in time at which we can definitively say the Vedic period has ended and the classical Hindu period has begun. As mentioned previously, the Vedic traditions were largely retained and embraced within emerging Hinduism. What distinguishes the classical Hindu era is the reorientation of religious life toward new concerns and new beliefs. This evolution took place over a two-hundred-year span, between 800 and 600 bce, according to contemporary Western reckoning. Is That All There Is? During these two hundred years, Indian religious life began to change dramatically. The venerable old Vedic ritual system, which had dominated Indian religion for centuries, came under scrutiny. Increasingly, thinkers expressed doubts about the kinds of benefits the Vedic rituals could produce. It was not so much that the Aryans no longer valued long life, health, material prosperity, and children—the sorts of things rituals were intended to provide; rather, these goods were now regarded as less important in the grand scheme of things. Sages were starting to wonder: Is this all there is to life, or does human existence have some meaning or significance that transcends the acquisition of these traditional goods, as valuable as they are? This question arose with more frequency as the Aryans increasingly enjoyed greater material success and as they settled in villages and became agriculturists and traders. While concerns with subsistence needs receded into the background, other questions—what we might call philosophical or transcendental issues—seem to have come to the fore. The increase in material well-being does not wholly account for this philosophical turn, but it surely 59 played a part. How many of us—particularly in our affluent society—after having attained everything we thought we wanted, raised our heads and asked, “Is that all?” For a variety of reasons, growing numbers of individuals throughout northern India in the period we are considering were asking the same question: “Is that all there is? Is there something more to life than simply satisfying our desires, and if so, how do we find it?” Anxiety about Death Closely connected with this question was an increasing concern with death and the ultimate fate of the individual person. The Aryans of the Vedic period were not unconcerned about death, but neither was their interest a great preoccupation or a matter of deep passion. The face of death was neither terrifying nor the object of intense speculation. Death was a simple reality of life, and the point of existence seemed to be to enjoy what the world had to offer before death comes. There was nothing in Vedic culture to suggest anything like what Ernest Becker called “the denial of death.”1 To be sure, some passages in the Vedas intimated that there might be some form of existence for the person beyond his or her individual demise, but this was by no means a consistent or universal belief. The clear emphasis throughout the Vedic period was on the complete enjoyment of the goods of this earthly life. But as the age of classical Hinduism came into full manifestation, the issue of death arose as a topic of greater attention, and it was approached with an unprecedented energy. In the previous chapter, we saw this exemplified in the tale of Nachiketas and his dialogue with Yama, the King of Death. Rather than accepting the pleasures of the earthly life, the young Brahmin compelled the god of the underworld to reveal to him the secrets of existence beyond death, a demand Yama was reluctant to grant. As Nachiketas’s dialogue with the King of Death demonstrates, the question of death and the afterlife had become a matter of much discussion and speculation among certain groups of Aryans. These were probably the Brahmins and other high-caste members who were acquainted with the Vedas and sufficiently leisured to ponder such matters. At any rate, the evidence that remains comes only from these educated classes, and it suggests that conjectures about death were very diverse and anything but consistent. Among the many ideas being debated among philosophically minded individuals, one is of particular interest for subsequent Indian thinking. We noted earlier that some Aryans...