CHAPTER TWO Come Back and Finish What You Started

      Judaism moved forward from the Axial Age by developing the idea of a personal God whose ways soared above those of humanity as the heavens tower above the earth. Other contemporaries, though, travelled in the opposite direction. They rejected the single, personal God as too limiting, prone to become a projection of our own fears, needs and desires. They opted instead for an impersonal and opaque deity which was less constrained, less clearly defined, less of an encouragement to complacency within a system of rewards and punishments, and more of a challenge to individuals to journey beyond language, dogma and earth-bound imagery in order to explore the transcendent within.

      On the Indian subcontinent, there is some surviving evidence that the reincarnation-based belief system later encapsulated in Hinduism had in fact existed since prehistoric times. On the basis of archaeological findings, for instance, scholars believe that faith in reincarnation existed in the Dravidian people of southern India and northern Sri Lanka. However, in the Vedas – the first sacred texts of Indian civilisation, composed in the second millennium BC – there is the conviction of a life after death but no details about how it is achieved. It is merely a land of shadows akin to the oldest Jewish beliefs.

      The Axial Age saw the emergence of both Hinduism and Buddhism. The stance they took on afterlife was radically different from that taken first by Judaism, under the influence of Zoroastrianism, and later by Christianity and Islam. Between 600 and 300 BC, some of the key documents of Hinduism, the Upanishads, were written down by scholars and philosophers of the highly developed civilisation which was based on the River Indus. The Upanishads, while paying homage to the Vedas, substantially developed their ideas on what happened after death by teaching something called samsara – literally a chain of embodiments – whereby individuals died and were reborn according to how they had lived their previous life, i.e. by what ‘karma’ they had achieved.

      In places the Upanishads were very specific. If you had stolen grain in one life, you would become a rat in the next. If you killed a priest, you would be reborn as a pig. By twinning reincarnation and karma, the principle that you reap what you sow was set in stone. The Upanishads made it plain that there was not one, single journey upwards. Rather, there would be many twists and turns in an individual’s spiritual journey, because that was how the principle of karma operated. It was a gradual process of education, seeking after moksha – the liberation of the soul from the oppression of the body. Part of the learning curve was to see the self in the wider context. The atman – or ‘individual soul part’ – of the Brahman-Atman – or ‘world soul’ – gave people a seed of the divine which had to be cultivated and, ultimately, liberated.

      The process of death and rebirth, therefore, was not envisaged as an endless one. The goal was to continue learning and growing until you had reached such a high level of karma that you could relinquish any sense of yourself and be absorbed into the divine, for at the end of the line stood the gods. It was all about self-learning, self-improvement and self-control. When you reached the highest point, the Upanishads said, you were realising your own destiny. Instead of heaven then, one attained a state of mind or of being, described in one passage in the Upanishads as self-abandonment. The way you lived your life could block your ascent: self-centredness, for instance, was deemed to hinder your absorption into what was called the ‘Great Self. ‘Little Self was egotism; ‘Great Self was understanding your place in the divine plan.

      In the Kausitaki Upanishad there is a description, using familiar imagery of place and landscape, to convey the idea of union with the infinite spirit or brahman, but there is little sense of the reader being invited to take what he or she reads literally. It seems instead an effort to put into words what is in fact beyond words. When people depart this world, it states, they go to the moon, which is both the doorway to new life – rebirth on earth – and to the final destination. When they get to the moon, most become rain and are rained down on to the earth, where they are reborn. (Later Hindu belief allowed for a place of temporary respite, called Priti Loka, where one could recharge one’s batteries before returning to earth.) A small number of people, however, are allowed to pass into the inner sanctum where a long, winding path, lined by solicitous angel-like nymphs, leads to the world of brahman:

      He first arrives at the lake Ara. He crosses it with his mind, but those who go into it without complete knowledge drown in it. Then he arrives near the watchmen, Muhurta, but they flee from him. Then he arrives at the river Vijara, which he crosses with just his mind. There he shakes off his good and bad deeds, which fall upon his relatives – the good deeds upon the ones he likes and the bad deeds upon the ones he dislikes. It is like this – as a man driving a chariot would look down and observe the two wheels of his chariot, so he looks down and observes the days and nights, the good and bad deeds, and all the pairs of opposites. Freed from his good and bad deeds, this man, who has knowledge of brahman, goes on to brahman.

      (Upanishads, translated by Patrick Olivelle)

      Brahman, the divine soul anthropomorphised and sitting on a couch that is described as ‘life breath’, with one leg each for past, present, prosperity and nourishment, asks the new arrival to identify him or herself:

      I am the season. I am the offspring of the season. I was born from the womb of space as the semen for the wife, as the radiance of the year, as the self [atman] of every being. You are the self of every being. I am who you are … the real.

      The system of reincarnation and karma was closely linked in the Upanishads with earthly developments, notably the institutionalisation of the caste system in around 500 BC. Your karma was measurable by what class you belonged to on earth. It was difficult, therefore, within any one life-time to rise through the ranks. Hence the Brahmins (or priestly caste) were acknowledged as enjoying good karma accumulated in previous lives, while the Shudras (or servant caste) were suffering as a result of past bad karma. Ultimately, it made for an enclosed and hopeless world-view, effectively shutting off the possibility of developing and growing