Page:An Indian Study of Love and Death.pdf/71

Rh must be subjective alone. But there is nothing here that is fatal or eternal. “Of that which is born, death is certain. Of that which is dead, birth is certain.” “The body comes and goes.” “Never is the embodied soul destroyed.”

Many are the ceremonies to be performed at the burning-ghât. Amongst other things is the offering of the Viaticum, which, with Hindus, is given after death. A similar act of ministration will be repeated every time a requiem is performed for this man’s soul; and the sight of the sacramental food will carry the mind back swiftly to the heart-piercing grief of these moments, before the funeral-pyre; so that prayers for the repose and benediction of the spirit may be uttered in all that concentration and exaltation possible only to great sorrow. Yet even now, before this pinda, as it is called, can be given to the dead, one is ﬁrst set apart and offered for the whole world, as it were,