Rebirth or Transmigration in the Rigveda

 

Rebirth or Transmigration in the Rigveda

 Shrikant G. Talageri

 

The ICCR (Indian Council for Cultural Relations) has announced the Distinguished Indologist Award for 2023 (now I am told that it is for 2022 but announced now in 2023), and it has been awarded to the Polish Professor and scholar Joanna Jurewicz of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Warsaw. This award is given to a foreign scholar for "their outstanding contribution in the study, teaching and research in any of the fields of Indian studies".

In one sense I am really very happy that the award has gone this year to a pro-Indic Indologist like Joanna Jurewicz who is known for her love for India and Indian religion and culture. Usually, such scholars (the example of Koenraad Elst comes immediately to mind) are isolated or shunned in the west and treated by many (but thankfully not all) Hindus with disdain and suspicion. Jurewicz has narrated the extremely heartwarming story of how her father gave her a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, and how she sat one morning on a university park bench reading it and lost track of time until she suddenly realized it had become dark, how she felt the Bhagavad Gita has depth which none of the European philosophical works could match, and how she was inspired to take up the study of Indian philosophy in the early nineties as a result of this experience.

While having nothing to object to, and everything to be happy about, with this conferment of the award to this great scholar, I still find it necessary ─ perhaps more necessary than ever since this award will draw particular attention to this aspect of her research ─ to examine critically one aspect of her studies which most Rigveda-centric Hindus will rejoice in: her claim that the Hindu belief in reincarnation originated in the Rigveda. One comment to this effect I have already seen claims that her research in this respect "is pathbreaking. It proves the traditional position, disproving centuries of Indologist opinions contrary to this. Indologists postulate the origin of the idea of rebirth and karma as contribution of "kshatriyas", the idea which Bronkhorst takes to the extreme in his book Greater Magadha".

Now, how politically motivated and anti-Hindu western academics like Bronkhorst interpret and present some "Indologist opinions" has nothing to do with the correctness or incorrectness of those "opinions". Even central aspects of the Hindu religion like polytheism, pantheism and idol-worship have been presented as "wrong" religious ideas by western scholars brainwashed since childhood with Christian theological and religious biases, and this has in the past prompted many staunch Hindus (e.g. Swami Dayanand Saraswati and the Arya Samaj) to react by trying to show that the "real" and "original" Hindu religion was also totally devoid of polytheistic and "idolatrous" concepts which only later entered into the earlier "pure" Vedic religion as corruptions or distortions. As I wrote in my book "The Rigveda - A Historical Analysis" in 2000: "This was rather like accepting and adopting the European prejudice which treats white-skinned people as superior to dark-skinned people, and then trying to show that Indian skins are whiter than European skins!"

Here it is not a case of which is right and which is wrong. But it is a case of Veda-centric Hindus, who would like to believe that everything (or at least everything Hindu) originated in the Rigveda or the Vedas in general, resenting the idea that a central aspect of Hinduism like the concept of rebirth and transmigration should be considered non-Vedic or post-Vedic or as originating in any other part of India other than in the part of India which produced the Harappan cities and the Rigveda. Even if the concept of rebirth and transmigration is alleged to be a "kshatriya" concept (which is ridiculous, since religious concepts in Hinduism are and were never necessarily varṇa based) why should any Hindu feel that this, in some way, demeans either the Vedas or Hinduism or the concept of rebirth? Are kshatriyas foreigners or non-Hindus, or should everything in Hinduism necessarily have a Brahmin origin? [As I said, how politically motivated and anti-Hindu western academics like Bronkhorst interpret and present this idea should not be material to our reaction to the basic idea itself].

As I have pointed out in my books and so many of my articles, it is not at all a fact that all of Hinduism, in all its aspects, has origins in the Rigveda or in the Vedic texts. In fact beyond the sacred language, the aspects of hymn-composing and chanting, the worship of the elements and the elemental Gods of Nature, and the worship of fire in the form of the sacrificial fire of the yajña ─ all of which were central to the religion of the Vedic Pūrus, the proto-Iranian Anus and the proto-European Druhyu (druids) ─ almost everything in Hinduism is derived from the culture of the interior peoples of India: from the Ikṣvākus of eastern UP and Bihar, the Yadus-Turvasus of central and western India, and the Dravidian speakers of the south and the Austric speakers of the east. Hinduism is not a religion derived from the religious culture of one group of Indians of the northwestern parts of India, it is a vast and spreading banyan tree covering and including all the different religious aspects, deities, concepts, philosophies and rituals of all the different parts of India.

Unfortunately, saying something ─ something purely Indian and purely Hindu ─ originated from some other branch of this banyan tree than from the Vedic branch is regarded as an assault on the Hindu identity by many Hindus! Nothing else can explain why many Hindus resent any idea that some aspect of Hinduism originated in some other part of India than in the Vedas, and regard this idea as a western Indologist conspiracy to undermine Hinduism, and rejoice when a western or non-Indian/non-Hindu scholar seems to be "proving" that this aspect of Hinduism did originate in the Vedas after all!

 

But to come to specifics: has Joanna Jurewicz really "proved" that the concept of rebirth/reincarnation originated in the Rigveda? And is this the "traditional position"? To answer the second question first, the main "traditional position" (later Hindu texts are multitudinous in number, and can contain all kinds of other minor positions) is that the earlier Vedic texts represent karma kāṇda, the details of the rituals and sacrificial rites required to be performed for the attainment of mainly material benefits, while the later Vedic texts (specifically the Upaniṣads), represent jṇāna kāṇḍa and upāsanā kāṇḍa, or philosophical and spiritual ideas. Of the six official schools of Hindu philosophy, it is only the pūrva mīmāṁsā school which deals prominently with the karma kāṇḍa texts and (in some sub-schools) links it with philosophical concepts: here, the very name of the school of philosophy pūrva (i.e. "earlier") mīmāṁsā, as opposed to the vedānta philosophical school which is called uttara (i.e. "later") mīmāṁsā, emphasizes this traditional distinction. [That there are indeed certain hymns, in the later parts of Books 1 and 10 of the Rigveda, which have mystical or philosophical value worthy of deeper study, does not detract from the fact that "philosophy" is a general term for deeper thinking and deeper speculations or approaches, which can be found in any ancient text, and that these particular philosophical hymns are in no way connected with the later schools of philosophy].

Joanna Jurewicz has presented her thesis that the ideas of rebirth/reincarnation originated in the Rigveda in a paper, "Rebirth Eschatology in the Rigveda, In Search of Roots for Transmigration", published in Indologica Taurinensia, The Journal of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies, Edizioni A.I.T., Torino (Italy), Volume XXXIV, 2008.

Jurewicz is not the first to suggest that the concept of rebirth originated in the earlier Vedic texts. At the very beginning of her article, she cites the earlier history of efforts to locate this origin in the earlier Vedic Texts: "A lot of scholars maintain that no belief in transmigration had existed before the Upaniṣads. However, Killingley presented evidence that shows that the topics of the pañcāgnividyā  and deva-/pitṛyāna [two concepts in the Upaniṣads] have their antecedents in the earlier Brahminic texts. He claims that theories of karma and rebirth are made up of several ideas already present in Vedic thought. Also Tull shows that the conceptual framework of the Upaniṣadic idea of transmigration had been established already in the Brāhmaṇas with their idea of sacrifice during which the sacrificer symbolically experiences death and rebirth during his journey to heaven. Oberlies goes even further back and tries to reconstruct a possible Rgvedic belief according to which the dead came back to earth to be reborn in their progeny. We can put this belief into broader conceptual frames as it is very close to the beliefs characteristic of 'small scale' or 'tribal' societies. Obeyesekere maintains that the belief in rebirth after death is quite widespread and varies in different cultures. Contrary to the mature Upanisadic form of the rebirth eschatology, the rebirth eschatologies characteristic of small scale societies are not linked to ethical causation. Obeyesekere believes that the kṣatriyas in the Upaniṣads who expound their views about transmigration implicitly are in discussion with traditions that 'seem to believe that after death one can be reborn in the human world or in a subhuman one'" (p.183-84).

Even as she cites these earlier attempts to find traces of links of the Upaniṣadic concepts of rebirth in the Brāhmaṇa texts, it is clear that these attempts are only general and half-hearted attempts to connect the Upaniṣadic concepts with earlier references, based on speculative sociological ideas of "beliefs characteristic of 'small scale' or 'tribal' societies" rather than on specific and concrete references in either the Upaniṣadic or the Brāhmaṇa texts.

Jurewicz herself goes right back to the Rigveda to find the evidence for the concept of rebirth, and for all her efforts (at least if one is to go by this particular paper), can only come up with three verses in one hymn from the latest book of the Rigveda: X.16.5,13,14.

Before proceeding with her arguments, she gives the following preamble to her research: "Like many other scholars, Obeyesekere maintains that we lack evidence for such a belief before the Upaniṣads but he thinks that the preserved texts do not necessarily represent the whole religious situation in ancient India. 'It is true' - he says - 'that there is no way to trace the history of the theory of rebirth backward, but there is a methodological way out by examining how it might have originated' Then Obeyesekere creates - what he calls 'a theoretical possible model' to explain the problem. My paper will support this model with textual evidence. I would like to show that there are at least three stanzas in the Ṛgveda (RV) from which the belief in rebirth can be reconstructed. The argument is based not only on the philological data. but also on the consistency of the whole reconstruction and its power to explain many unclear issues, concerning both the interpretation of some Ṛgvedic Stanzas and the development of the concept of rebirth. I may add that I had managed to find the evidence supporting my argument before I became acquainted with Obeyesekere's book."

It is clear from the above that the whole search for "evidence" for the concept of rebirth in the earlier Vedic texts is a laborious, motivated and speculative enterprise, but one sentence in the above is actually a very significant one: Obeyesekere "thinks that the preserved texts do not necessarily represent the whole religious situation in ancient India". Obviously they do not: "ancient India" did not consist only of the Pūru (Vedic) northwest; the Ikṣvāku east was also a part of "ancient India", and the philosophical ideas found in the Upaniṣads and the "heterodox" philosophies (Buddhism, Jainism, Charvaka, etc.) were as old as the Vedas within the eastern areas, but they found their way into the oral/written traditions only after the Vedic culture spread eastwards and southwards all over northern India (in the same manner that, much later, the Buddhist and Jain philosophies and religious ideas and practices spread out from Bihar to the rest of India) and incorporated these eastern philosophies into the Vedic stream of literature. Confusion arises (and attempts to solve this confusion follow) only when it is imagined that the "whole religious situation in ancient India" consisted only of the "whole religious situation in the northwestern parts of ancient India" and that nothing else existed in the rest of India before the northwestern culture and religion spread all over India. so the roots of everything must be searched for in the texts of the northwest!

Jurewicz's attempts to trace the origin from the three verses from the one late hymn in the Rigveda that she cites (X.16.5,13,14) are as laborious, motivated and speculative as the earlier attempts to trace this origin in the Brahmana texts. Needless to say, no-one citing evidence for the concept of rebirth in the Rigveda will be able to explain why only three verses in one hymn should give "evidence" for it in the most indirect and obscure manner (which would require to be laboriously elucidated today by some present-day scholar), and why the whole of Vedic literature, between the Rigveda and the Upaniṣads, participated in this deafening conspiracy of silence  about this concept if it was already present (in any form or manner) even during Rigvedic times.

Out of genuine respect for this great scholar, who definitely deserves the honor that she has been given, I will not go into specifics about the manner in which she attempts to find evidence for the concept of rebirth in these three verses. The reader can read the article for himself:

https://www.academia.edu/8179799/Rebirth_eschatology_in_the_Rgveda_In_search_for_roots_of_transmigration

My only point is that all these attempts to trace everything to the Rigveda are not to the benefit of Hinduism or Hindutva or Indian culture and civilization. It is time Hindus who are proud of their heritage should realize that they really have a very great heritage ─ a veritably massive cultural and civilizational banyan tree which dwarfs all other cultures and civilizations of the world ─ to be proud of. Do not reduce everything to one part of India or one set of texts or one set of beliefs. Our heritage deserves to be recognized for the great and vast heritage that it is, and not be reduced in any way to fit in with any biases and prejudices.