The Soul and the Land of the Dead: South Asian Views

[00:00:00] HOST:
The Foerster Lectureship on the immortality of the soul was established by Miss Zweybruck as a memorial to her sister and brother-in-law, Agnes and Constantine Foerster. The Foerster Lecture, as she, as it is specified, is to be given on the immortality of the soul or other kindred spiritual subjects. Such lecture is not to form a part of the regular college course and shall be delivered by some person especially qualified therefore and especially appointed for the purpose.

It is an honor for me and also a pleasure to tell you that it is Professor von Fürer-Haimendorf who has been chosen for this honor for this year. I shall introduce him briefly. He is a professor of Asian anthropology, now emeritus at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.

He was dean of the school. He was acting director. He was born in Vienna, a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Science, of many other learned institutions which I shall not enumerate.

He taught at Vienna. He was in this country on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. He did extensive fieldwork, anthropological fieldwork in India, in Hyderabad, in Orissa.

He also taught in Hyderabad at Osmania University. He was an advisor to the Hyderabad state government before the independence of India. He was an assistant political officer, and he is a very well-known anthropologist who has published widely about Indian communities and tribes.

I have here ten titles of his books, and these only include his major books. He is very active as a scholar, as a field worker, as a publisher, and also as an administrator. I shall not read out those titles, but I shall tell you that they deal with the Nagas, with the Chenchus, with the Reddis, with the Rajgonds, with the Apatanis, about whom he spoke recently, with the Sherpas, with several others.

There are only two more slightly general and slightly personal things I would like to add. First of all, why should this anthropologist not be introduced by an anthropologist? Well, because he is interested in a specific area, namely South Asia or India, in which others are also interested.

And so, for reasons I cannot really fathom, I have been asked to introduce him, though I am a Sanskritist. As you know, Sanskritists do not go to those parts of the world where Sanskrit was once spoken and still is. They sit in their chair and at their desk, and they read books, and they make other books with the help of those books.

However, eventually, they want to know something about the peoples of India, and they look up the writings of people who write about those peoples. And of course, they look at anthropologists because anthropologists are supposed to write about those people. Now, my experience as a Sanskritist has been the following.

Whenever I want to know something specific about a group, a tribe, a caste, or a community, And by something specific, I, I mean what they do when the rainy season is over, What they do on the first moon of a certain month? What do they do when somebody dies? And I look up the works of contemporary anthropologists.

I find theories and abstract symbols and charts and so on, but I don’t get any answers to these questions. I have to look up the district gazetteers and the old-fashioned ethnographical work of the nineteenth century. However, when I look up any of the communities which Professor von Haimendorf has studied and written so extensively about, I always find answers to my questions.

Now of course, you might immediately think, “Oh, so he is one of those old-fashioned ethnographers who do not participate in the theoretical brilliance of the contemporary social sciences.” Well, I can assure you, and I’ve known him for many years, that he is as adroit as anyone around to manipulate those symbols and to produce those charts and to, uh, produce this kind of jargon. It just so happens that he still does not mind to give us basic information of a kind that has become rare, and this is one of the reasons why I like him.

There’s another reason why I like him and why I’m pleased that it has fallen on me to introduce him, and that he, that is, that he has, uh, a quality, uh, which is very much admired, especially in America. He’s extremely tough. Now, you might think if you see him that this Austrian aristocrat

(clears throat)

who is so refined has to be provided with a comfortable chair, with wine of a good kind in the right kind of glass, and has to be given a good dinner at the right time. I can assure you again from my personal acquaintance with him that he will appreciate all those things. However, if you put him on a hilltop somewhere in the Himalayas, and you give him a bag of barley far away from all villages, food, post offices, telegraph offices, any possible means of communication, not only he will survive, he will return a month later with a splendid film about that area.

You may ask me how I know this. Well, a few years ago, I was in Northwestern Nepal with some Berkeley students. We went on a distant trek, which was exactly like what I mentioned a moment ago.

There was no food available there. There was no post office. There was no post office, no medical support, Of course, no roads.

We, we went on foot. No aeroplanes could land there. Helicopters couldn’t go because the air was too thin.

And my students were getting worried. And in fact, after some lengthy discussions, they decided that they wanted to go back. I kept reminding them that Professor von Haimendorf only two years earlier had gone on the same trek, and since you know these treks are lengthy and there’s very little to do apart from looking at the magnificent landscape, I did some statistics.

I discovered that the age of Professor von Haimendorf was twice our average age. That is to say, he was one and a half times my age, And he was three times the age of the students.

(laughter)

He went

(laughter)

twice as fast, he went twice as high, which means twice as cold, and he went three times as far. And during the course of that trip, I already had considerable admiration for his scholarship and for his human qualities. But during the course of that trip, they increased even more.

(applause and cheering)

[00:07:33] PROFESSOR VON FÜRER-HAIMENDORF:
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I’m honored and extremely pleased to be among you, and to be after, I think, uh, twenty-two years, once again in Berkeley. I’m also honored and pleased to give the First Lecture. When I was told, or rather when your university authorities wrote to me that I should speak about the immortality of the soul, which is the theme of these lectures, I was at first somewhat taken aback because I didn’t think that I was either theologian or philosopher.

But fortunately, as it is with anthropologists, I found an easier way out because I could talk about the beliefs of the people I had studied, uh, what they thought about the immortality of the soul, and indeed of the soul in general. So I will today, uh, talk to you precisely according to the brief which I was given. I will not talk about philosophical problems but I will talk as an anthropologist about what the people I studied believe and think.

But I thought the subject is somewhat perhaps elusive, and unless you know who the people are who have these beliefs, it may perhaps not be all that interesting. So I thought I will introduce this talk before I come to my actual lecture, which, as this is a prestigious and formal lecture, I have actually written down, which is not in my normal practice. But I thought I will first show you some slides, and if you, uh, permit me, perhaps extra ten or fifteen minutes, because this will be the length of this introduction, I will be able to show you what the people who have these beliefs, or what they look like, roughly where they live, et cetera.

So let us start with these slides. Right. You know, of course, uh, souls cannot be, uh, photographed.

And, uh, the immortality of the soul can’t even, uh, be photo– uh, even more difficult to photograph. So what you are going to see ha– now will not be souls, but they will human bodies. Uh, but behind these human bodies, there are some brains.

And in those brains, there are thoughts, and these thoughts are about souls and immortality, et cetera. So let us briefly, uh, and I say literally briefly, talk about, uh, the people. I’m trying to shut out that light.

I have succeeded in doing this. Uh, it’s always difficult in a lecture hall you don’t know. A particular lecture hall which I think is really more suitable for the voice of Pavarotti than of my own.

But anyhow, uh, we will now on the screen, I hope, first see a map of, map of India, and later on we will see people such as, uh, have those beliefs I’m going to talk about. Uh, all I want to show you here in this map is that I’m going to talk mainly about the tribal people and, uh, some of them are here in the center of India where I have worked for a very long time. Actually, I have spent about ten years in that area.

I have also spent some years of my life in the extreme northeast, and we will also see some people, such as a tribe I have recently revisited, actually in April and May of this year, right up there in the northeast corner of India. And finally, we will end up with some, uh, of the high altitude populations in Nepal. So, uh, that will be enough for the moment, and now I’ll run just very briefly through some of the slides of, um, uh, the people I studied.

Uh, this is a sort of landscape which you see in the Deccan. And in these forests, there are even now, uh, relative primitive people such as you see here. Uh, this is a Chenchu, and and I’ll– later on, I will talk about the beliefs of the Chenchus: of souls, the afterlife, the land of the dead.

This is a very primitive, uh, tribe of hunters and food gatherers, uh, who, uh, were like that when I first studied them in, uh, nineteen forty, forty-one. And again, I revisited them this winter. And these photographs, of course, are, as they are in color, they are taken now, and you s- will see that they have hardly changed.

Uh, they are, living in little huts as they used to do, and there is actually, apart from a bit of different clothing, there is very little difference. So these are among the most primitive tribes in India. Hunters and food gatherers, they have no cultivation, they, uh, have virtually no animal husbandry

And they represent some of the most archaic strata of Indian civilization. Uh, some during part of the year, they don’t even live in, in grass huts, they just put up a few leaf, uh, branches of leaves and live in those. But that doesn’t mean because their material background is so primitive that also they have not got some ideas about the afterlife and, as you may say, the immortality.

Uh, there are other people whom I’ve studied. This is a tribe, and indeed, I will start with this particular society, not with the Chenchus. These are a tribe called Reddis.

This is the Godavari River, one of the sacred rivers of India, and this is in, uh, Andhra Pradesh, previously known as Hyderabad State. And, uh, here we have a type of shifting cultivators, or as they are also— anthropologists call them slash and burn cultivators, such as we still find now, eh, in places such as the Amazon basin or, um, some other parts of Southeast Asia. Uh, again, I’m not going to go into great detail, simply to give you an idea what these people look like.

Uh, these two belong, no doubt, to some of the very ancient stratum of the extremely diverse Indian population. I said they are shifting cultivators. They clear the jungle in, uh, small patches and grow their millet and other crops.

Uh, not many of these groups can pursue this old type of, uh, their, uh,

(coughing)

economic style because civilization is pressing on them. The, uh, growing population of India, uh, is pushing these relatively primitive tribes more and more into the background. But nevertheless, here they are.

The women still go to the jungle to collect edible roots, very much as it was thirty years ago when I first met them. So there is not much change. Their villages look very much the same.

And we have here, uh, really remnants, small remnants, a few thousand here, a few thousand there, of the most ancient populations of India. But, um, other tribal areas have been developed, if we may say. Developed means here very often cleared of forests, which is not a good thing, and very often not by the tribal people themselves, but by advanced populations which was pushing into the tribal areas.

This is

(clears throat)

the same process

(clears throat)

which now is gradually,

(clears throat)

eradicating some of the primitive groups in the Amazon basin. In India, this has happened already some time ago. The tribe living in these highlands here, just kind of plateau, also in northern Andhra Pradesh, these are the Gonds.

Now, here we are no longer talking about a small group because there are about four million Gonds in, in, uh, India. So this is a very substantial ethnic group as they go, and, uh, what their, their beliefs and their ideas about the afterlife obviously must be those which were held, uh, in the past by even much larger populations. I’m not going to describe now the physical features.

I just show you sli– a few slides that you see what these Gonds are looking like. They speak a Dravidian language, a s-language of their own. None of the, uh, literary Dravidian languages, but Gondi.

Uh, and they have a much more elaborate material civilization than, let us say, the Chenchus and Reddys. Uh, they have adopted, this is a wedding which we are seeing here, some of the, uh, rituals also of the surrounding Hindu population. Uh, this is a, uh, society which is extremely complex in their social structure, about which I cannot deal here.

Uh, here, this is, uh, something which is a little closer to the subject of my letter, lecture later because it’s a, a sacrifice of a goat at a funeral feast which obviously is connected somehow with what will happen after the funeral to the soul. And here we see a, a goat being sacrificed. Uh, 25 years ago, it would have been a cow, but cow slaughter is now prohibited in India, so they have to manage with goats.

What the gods will think about that, who were used to beef eating, are rather like Americans, or as I had the pleasure tonight at the dinner too. So now even the goat gods have to manage with goat’s meat. I suppose they won’t like it so much, but this is modern India, which is not as liberal as the old India was.

The old India were– was, where anybody could k-kill, sacrifice, eat what they liked. Today, this is not so. So, uh, the Goans had to substitute goats for cows.

Um, uh, but they continued, as best as they can their rather colorful and gay life. They have still their festivals where they dance, women and men, and even wear these masks and very beautiful, uh, peacock feather crowns. So these are the Gonds, and I’m going to talk about Gonds quite a lot later on, and their very complicated idea about what happens to their souls.

However, there are also in other parts of India, there are other tribes such as the Nagas on the borders between Assam and Burma. Uh, these are Konyak Nagas. Uh, they are also shifting cultivators, but far, uh, more, uh, far more advanced than such people like the Reddis.

They live in big villages, as you see here, one, uh, with up to two hundred and fifty houses. Uh, this is rather also was very interesting to me. I lived in that village in 1936 for a year, and I came back in 1970, and I went to the same place to take sort of the same photograph.

And indeed, when it came out ultimately, I’m not going to show you both, they were almost identical. Namely, nothing had changed there, uh, in these, um, thirty-four years and except that there were more houses, but of course, the population had increased. Uh, something seems to happen here, but, uh, the, uh, dance you see here is one of the headhunting dances of the Konyak Nagas.

And again, I’m going to talk about their idea, not only what happens to the souls of those people whose heads they have cut off, but also to those of their own kinsmen. Uh, and indeed, the, uh, Konyak Nagas were very concerned about the fate of the souls after this, and those who w-were their enemies, their skulls were kept in collections such as see, you see here. Uh, and again, I must say this photograph was taken in 1970, so it’s not so long ago.

At that time, they were no longer going head hunting, but they were preserving with all the more, uh, care the collection of enemies’ heads they had from old days. Um, another area about which I will talk, or about the people of whom I will talk, are the mountain tracts between Northeast India, between the plains of the Brahmaputra River, the plains of Assam, and the mountains of Tibet. This is an area which is inhabited by tribes such as, for instance, the Apatanis, who I just visited very recently, who are much more advanced, were always much more advanced in material civilization, who had irrigated rice fields as you see, you see here.

Uh, but who have in recent days enormously, uh, progressed. Uh, they were, uh, in the old days already, uh, they had big villages, uh, houses such as you see here. Of the, uh, These are all very recent photographs taken only a few months ago.

The women had a particular type of tattoo and nose plugs. So they were, uh, again, a very archaic group. They had been living in almost complete isolation.

Uh, their priests were very gorgeously dressed, and these priests were particularly concerned with such problems as we are going to talk about today. Uh, they are able to, in their– in trance and in dreams, to penetrate into the land of the dead, where they then, uh, get first-hand information on what happens to the souls of the departed. They are still, uh, look very gorgeous.

Uh, how long, um, this kind of, uh, extremely rich material culture will persist, we do not know. I fear it may not be very long that they will continue to weave all these extremely elaborate textiles, but for the moment, At least for ritual, uh, on ritual occasions, they still do that. Uh, they also continue to have their feasts where the, uh, pigs are being slaughtered.

Again, uh, I don’t want to go into details here, but it is on such occasions they also still perform their old type of dances. Uh, that is a kind of dance which used to be danced when an enemy had been killed and was brought back, and the whole idea of that ritual was to placate the, uh, souls of the enemy and, uh, prevent them from harming the living, those who have– were responsible for the deaths. Uh, today, there are no more enemies killed, but the same ritual is performed when a, a ba– a leopard or tiger is killed.

Um, tigers are getting scarce too, but in this case, a leopard was killed, so the ritual was performed. But it gives you a good idea of what these people look like. And these are some funeral monuments, and as I will later also say that according to the deserts of people about their conduct in life, these certain s-symbols are attached to these funeral monuments.

Perhaps if you keep this in mind when we come to the point where I will say that how in the land of the dead then people are judged according to, uh, uh, what particular deeds of valor they have been performing, and s- the symbols for such deeds are attached to such funeral monuments. Uh, but civilization is penetrating everywhere, and this valley which when I first entered in 1944 had, uh, not seen any white man. Uh, today, even the Apatanis themselves own motorcycles as you see at the back, and Jeeps, and the very rich ones even have Ambassador cars.

These are the best type of Indian-made cars. And, uh, they even, uh, some of them were modern dress. Here, a young man who is a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force with his young wife, who manages a pharmacy.

Uh, so you see, uh, there is change, but there is not such rapid change in the ideas about the afterlife. If we move a bit to the west from there, we come to Buddhist populations of the Himalayas, such as the Sherpas, who live in this gorgeous environment, uh, in very good houses, and who are obviously much more sophisticated, both in their material culture as in also their ideas. But nevertheless, we will see that there are certain similarities between the primitive and the not so primitive.

These are Sherpas. They are Tibetan-speaking people, Buddhists, uh, they live in the high valleys, uh, They look exactly like Tibetans. They dress like Tibetans, and they have ideas about the afterlife like Tibetans, about which we are going to talk.

Other Bhotia populations, namely, uh, Buddhists, Tibetan speakings, are found in other parts of the, uh, Himalayas on the borders between Nepal and, uh, Tibet. Uh, it is probably one of the most beautiful parts of the world. And, uh, all the ritual– do you– here we have a group of r– lamas preparing for a great, uh, series of ceremonies which last over three or four years, outdoors, in the sight of all these, uh, mountain peaks.

Uh, their monasteries, they have Buddhist monasteries, are extremely well furnished. Here, the, uh, statue of the previous abbot who is now reincarnated, so that brings us again to the idea of, uh, souls, Uh, uh, monasteries which are decorated as you see here with, uh, very fine paintings. So this is, uh, clearly a civilization which is rich in both in their material outfit as also in their ideology.

Uh, here is a… That is a monastery dance. Uh, and then this here is a group of nuns.

Uh, the– I will also mention that not long ago, I studied a nunnery in Nepal and f-to find out what people here, what their idea about the afterlife is. Here a group of novices, Buddhist novices in another part near another monastery. And, uh, then, uh, one of the reincarnate lamas, he is a Tibetan, uh, who came from one of the famous monasteries north of the Himalayas and is now– has established a, a monastery in Nepal.

And the next, and I think last, uh, slide, is of the abbot of another monastery who is also a reincarnation. I’ve known him for quite a number of years when he was quite young and had just succeeded to the abbot shift because he is a reincarnation of the previous abbot. Uh, we all are of course familiar with the reincarnated, uh, Dalai Lamas, et cetera, but on the much lower level, the same ideas are being kept.

Uh, and finally here, a monk who has retired to one of the probably highest hermitages, uh, I would say in the world, who is sitting here in view of Mount Everest in a sort of sun seat, meditating, uh, at an altitude of about, uh, fifteen thousand feet. Obviously, uh, here we have people who devote their whole life to the contemplation of the, what they consider the eternal truths about human life and the human soul. We have now come, uh, to the end of this short introduction.

I hope you won’t feel that that was unnecessary, but it will give you some kind of an idea, uh, what the people are look like, about whose beliefs and thoughts I’m going to talk. Now, I’m starting now, so to say, the formal part of this lecture, and, uh, this begins perhaps in a rather odd way, because while I was already contemplating what I would say, I happened to find in the– quite incidentally, in the home of a friend, I saw a book, uh, by an American doctor, Raymond A. Moody, with the title Reflections on Life After Life. And when I saw this book, I thought, “Ah, that is something which may give me some idea about this lecture.”

Uh, and very soon, reading this book, I realized that the experiences the author– author described were indeed of relevance to an understanding of the beliefs of many people among whom I had lived in various parts of South Asia, from the jungles of the Deccan, such as you have seen here, to right to the villages and the Himalayas of Nepal. Now, who is this Raymond A. Moody, and why is he relevant at all to this talk? Moody is a medical doctor who got interested in the experience of some of his patients who were revived after having been considered clinically dead.

And starting from their accounts of what they remembered of the time when they seemed unconscious, he carried on his investigations into the experience of other persons who were the victims of near-fatal accidents and had at one time been on the verge between life and death. And one of the stories of a patient who had been revived from a state of clinical death reminded me so vividly of statements I had heard among the Buddhist people of Nepal, of, uh, of the Himalayas, indeed of the Sherpas, that I could not help considering the possibility of a connection between the two experiences. Moody’s patient spoke of a state in which he felt dissociated from his own body and saw doctors and nurses deal with his body, which they obviously took for dead.

Now, some years ago, a Sherpa, one of the people I’ve just seen here, had explained to me that when a man dies, his spirit, or you may call it his soul, sees the scene in the house of death and wonders why the members of his family are crying and crowding around the bed of the room in which he had lain. Only after some time does he realize that his motionless corpse is on the bed and that his family is mourning his own death. He sees, too, that lamas arrive and begin to recite a text in which the departed is instructed in the encounters which he will have on his road to the next world.

Now, at the belief of my Sherpa friends in the ability of a person whose body had just died to see his own corpse and watch the behavior of the mourners seemed so much less inexplicable if they too perhaps had heard the tales of men and women who had, so to say, returned from the gates of the world beyond and were able to tell of their experiences during the hours of apparent death. The similarity between the two experiences seemed to me very strange. Now, in the context of these lectures, I’m not concerned with either a medical or philosophical explanation of the phenomena reported by Dr. Moody.

But what I am concerned with is the light they may well be able to throw on the belief in the survival of a person’s consciousness. after life has left his body. This belief is enormously widespread.

Indeed, I am tempted to say universal among all the primitive as well as the not so primitive people among whom I have spent a total of some seventeen years of anthropological research in South and Southeast Asia. I was always impressed by the fact that within the very wide range between, on the one hand, sophisticated Tibetan lamas and on the other hand, illiterate members of the most primitive jungle tribes, I never encountered a group who lacked the belief in the continuity of human existence after the end of this earthly life. Nothing could be more misleading than the assumption that there is any uniformity in the eschatological concepts of tribal societies, either within a geographical area or with any particular cultural stratum.

The variations in all such concepts are infinite. And all I propose to do in this lecture is to place before you a kind of selection of the ideas about life after death which I encountered among the numerous Asian societies of whom I have personally experienced. Among preliterate tribes standing outside or on the fringe of the great historic civilization of Hinduism and Buddhism, we have to distinguish between those who have vague ideas of a life after death, but no conception of different entities such as soul, spirit, or life principle having an existence separate from the body, and other tribes who have very clear ideas about different elements in the makeup of the human personality, and who speculate in great detail about the conditions of these various elements after a person’s death.

It is obvious that those populations who have no clear ideas, and hence not much to say about man’s fate after the cessation of life, do not lend themselves to any detailed analysis of their eschatological concepts. I may mention here one South Indian tribe whom I studied first in 1940 and 1941, and whom I revisited in 1977. These are the Hill Reddis, shifting cultivators of whom I showed you a few slides near that river, the Godavari River.

Uh, there are Telugu-speaking type of shifting cultivators, and indeed, these people must be the despair of any anthropologist interested in myth-mythology and religious ideas. And while, while I lived among them, I really began to doubt my own ability to penetrate into the world of ideas of a primitive people. And fortunately, it was rather early in my, uh, studies of the Deccan type, so I got very worried about this.

And fortunately, this doubt was then dispelled when a year later I could immerse myself into the complex mythology and ritual of the Gonds of whom I shall soon have more to say. Gonds are those people with the big peacock crowns which we have just seen. Now, uh, these Reddis are not without ideas about an invisible world peopled by gods and spirits capable of affecting man, and they use prayers, offerings, and spells to influence such supernatural beings.

They think about them in anthropomorphic terms, and as they attribute to them activities and sentiments very similar to those of man, it may even be misleading to regard them as supernatural. Such deities, as we may call them, so in translating the Telugu word Devata, we might call them deities, are in the eyes of the Reddis as much part of the natural world as men and animals. They are not really considered supernatural, quite different.

And the fact that they are normally invisible is of little relevance because seers and shamans can see them in their dreams and report on their appearance. But none of these beings are believed to concern themselves in any way with those men and women who have died. There’s no general belief in a land of the dead where the departed mingle with gods and spirits, and the Reddis have no idea of what may be the fate of those whom they have buried or cremated.

Uh, yet we would be mistaken if we assumed that the Reddis believe in the total extinction of the personality at death. At a funeral, they addressed the deceased, asking him to give them a sign whether he was killed by black magic or by the action of a god. Such a sign would take the form of an impulse communicating itself to the corpse bearers and directing their steps in a definite di-direction.

Later, food offerings are given to the departed, and I knew of a man who kept on placing bits of special food outside the village for his deceased father, who had died many years previously. He did this because he believed that the dead stay in the forest. So there is clearly an idea that life goes on in some way after this.

But the concept of a soul as an element different from the body is foreign to the Reddis. Talking of their dead relatives to whom they give food at the time of certain ceremonies, they refer to them as the elders or simply as the departed, but never as the souls of the departed or the ancestor spirits. Nothing in the Reddy’s funeral custom is suggestive of any fear of the dead, and there is no conscious attempt to prevent the dead from returning to the habitations of the living.

Only if a man dies in great pain or on account of black magic is there some likelihood that he will turn into an evil spirit, and to come face to face with such a spirit means certain death for the living. Hence, at the suspicion of such a development, a magician will be called to banish the spirit into the forest and secure the villages against molestation. So here, too, we have proof that there is an idea of survival.

Yet on the whole, the Dieri’s ideas about the afterlife are characterized by their vagueness, and no one believes that good or bad deeds in this life have any effect on one’s fate in the world beyond. I remember very well the rather pathetic complaint of an old man who used almost to say, “Although we give so many offerings to the gods when we die, what good does it all do us? We do not know what will happen to us.

We only know that we will be buried, but we can’t say anything in greater detail. Now, that is very different from ideas such as we will, uh, uh, hear later on. So much about the Reddis, probably the type characterized by the very vagueness about their ideas about the fate of the soul after death.

Now, the Chenchus, that tribe of food gatherers and hunters, far more primitive than the Reddis, they are the less vague about the fate awaiting the dead. The Chenchus in the forests of the Nallamala Hills of Andhra Pradesh, they share with many a far more advanced Indian tribes the concept of an element, uh, which at times can separate from the body and which survives its ultimate decay. They call this element the jiva or jiva.

Sanskritists here will at once realize what that is. A term which occurs in most of the languages derived from Sanskrit, in Hindi, etc., and which is sometimes translated as soul and sometimes as life force. The jiva is believed to wander about while a man sleeps and dreams, and if during serious illness the jiva leaves the body, the patient becomes unconscious and can recover only if the jiva returns.

That all is according to the ideas of the Santals. There is the idea also widespread among Indian tribes that after death, the jiva goes to Bhagavan, sort of supreme god we may call him, and some Santals believe th-that the jiva of those who in life were a trouble to other men may not be accepted by Bhagavan, and instead would roam the world as evil spirits. So is there some sort of faint idea that life in this world and behavior in this world will finally affect the fate after death?

Now, although all the ideas about the fate of the soul after death are rather vague, the Chenchus definitely believe that their departed relatives wish to be remembered and that they will help those who think of them and give them offerings of food. If a man neglects his departed relative, they may, may make him ill, but gifts of food can quickly appease the angry jeev. As all these ideas are found in one form or the other also among other tribes and even among Hindu castes, I really hesitate to consider them characteristic of a society of semi-nomadic food gatherers.

Yet their acceptance by the Chenchus suggests that an extremely primitive economy and a social pattern which does not provide for corporate action on the part of large groups of kinsmen by no means excludes feelings of mutual dependence between the living and the dead. Now, after these very brief comments on the eschatological beliefs of two very minor tribes of South and Andhra Pradesh, we may now turn to one of the largest tribal groups of the whole of India, namely the Gonds, of whom you saw some photographs. Uh, the Gonds who speak their own Dravidian language and who are organized in a very complex social system entirely peculiar to them.

There are, as I mentioned already, about four million Gonds in India, but I shall here concentrate on the one group I know best, the Gonds of Adilabad, a district which used to be form of Hyderabad state and is now divided between Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. The Gonds’ eschatological beliefs are closely intertwined with the principles of their social structure. To the Gonds, the living and the dead form a single community, all of whose members are dependent on each other.

The clans which make up Gond society are represented not only on this earth, but also in the land of the dead, where the departed congregate around their respective clan deities. Indeed, one may really, uh, liken a Gond clan to an iceberg, for by far the greatest number of its members dwell in the land of the dead, and only the most recent recruits live on the surface of the earth like the tip of the iceberg coming out of the ocean. Now basic to an understanding of the nature of man in Gond belief is the distinction between two elements, either of which we may describe as a soul, or we may be tempted to describe them as soul.

And their analysis is facilitated, greatly facilitated, by the fact that in Gondi, in the Gond language, there are two quite different terms for these elements, and there is hence no possibility of confusing one with the other. There are some groups of Gonds who don’t speak Gondi anymore. They speak Telugu now.

And they have only t– one term for both, and there’s total confusion. Which is quite impossible to get anything, anything clear about their eschatological beliefs because they are themselves confused by their change in language. But the Gonds who still speak Gondi, they call these two elements, one the jiv, For rather than using the same Sanskritic word, as the Chenchus use, and the other is known as the Sanal.

Now, the jiva is the life force without which no human being can exist. According to Gond belief, the jiva is sent by Bhagwan, the supreme god, into a child while it is still in the mother’s womb, and remains with the person until the moment of death. So it is an enlivening principle.

A tale known to every Gond tells how Bhagwan sends his messengers to fetch the jiva and bring it to him when he wants a man to die. And these messengers of death, uh, can easily extract the jiva if a man is weakened by illness, and hence Bhagwan makes people suffer from disease before he causes their death by depriving them of their life, of their jiva. Now, as the jiva leaves the body, it returns to Bhagavan and joins a pool of jiva from which a jiva may be taken for use in other human beings, not necessarily connected with the jiva’s previous incarnation.

So it is a kind of pool of, of life-giving principles from which that deity, Bhagavan, can pick one up and enliven another embryo. Sometimes, however, uh, a jiva is incarnated in a grandchild of the man or woman whose body he had to leave at death. And this is assumed to happen if a man’s grandchild is born soon after his death, and any similarity between grandfather and grandson is interpreted as a sign of such reincarnation.

Nevertheless, a man’s personality is not believed to adhere to the jiva, and no one ever remembers an earlier life. Very different from Buddhist ideas, particularly Tibetan Buddhists think that you can remember an earlier life. And the element in which the personality of the gone survives is not the jiva, but it is the sanal, and this element comes into being as a separate entity in The moment of death, not before.

Now, what does Sanal mean? Sanal means literally the one who has gone. It’s formed from the word for going, i.e., namely, the departed.

And the entire elaborate funerary ritual is cur-concerned with the Sanal and in no way with the Jiv. The Sanal is supposed to follow the corpse bearer from the village to the burial or cremation ground. And after the disposal of the corpse in the one or other way, either by burying or burning, the mourners prepare for the Sanal a miniature seat, a leaf cup with water and other comforts.

And they address him with the words, “You have died, you have become a god,” stay now in your place.” They use for god here the Gondi term, pen. Now, the word pen is usually translated as a god, but here it really means, uh, rather one of the compa-company of the Sanals, the Sanalia, the departed who dwell with the clan deity.

Um, throughout the long and complex mortuary rites, which include a great and expensive memorial feast, the departed in whose honor they are performed is always referred as to, as as the Sanal. It is always implied that even though death has changed the circumstances of the departed, it has not changed his identity. A significant indication of the Gonds’ idea of the status of the departed is the insistence on the necessity to join every Sanal with the clan deity, with his clan deity.

There is a special rite at the clan god feast in the month of December when the sarnaul of every clan member who had died in the preceding year is formally introduced to this clan god. And this involves the sacrifice of a goat and the cooperation of the clan priest. There is a problem over women who are widowed and then marry a man of a clan other than that of their first husband.

Strictly speaking, no woman should marry any man from an exogamous group. I used here the term phratry, uh, I mean a group of clans other than that of her first husband. For after her first wedding, she was introduced to his clan deity and thus became a member of his clan with the expectation that after death, her sanal would join the company of the clan god and the sanals of that same clan.

As long as she concludes a second marriage with a man of her husband’s clan or clan group, all is well, because she would then adhere to the same clan deity, and there is no problem. But if her second husband belongs to a clan adhering to a different clan deity, then there arises a conflict of loyalties, and Gonds themselves are doubtful what her status will be in the land of the dead. Some say they– she will nevertheless go and then to the company of her first husband’s clan deity.

Others say, “No, she will go to that of her second.” And I mention this problem really only but in order to demonstrate how very real, uh, their future in the underworld appears to Gaunt men and women. It is a real problem for them.

Unlike some other tribes and many Hindu castes, the Gonds do not believe that any member of their society could ever become an evil spirit, whatever his actions may have been in his earthly life. The place of every sanal is with his clan god in the appropriate part of the land of the dead, and nothing can deprive him or her of this place. Implied in this belief is the rejection of any idea of retribution in the next life.

Neither are good deeds rewarded, nor criminal acts punished in the life after death. This does not mean, however, that the Gonds dismissed the idea of supernatural sanctions altogether. The belief in such sanctions exists in innumerable myths, and stories tell how the gods have punished the neglect of their cult, or how a man’s unjust or inconsiderate conduct towards a wife or dependent brought about divine retribution.

But such retribution in the shape of illness, loss of crops and cattle, or the depredations of tigers, is always on this earth and in this life, never in the land of the dead. Nor do Gonds believe in a reincarnation related to a man’s conduct in an earlier life. The element involved in the process of reincarnation is the jiva, but as neither personality nor identity attaches to this life force, the fate of the jiva is unconnected with moral judgments.

Indeed, the acceptance of the Hindu idea of reincarnation, resulting no doubt from the present-day Gonds’ familiarity with some Hindu myths and folktales, does not mean that anyone hopes for a good or fears a bad reincarnation. The one rather strange aspect of the Gonds’ belief in another world where the departed of each group of clans are united with their respective clan deities is the fact that the Gonds do not seem to have any concrete evidence for their picture of the land of the dead. We shall see presently that many other Indian tribes based their idea of the afterlife on the report of shamans.

and seers in trance or in dreams who have journeyed to the land of the dead, and are therefore familiar with its denizens, both human and divine or demonic. Although among the Gonds too there are seers who can establish contact with gods and spirits, some of whom can be induced to possess them and speak through their mouths, such seers never claim the ability to penetrate into the land where the departed, the Sanalir, live in the company of the clan deities. This is a situation very different from that characterizing the worldview of another tribe, Munda-speaking tribe, the Sauras in the hills of Orissa.

The Sauras are adept in establishing relations with the world of gods and spirits, and their shamans, both male and female, often visit the underworld and mingle there with the departed and the spirits. Moreover, ancestors of Sauras come to the land of the living, possessing shamans and telling through them about the conditions in the underworld. Summarizing several accounts of the underworld by Sauras, we can draw a fairly clear picture.

The underworld resembles this earth, but there are more mountains, and the valleys are deeper. It is always night with the moon as the only source of light. Hence, it is difficult to get about and to recognize people from a distance.

The spirits have large houses, not the s-souls of the department, the sort of spirits or gods. They have large houses and, uh, the departed, on the other hand, they have small and badly thatched huts. The spirits are described like rich men or officials in this world, and the p-departed are like peasants and who do some plowing, even though the land is poor in the land of the dead, it is difficult to find enough food.

Hence, the departed are starved and miserable-looking. They always shiver and do not have sufficient clothes. When they can find their way, they come to their old houses on this earth and trouble their relatives by making them ill in the hope to be bought off with gifts of clothes, such as are given for the dead at certain ceremonies.

The departed behave very much like men do on earth. They quarrel and even commit murder in the land of the dead. If a husband and a wife both die and meet in the underworld, they will live together as before and may even have children.

A peculiarity of the Sauras is the firm belief that shamans, both male and female, can marry non-human inhabitants of the underworld and visit these spirit spouses in their own realm. Thus, a Saura may have a human wife in his earthly village and at the same time be married to a spirit wife in the underworld. When he dies, he will permanently join his spirit wife and gradually change his status and become a spirit himself.

So there’s some social mobil-mobility through marriage with spirits. And though his human wife may ultimately also die and enter the s– and enter the underworld where she may see her husband, his new social status, his elevated social status, and his marriage to a spirit wife erects an insurmountable barrier between the former human spouses. It would seem that, uh, that the establishment and maintenance of links with the departed occupy an unusually important place in the thinking of the Munda-speaking people of Peninsular India.

For it is among them that one finds the most outstanding examples of living megalithic rituals, such as among the Gadabas of Orissa and the Mundas and Hos of Bihar. In this context, I cannot enter into the details of the cult of the dead of these tribes, but may just draw attention to the fact that the expenditure of great energy and cost on the erection of large stone monuments is a clear proof of a people’s concern for their departed. I think in the same way as we say Egyptians must have been very concerned about the life of their departed in the next world because they built big p-pyramids.

And in the same way, this is true of the Munda-speaking, so many of the Munda-speaking people. And this concern does not necessarily coincide with very clear ideas about conditions in the land of the dead, but often the two phenomena go together. Leaving peninsular India, we find notable instances of megalithic monuments among the Khasis of Meghalaya in what was previously part of Assam.

Like the Munda types and Austroasiatic speaking people, as well as also among the Naga types of Nagaland. In both cases, there’s a close link between megalithic monuments and a cult of the dead. The care lavished on the dead is particularly striking among the Konyak Nagas, a tribe I first studied in nineteen thirty-six, indeed it was my first fieldwork, and whom I revisited in nineteen seventy.

The funeral practices of the Konyak Nagas are characterized by an unusually extended care for the actual skull and the bones of the dead person. Both skulls of the enemies, you saw a collection on one of the slides, and also the skulls of as of the, uh, departed kinsman. Uh, the body of a dead man or woman is first placed on a bamboo platform, often close to the house of the surviving members of the family, who stolidly put up with the appalling smell of the putrefying corpse.

I was once during an ep-epidemic in, um, a Konyak village, and it’s quite appalling because everywhere on those platforms were rotting corpses. U-ultimately, the head is wrenched off the body and the skull cleaned of the remnants of brain, flesh and skin. When it is clean and dry, it may rest for months or more in a corner of the dwelling house, or it may be put into a kind of s-stone cist and put, uh, near one of the paths leading out of the village.

And in such an open sandstone cist or urn, it then it looks out from there at those, the villagers who go from the village to their fields. And, uh, there the skull then remains indefinitely looking out on the passersby who benefit thereby, uh, benefiting thereby their welfare and their fertility. We must not forget, of course, that the Konyak Nagas used to be headhunters, and that not only the skulls of their relatives were lovingly preserved, but that large collections of enemy skulls filled their men’s houses.

These too were considered vessels of magical power, believed to enhance the wealth and fertility of the visitors to these houses. One may well wonder whether such a fascination by the dead relics of a living body, be it of friend or foe, is accompanied by an equally strong interest in the face of the less tangible elements of a human personality. Like other Indian tribes, the Konyak Nagas do not believe in a single spiritual entity surviving the death of the body.

Though their reasoning is by no means clear, it appears, it appears that their eschatological concepts involve three different entities. Insofar as their own fate awaiting them after death is concerned, their ideas are very definite. Old men often spoke to me without any sign of emotion of the time when they would go to Yimbu, the land of the dead.

For their journey, uh, they would need their weapons, and these would be hung up on the corpse platform. For on the way to the land of the dead, they expected to meet all the men whom they had killed in battle and whom they would have to fight once more. The entity which travels to Yimbu, and to which the major part of the individual’s personality at is attached, is called Yahaw.

Uh, the gate to Yimbu is guarded by Doloba, the powerful guardian of the netherworld, uh, who questions the yaha, we might call it the soul, before allowing it entrance. The yaha of Konyak belief is different from the Sa’anal figuring in Gond eschatological ideas. For whereas the Sa’anal takes shape only in the moment of death, the yaha exists already during a man’s lifetime and can be separated from his body without immediately causing death.

Yaha sometimes stray from sleeping bodies and then risk being kidnapped by some unfriendly spirit and dragged to Yimbu, the land of the dead and the land of the spirits. Such an event is fraught with danger, for the separation of body and Yaha cannot last longer than a few days without fatal consequences. Kon-konyak shamans have a remedy against such an abduction of a Yaha.

They can induce a state of trance in which they themselves enter the land of the dead and recover the straying yaha by promising offerings to the god or spirit responsible for the kidnapping. Sounds very modern. Life in Gimbu resembles life on this earth, and some Konyaks, and particularly those of the Wancho group, believe that everything on this earth has a counterpart in the land of the dead, and that below every village there’s a corresponding village in the netherworld, with a chief’s house exactly below the house of the earthly chief.

I was often told that when I asked about it. I said, “Well, look, we are sitting here in this house. There’s exactly this kind of house is down below us.

It’s just like this.” So that is a very sort of real belief. But there’s no permanence in the land of the dead either, for those in Yimbu die too and then go to another land of the dead which is not accessible to human shamans.

So there’s a sequence of lands of the dead. Apart from the Yaha, this kind of soul which comes closest to indeed to our concept of the soul, there are two other elements which outlast, uh, the death and the decomposition of the body. One of them is called Mio, and Konyaks believe that this is a kind of invisible entity attached particularly to the human skull and accounting for the magical fertility-enhancing force in human skulls.

And finally, there’s a third element known as Hiba, which may be likened to a ghost, which may, on occasion, haunt the living. The belief in the possible return of a Hiba, this ghost, to the home of his relatives does not conflict with the belief in the Yaha’s residence in the land of the dead, for Yaha and Hiba are different entities and have no connection with each other. So there’s this idea that after death, the personality splits in so and so many elements, which is quite frequently found among Indian tribal populations.

Any idea of retribution for conduct in this world, in the land of the dead, is as foreign to Konyaks as it is to Gonds or Sauras. Yet there are two different routes to Yimbu, to the land of the dead, and those who died an unnatural death must take a path more troublesome than the road on which the majority of the departed proceed to Yimbu. For my last example, I get to say it’s not yet the last of the whole lecture, but the last of the, uh, Ti– Indian tribal population.

I’m choosing the Apatanis, a Tibeto-Burman-speaking people in the Eastern Himalayas, uh, I showed you some houses and the, their rice fields, uh, whom I studied first in nineteen forty-four and forty-five, and whom since then I revis-revisited several times, and last in March, April, and May of this year. During the span of thirty-four years, many changes have occurred among the Apatanis, but it seems that the ideas regarding the fate of the dead have largely remained the same. Like the Konyak Nagas, they rely for their knowledge of the worlds beyond almost entirely on the accounts of shamans and priests who claim to visit the regions inhabited by gods, spirits, and departed human beings.

I’m referring to these regions in the plural because the Apatanis believe that some of the dead dwell in an underworld known as Nelli, while others fi-find a place in Talimoko, which lies above the clouds. So there’s one down below, one high up. All those Apatanis who died a natural death go to the underworld, to Nelli, which looks, according to their belief, exactly like an Apatani village, with long rows of houses, fields, et cetera.

And on the way to Nelli, about halfway between Earth and the underworld, they come to a house which has also a name, Hisinjato, and there they meet the guardian of the underworld, Nelkyrie, and also they are met by their parents, kinsmen, and friends who have preceded them in death. And these kinsmen ask the new arrival about his exploits in his earthly life, how many enemies he has killed or captured, how many bulls and pigs he has sacrificed, how many wild animals he has killed in the chase. There is a scale for such exploits, and the reception of the departed by the other inhabitants of the underworld, uh, uh, depend on his achievements in his previous life, and these are reckoned by the number of points he has accumulated.

There’s a kind of point system, And these points are known as ichang. And various deeds count as one ichang. For instance, killing one man or one woman, of course, not of one’s own community, but of a hostile tribe, that gives you one point.

Killing a tiger gives you one point. Killing one wild boar gives you one of those ichang. Killing any number of wild sows gives you, again, only one.

So one boar is one ichang, but any number of female pigs is only one. Killing a bear, killing any number of deer, each gives you one of these points. Buying a slave used to give you one.

Buying a large rice field gave, gave you one point. Buying several small rice fields gave you one point. Therefore, women too can acquire these points by buying slaves or buying land.

Perform, performing a major feast of merit gave you one point, performing several minor feasts of merit, again gave you one point. And these points are symbolized by little pieces of cane on these, uh, monuments for the dead, as I showed you in the slide, these slanting bamboos. And those who have many ikhang to their credit are received with honor by their kinsmen and entertained with choice food.

But a man who has none or few ikhang to his credit, uh, will be ashamed and too shy to speak to the prominent among the departed. Whatever their ranking in the terms of ikhang acquired, the departed go nevertheless all to the same place in the underworld. But there too, there are rich and there are poor.

A man who was rich on this earth will be rich again, and a slave will be a slave and serve his master. In the underworld, a man finds the cattle he has sacrificed during his lifetime, but those animals which passed to his heirs are forever lost to him. So this is all the incentive to do away with your cattle while you are alive and, and not to leave it for your heirs.

Um, every woman in the underworld, land of the dead, returns to her first husband. But those who died unmarried may marry in the underworld and beget children. Life in this Neli is similar to life on this earth.

People cultivate the land and work, and ultimately they die once more and go to another land of the dead. So we have here the same idea of a sequence of lands of the dead. And although Neli is believed to be under the earth and is thus a real underworld, it has no gloomy associations, but is considered a good and happy place.

Another land of the dead is situated somewhere in the sky, and to this abode, known as Talimoko, repair all those who died an unnatural or an inauspicious death. Men who were killed by enemies and women who died in childbirth go to this land in the sky. There’s no suggestion, however, that the fate of those in Tali Moko, in the sky, is one of unhappiness, of suffering.

But it would seem that life in Tali Moko is not considered to the same extent a continuation of life on Earth as is the existence of the departed in Neli. Yet these tales of Iki and Ixang, tales of exploits on Earth, they are useful also for those in Tali Moko. For among the inhabitants there, also there are many who respect the successes a man achieved on earth.

But both those in Neli and in Talimoko are believed to return at times to the dwellings of the living, but their visitations are not welcome. Men in Talimoko, for instance, sometimes fall in love with beautiful girls on this earth and then make them die by an unnatural dea- death, such as in childbirth, in order to be able to take them to Talimoko. So if a beautiful girl dies, people say someone from Talimoko has taken her away.

So there’s this very close interaction between the dead and the living. Unlike the Konyak Nagas and many other types, the Apatanis do not have the idea that the human personality splits up after death. The entity which goes to Nelli is called Yalo, and there is the belief that while a man, uh, is asleep, his Yalo may roam about, and that dreams are the experiences of the Yalo on his wanderings.

Many of the spirits who inhabit Nelli side by side with the departed are ever avid to draw straying yalo, straying souls, into their spheres. If they succeed, the man whose yalo is prevented from returning to his body will fall ill. If a shaman, then a shaman must be employed to locate the yalo and, and identify the spirit who detains the yalo.

He will try to ransom the yalo with the sacrifice of an animal, and if the spirit accepts the offer and releases the yalo, the patient will regain consciousness and recover. Those who go after death to Talimoko instead of Neli are not referred to as Yalo. There’s another term known as Igi, but there’s no clear conception of the difference between Igi and Yalo.

Now, in recent years, some confusion has been brought into the Apatani’s ideas about the afterlife. A good many Apatani children are now going to mission schools in Assam. And though few have become Christians, ideas of heaven and hell have spread not only among such children, but also among their parents, who may have seen, perhaps in visiting those schools, pictures of heaven with angels and saints among the clouds.

As Talimoko, too, is believed to be among the clouds, these pictures look to them uncommonly like representations of Talimoko. Apatanis have begun to wonder whether Talimoko is, Talimoko is not after all a better place than Neli, so easily identified because it’s under the ground with the hell of Christian eschatology. There’s as yet no sign of any spread of Christian, or indeed Buddhist or Hindu, ideas of rewards for morally commendable acts or punishments for crime to be reaped in the next world.

The value attached to deeds of valor, symbolized by the a-accumulation of ikhang, is of course in the nature of a translation of merit gained in this life to benefits in the next world. But there is certainly no idea that morally re-reprehensible acts such as incest or theft, uh, would render a person liable to punishment in the land of the dead. The nearest allusion to morality in connection with Sapatani’s beliefs in the afterlife was a priest’s brief comment that in the land of the dead, too, there are good people, and they will be good again, and bad people will be bad again.

Now, this does not mean that Apatanis lack any sense of moral values. Generosity, reliability, truthfulness, and honesty in trade deals are certainly appreciated qualities. But they are never mentioned as qualifying a man or woman for any advantage in, in the next world.

In short, as life is in Neli no more than a reflection and continuation of this life, the aims of all conduct is nes- is of necessity this-worldly, and tribal morality lacks the otherworldly incentives of the ideologies which I’m going to discuss presently. Now after this short survey of some of the ideas concerning life after death and the nature of the soul in a number of tribal societies, it would seem logical to proceed in the same manner with an analysis of eschatological beliefs among the members of some of the more advanced societies of South Asia. In such an endeavor, however, there is the– we encounter the difficulty that in all such societies, there is a great gap between what we might call folk beliefs and the doctrines contained in an enormous volume of, uh, sacred scriptures and theological writings.

And it is quite obvious that in the context of this lecture, I cannot deal with the latter, nor, indeed, as an anthropologist, would I have the necessary competence to deal with data rightly considered the preserve of Indologists. In order to attain a measure of comparability, I have therefore decided to confine myself to the discussion of such Hindu and Buddhist societies which I investigated in much the same way as Gonds and Apatanis, namely by living in their villages and observing their behavior. I know very well that such behavior is ultimately determined by ideas which have some of their roots in religious scriptures.

But here I shall ignore these and speak only about the values and ideas manifested in the conduct I could watch and the views I heard expressed by unsophisticated villagers. There is probably no better place to observe simple Hindu communities relatively unaffected by modern developments and ideas than the hill peasants of Western Nepal, most of whom belong to such high castes as Chhetris and Thakuris interspersed with small communities of Brahmins. These three twice-born castes have for long formed the dominant stratum in the multi-ethnic and multilingual, well, as a society of the Kingdom of Nepal.

In its basic premises, their ideology conforms to the tenets of orthodox Hinduism, although the people in the remote mountains of Nepal have long been divorced from the great centers of Hindu civilization. What then, may we, uh, may we ask, are their beliefs regarding the fate of men in the world beyond? Like other Hindus, wherever they may live, they regard human life on this earth as a phase in a process extending over a sequence of existences.

And they believe that in the same way as conduct in past life determined their status in this existence, so achievements or failings in this life will have their repercussions in future reincarnations. You will remember that the Konyak Nagas and the Apatanis also think of a succession of existences. After the end of this life, the departed go to the land of the dead, and after having lived there again, much in the same state as on earth, they die again and enter further land of the dead where existence again is limited in time.

Now, this is very similar to the Hindus’ unending succession of one incarnation after the other, but there is yet an important difference. While Naga and Apatani’s existences are repetitive, each shaped on the model of the previous one, the Hindu model allows for change, indeed encourages the striving for a betterment of man’s fortunes. This is where the theory of karma comes in.

Morally positive acts in one life improve man’s condition in the next, while morally negative behavior results in rebirth in an inferior form. Hence, Chhetris and other Nepalese Hindus consider the acquisition of merit not only virtuous, but also an insurance for one’s future well-being. For abstentions sacrificed in this life create the basis for gratification in a li-life beyond death.

The primary means for acquiring merit are prayers, participation in ritual performances, pilgrimages, almsgiving, and donations to Brahmins and temples. A favorite way of increasing one’s store of merit is to, to commission a seven days recitation by Brahmins. Such a performance, which is accompanied by the giving of offerings, may involve lavish arrangements, and this is called Saptaha, seven days rite, and its beneficial effects may be directed towards a deceased kinsman or spouse who profits from the excess of merit in the next world.

If performed as a memorial rite, the Saptaha involves the gift of an entire set of household goods, possibly including furniture and even a saddle horse to the senior Brahmin. It is popular belief that the replicas of all the donated objects of personal use would be available to the departed for his life in the next world and will correspondingly increase his comfort. We see here an overlapping of two conflicting ideas.

The belief in a life in the world beyond, which is so similar to life on this earth that the departed require a whole domestic outfit, is clearly inconsistent with the belief in the immediate reincarnation of every human being in a shape conditioned by his earlier deeds. This, however, does not disturb the simple Hindu villagers who wants to do his best to provide his parents or deceased spouse with as many luxuries as he can afford. Moreover, the belief in a place where the departed can lead a pleasant life is the direct consequence of the old Vedic concept of Svarga, a heavenly place inhabited by the gods, and those departed referred to as Preta who had deserved entry into a sphere of bliss.

Most Chhetris believe in the existence of a heaven where those of great merit are reborn and lead a happy life in the company of gods and celestial maidens. Yet even life in heaven is not thought to be permanent, and as a person’s store of merit is used up by enjoyment, he becomes once more subject to the law of rebirth. There is, however, also a belief that although a person’s acquired merit may help him to go to Svarga, to heaven, he is not secure in this heaven, for any of his descendants up to seven generations committing a serious sin can, so to say, by retrospective actions, throw all his departed ancestors into hell.

This idea that joint family responsibility extends across the frontiers of death seems a permutation, a reversal of the biblical idea that the sins of the fathers will be avenged on children and children’s children. The Chetris seem to believe that evil can work backwards, that the acts supposed to propel a man’s ancestors into hell may appear to a Western observer as comparatively trivial. Thus, marrying with full rights a girl who has already been formally betrothed and gone through the rite of svayamvara is considered so unpropitious an act that even those of the bridegroom’s kinsmen who had already reached heaven may have to leave it and go down to hell.

These, of course, are folk beliefs. I don’t know whether they have any, uh, support in scriptures. The belief in the impermanence of any stage attained in the cycle of reincarnations is widespread among Hindu and Buddhist populations, and it affects, of course, also popular ideas of the nature of life in the abode of the departed.

Thus, I remember a monk in Sri Lanka explaining to me that even incarnations as one of the celestial beings in the heaven of the gods was not a guarantee of eternal bliss, for the merit acquired on earth which enables a man or woman to reach heaven is gradually being used up because those who enjoy the pleasures of the celestial gods are so taken up with this enjoyment that they have no time for meditation and hence do not replenish their store of merit. Even the bliss of the gods is not flawless, because they too know that their happiness will come to an end when all their merit has run out and they are subjected to another reincarnation. My informant thought it better, therefore, to be reborn as a man capable of regaining merit and thus advancing on the road to Nirvana, the end of rebirth, than to achieve the temporary satisfaction of a happy life in heaven.

It would seem that in popular Hinduism, there are many inconsistent ideas about man’s fate after death and the nature of those entities which survive the decay of the body. The greatest inconsistencies lies in the fact that Hindus believe, on the one hand, in the necessity to care for their ancestors and periodically give them food offerings, and that on the other hand, they also believe in the reincarnation of every human being in a new shape, dependent on the balance between meritorious acts done and sins committed in his previous life. If such reincarnation takes place, it is obvious that the departed can no longer profit from any of the food offerings given them by the surviving sons or other kinsmen.

But I have never found a Hindu who was worried about this inconsistency and conflicting beliefs, stemming probably from different cultural sources which continue to be held side by side. It would be relatively easy to reconcile these if popular Hinduism subscribed also to the belief in multiple souls, or more precisely, the splitting up of the personality into different entities, it is. So, each of which can then be assumed to have a different face, such as the Jiva and Sanal of the Gonds or the Yaha and Miho of the Konyaks.

Yet any underlying belief in a division of the personality in this manner is never spelled out. Nevertheless, many a villager in South India believes that the dead man’s soul, the Jiva, manifests itself in the crows which eat the food offerings put down at the cremation ground. At the same time, he believes that the soul must go for judgment before the court of Yama, the ruler of the dead, and if able to show sufficient merit, will be admitted to the company of the sainted dead.

Yet he also believes that a dead man may be reborn in a grandchild, and in addition acknowledges his duty to per-perform for his deceased father a series of rites known as shraddha, which are aimed at providing and sustaining a new ethereal body for the departed. Though it is difficult to understand how all these beliefs can be held simultaneously, we can only say that they add up to a strong affirmation of the belief that death is not the end of the human personality, and that life continues in a variety of potential guises. Buddhist populations of the Tibetan persuasion have on the whole much clearer ideas concerning the fate of the human soul after death and the prospects for men in the world beyond.

Their belief in reincarnation is constantly sustained by the presence in their midst of reincarnate lamas, some of whom the older members of the community may have known in their earlier incarnations, such as the two lamas I showed you in the, these slides, the last two slides. The Buddhist people I know best are the Sherpas of Nepal, but acquaintance with several other Buddhist communities in the high Himalayas makes me believe that the Sherpa ideology is fairly typical of the Mahayana Buddhist worldview in general. Basic to this ideology are two basic assumptions, namely, the assumption human existence is not confined to one single lifespan, and the other that actions, good or bad, in one life can affect an individual’s condition in the subsequent life.

In theory, not all the existences of a person need to be lived out on this earth, because rebirth may occur in any of the six spheres, only one of which is this human sphere. But in practice, most Sherpas believe that they will be re-reborn on this Earth, and that their fortunes in the next life depend on the merit they acquire in this life. Additional subtraction of merit are thought of in more or less mechanical terms, and the Sherpas believe that throughout a person’s life, appropriate marks are given for good and bad deeds.

After death, the account is made, and the balance of good or bad marks determines a man’s fate. The Sherpas imagined it, the keeping of the record as is the action of two anthropomorphic beings acting respectively as the– a person’s good and evil genius. Sherpas do not view morality in relation to any divine legislation and upholders of a moral code, but see it against the background of an impersonal moral order.

Within this order, merit is gained by the performance of ritual practices, the construction of religious monuments, donations to lamas and monasteries, but above all, by acts of kindness to men and animals. There’s a great emphasis on mildness, generosity, and charity. A man’s store of merit accumulated by such morally positive actions is liable to diminishment by the commission of any kind of sin.

Laymen think of sin mainly in respect of interpersonal relations and the treatment of animals. The wide range of religious acts producing merit is not imagined as being matched by a corresponding range of negative acts resulting in sin. Most Sherpas discount the possibility of committing sin by offending any of the divinities of the Buddhist pantheon.

The neglect of their cult is interpreted merely as the loss of an opportunity to acquire merit rather than as a breach of a moral code. The sins which seem to come most readily to the minds of laymen are those which inflict any kind of suffering on men or beasts, and those which involve an infringement of the rights and dignity of other persons. It is obvious that murder heads the list of such sins, but even the killing of a cat is a grievous sin, whereas sexual relations between persons not bound by either marital ties or religious vows are morally entirely neutral.

At the beginning of this lecture, I’ve mentioned the extraordinary similarity between the experiences of some patients in American hospitals revived after a period of apparent clinical death, as reported by Dr. Moody, and the accounts of Sherpas gave me of how they imagined the transition from life to the mental state of a recently deceased in the limbo between this earth and the world beyond. The deceased, so the Sherpas believe, can see the house and the room in which he died, and sees also the weeping mourners and his own corpse, though it takes him some time to take the situation in and realize that he is no long- no longer alive in human terms. From that moment onwards, the living can maintain contact with the deceased for a period of forty-nine days, for this is the time when the departed, or we may perhaps say his soul, remains in limbo before his rebirth or ent-entry into one of the spheres of the wheel of life.

A saintly man whose accumulated merit would enable him to enter Nirvana and be free of any further involvement with the world of man can now decide on his course of action. He may either enter Nirvana and disappear, so to say, from the scene, or he may resolve that out of compassion for suffering humanity, he would allow himself to be reborn once more and serve his fellow men with the wisdom and the saintliness he has acquired in previous existences. Hence, the reincarnation of, of a lama is not a fortuitous event, but the result of the li-deliberate decision of the personality who is reborn.

Nothing could demonstrate the Sherpa’s belief in the post-mental persistence of the human personality in full possession of the faculty to make decisions more clearly than this view of the events which lead to the return to earth of a Tulku, a reincarnate lama. Man, fortified by the acquisition of merit and wisdom, appears thus not as a pawn in the hands of supernatural powers, but as a master of his fate even after his bodily death. The sinner whose evil actions result in his decline into a lower state of existence also retains his personality, and there is no suggestion that as long as a being remains within the cycle of rebirth, it can ever face complete extinction.

Release from the wheel of life is only possible by the attainment of Nirvana, an aim only within reach of the most saintly of men. The average Sherpa layman, however, has no idea of the philosophical concept of Nirvana and aims only at a good reincarnation on this earth, or at the most, on entry into what he calls Devachan, a region of heavenly bliss. The striving for a good reincarnation is certainly a strong motive for all those who devote themselves to a religious life.

When a few years ago, I spent some weeks in a Buddhist nunnery, I made a survey of the nuns’ motives for joining the nunnery, and found that the desire for a favorable reincarnation ranked high among their motives. Many of them indeed hoped that next time they w-would be born as men because they thought that as monks, they would have a better chance to rise towards a higher state of perfection. We have seen that Indian tribal societies, as well as South Asian peasant populations adhering to Buddhism and Hinduism, share a firm belief in the continuance of the life after death.

But while most of the preliterate tribes assume that the departed go to a land of the dead, which is more or less a repetition of life on this earth, this belief does not serve as motivation for any special kind of conduct in this life. So no one is believed capable of affecting his fate in the world beyond by his moral choices while he is alive. Neither hope for reward nor fear of punishment determines his modes of conduct.

Indeed, a member of the family dies and mortuary rituals have to be performed, very little thought is given to the fate of those in the netherworld. The attitude of Hindus and Buddhists, however unsophisticated, is quite different, for they know that it is to a large degree within their own powers to avert an unpleasant fate and create the conditions for a favorable course of events once they have left this earth and find a place in the world beyond. Without attempting any explanations of the phenomena described in Robert Moody’s book, I feel that the experience of his patients in a state of apparent unconsciousness may throw some light on the accounts of the netherworld which the shamans of such types as Sauras or Nagas give when they emerge from trance.

For if it is a fact that people on the verge of death and already considered dead by bystanders do have visions which they interpret subjectively as experiences of a world beyond this mundane existence, the detailed descriptions of shamans of the land of the dead are likely also to be based on some actual spiritual experiences are not and are not pure imagination, such as, for instance, Dante’s vision of the Inferno. If it is true, for instance, that some of Dr. Moody’s patients believe to have seen in the world beyond their relatives and friends awaiting them, then the Apatani’s belief in similar meetings of the recently deceased in a halfway house on the way to Nelli, the land of the dead, may possibly be the result of actual mental pic-pictures which their shamans may have had in a state of trance resembling perhaps in some respects the near-death states described by Dr. Moody. Now, I’m far from proposing solutions to any of these problems, but I’m convinced that parapsychological research can make some contribution to the explanation of phenomena encountered but often not fully understood by anthropologists.

To approach the eschatological ideas of primitive peoples with the preconceived idea that there cannot be survival of the human personality after death is, in my opinion, a sterile attitude unlikely to elucidate the problems involved in the belief in some kind of an afterlife, universal in primitive as well as the historic civilization of mankind, though in our own civilization it is eroded by a more materialistic approach to many aspects of human life. It was not my intention to draw in this lecture any philosophical conclusions from the ethnographic data which I have presented to you. I may mention, however, that the eschatology of populations figuring in anthropological works seems to command in these days very little attention, and it is perhaps legitimate to conclude from this neglect of an important sphere of human concern that most anthropologists nowadays are themselves rather disinterested in man’s fate once he has been declared as clinically dead.

Thank you.

(applause)