Page:History of India Vol 9.djvu/209

 HEAVEN AND HELL 169 The upper one is called svargaloka, i. e. paradise; the low, nagaloka, i. e. the world of serpents, which is hell, and which is also called naraloka, and sometimes also pdtala, i. e. the lowest world. The middle world, the one in which we live, is called madhyaloka and ma- nushyaloka, i. e. the world of men. In the latter, man has to earn his reward which he receives in the upper, whilst in the low he receives punishment. A man who deserves to come to svargaloka or nagaloka there re- ceives the full recompense of his deeds during a certain length of time corresponding to the duration of his deeds, but in either of these worlds there is only the soul, the soul free from the body. For those who do not deserve to rise to heaven or to sink as low as hell, there is another world called tiryagloka, the irrational world of plants and animals, through the individuals of which the soul has to wan- der in metempsychosis until it reaches the human being, rising by degrees from the lowest kinds of the vegetable world to the highest classes of the sensitive world. The stay of the soul in this world has one of the following causes: either the award which is due to the soul is not sufficient to raise it into heaven or to sink it into hell, or the soul is in its wanderings on the way back from hell; for they believe that a soul returning to the human world from heaven at once adopts a human body, whilst that one which returns there from hell has first to wander about in plants and animals before it reaches the degree of living in a human body. The Hindus speak in their traditions of a large num-