Page:A Comprehensive History of India Vol 2.djvu/97

61 Chap. II.] CREED OF THE HINDOOS. 61

driven into exile, to enter on some new state of being, in which it may be their a.d.

lot to sink to some unfathomable abyss of misery. When thus taught that blessedness, even when attained, is held by a precarious tenm-e, the worshipper does not reason very illogically when he resolves to give up all thoughts of the future, and confine his aspirations to the present life.

Besides those who are at once united to Brahma by absori^tion, without Hindoo transmigration, and those who possess merit sufficient to obtain temporary admission into some kind of heaven, there are others — forming, it is to Ije suspected, the far greater number — to whom the future presents itself only as a period of fearful retribution. These consisting chiefly of those in whom the quality of darkness predominates, are not considered fit even for transmigration till they have, in part at least, expiated their guilt in one of the numerous hells provided for that purpose. "When after death they set out for the court of Yama, who is to sit in judgment on them and fix their doom, they perform the journe}^ amid inconceivable horrors, and rend the air with shrieks and wailing. The sentence passed consigns them to a hell where the torment is adapted to the guilt which it is meant to punish. One sticks in the mud with his head downward, another is plunged in boiling oil, another is being sawed in two ; some stand among molten metal, some have their toe nails or tongues wrenched out, and numbers have their entrails perpetually gnawed by ravenous beasts, birds, and reptiles. It is only after "having passed," as the Institutes of Menu express it, " through terrible regions of torture for a great number of years," that they are condemned to new births. And what births? Some migrate "a hundred times into the forms of gTasses, of shrubs with crowded stems, or of creeping and twining plants, of carnivorous animals, of beasts with sharp teeth, or of cruel brutes;" others "pass a thousand times into the bodies of spiders, of snakes and cameleons, of aquatic monsters, or of mischievous blood-sucking demons." Again, " If a man steal grain in the husk, he shall be born a rat ; if a yellow mixed metal, a gander ; if water, a plava or diver ; if honey, a great stinging gnat; if milk, a crow; if expressed juice, a dog; if clarified butter, an ichneumon weasel," and so on through a long list, in some of which a congruity between the crime and the punishment may be detected, while in others the birth seems to have been selected at random by fancy run riot. It is added that "women who have committed similar thefts incur a similar taint, and shall be paired with those male beasts in the form of their females." Such, then, is the future state which Hindooism has prepared for those who embrace it. An absorption into the divine essence, destructive of personal identity, and conse- quently equivalent to annihilation, is the highest blessedness to which its greatest saints can aspire ; a heaven furnished with all that is most captivating to the senses, but not destined for perpetuity, constitutes its next highest reward; and a hell of unspeakable misery, to be followed after thousands of years by reappearance in the world, under some degenerate form, is the only