Hinduism

Introduction

Hinduism is an umbrella term covering an incalculable diversity of beliefs and practices. What may be said is that most Hindus believe that the present life is but one in an interminable yet potentially finite series. A conviction that this life is one's 'last birth' is exceedingly rare. The transmigration of souls is a presupposition in accordance with the karma theory of the retributive nature of action (see transcendence and transmigration). The basic idea is that motivated and intentional, and thus ethically significant, actions produce a residue that remains somehow latent in the soul until future circumstances are appropriate for its actualization or fruition in the experience of the instigating agent in whom it becomes active. It is the operation of karma that personalizes individual souls and propels them through the fundamentally unsatisfactory series of births in the here and now (samsara). The accumulation of merit through the performance of prescribed actions guarantees a superior status in one's next temporarily finite incarnation in either this or higher worlds and demerit ensures a dreadful destiny. It is not an exaggeration to say that maintaining a state of spiritual purity amounts to an obsession with Brahmins who consider themselves orthodox. The vast body of rules governing social and religious conduct codified in the Dharma-shastra literature (e.g., The Laws of Manu) are effectively prophylactic provisions charting a safe passage for 'twice-born' Hindus belonging to the three higher castes (that is, Brahmin priests and intellectuals, Kshatriya rulers and Vaishya farmers and merchants) through a hazardous domain of dangerous forces and excluded possibilities. Death (mrityu) is polluting (ashubha) in the extreme. The fear of death is predominantly an anxiety about the spiritually contaminant and the possibility of ghostly possession and haunting rather than terror in the face of the abyss of extinction or an eternity of punishment in hell.

Discussion and Analysis

The mortuary rituals (antyeshti) proper to higher caste Hindus, and which are thus expressive of cultural ideals, may be understood as a variety of rites of passage (samskara). They mark a transition between states, allow the spirit of the deceased to move on and afford an antidote to the pollution of death for those involved in the circumstances attendant upon the demise. They are the symbolic restoration of normal social relations which suspended in the case of the bereaved (co-mensal) relatives who are ritually impure for ten days after death (the latter stipulation varies). Any contact with death confers ritual impurity upon Brahmins who prohibited from reciting the Vedic scriptures for periods of one to three days. (Sastri, 74)

Cremation is the normal mode of material disposal. The corpses of those who have renounced the everyday world of social interactions (samnyasins), whose ceremonial initiation into that way of life has included an anticipation of their funeral expressing their irreversible exclusion from the everyday world, buried upright in remarkable tombs or placed in, preferably sacred, rivers. As one might expect, given the climate in India, cremation occurs as soon as possible after death and the accompanying ritual, in which offerings to the ancestors are ...