section 25. THE AFTER LIFE.--I. Upanishads.--Good deeds are requited, according to the Veda, in another world, the heaven of the gods and the fathers. The Brahmanas regard the heaven of the gods as a place of recompense for the good, and the abode of the fathers as a hell in which men are reborn to lives of suffering proportioned to their sins in this world. Finally we meet the

doctrine of transmigration definitively set forth in the Upanishads, by which retribution is effected, in part at any rate, by rebirth in this world.

The fullest eschatological scheme in the Upanishads is given in the parallel passages Ch. V. iii.-x., B.A. VI. ii. The first half of these sections (Ch. V. iii.-ix., B.A. VI. ii. 1-14) sets forth the theory that on death the soul goes to heaven in a sublimated form, here allegorically styled "waters" and "faith" (a conception in which are united the two ideas of "subtle body" and "works"), and from heaven returns at once to earthly birth, being sacrificed by the gods successively in the fires of heaven, the atmosphere, earth, man, and woman. Here there is no idea of requital in any world but this. The further paragraphs expound a more complicated theory of requital both in the other world and here. The souls of the sages who "worship Faith as their mortification in the woods" (they who have the saving knowledge) ascend by a series of stages which lead to the sun, thence to the moon, thence to the lightning, and thence to Brahma, the "supreme light," from which they never return. This is the "Way of the Gods," deva-yana. The souls of those who do pious works in the village (but have not won full enlightenment and withdrawn from the world) rise by the "Way of the Fathers," pitri-yana, which leads finally to the moon, where in the company of the gods they enjoy the full recompense

of their good deeds; after this they pass down to honourable rebirth on earth through successive stages (ether, wind, smoke, mist, cloud, rain, vegetation, food, and seed). The sinful, according to Ch. V. x. 7, have also a proportionate share in the joys of the moon, and are afterwards reborn in the forms of base animals or equally degraded races of men; according to B.A. this rebirth is immediate. On the other hand the famous passage B.A. IV. iv. 2-6 knows only of rebirth in recompense.