The Destiny of the Body

Part One

PROLEGOMENA

Chapter I

The Challenge

"Wilt thou claim immortality, O heart,

Crying against the eternal witnesses...

I only am eternal and endure....

I am a timeless Nothingness carrying all,...

I, Death, am He; there is no other God.

All from my depths are born, they live by death;

All to my depths return and are no more."

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book IX, Canto II, pp. 592-93)

"I bow not to Thee, O huge mask of Death,

Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,

Unreal, inescapable end of things,

Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit."

(Ibid, p. 588)

"Here a Mill and there a river, Each a glimpse and gone for ever!"¹: In these words Robert Louis Stevenson epitomizes for a child the transitoriness that characterizes the landscape seen on a railway journey. But do they not equally convey the sense of dismay that man feels in his insecure confrontation with this "wild and monstrous and sweet and terrible world" which, alas, seems to be so strongly marked with the stamp of transitoriness and inadequacy, suffering and evil? "A glimpse and gone for ever! sabbam aniccam — all is impermanent, just a passing show!" — so goes forth his wail of despair, under the afflicting burden of the twin shadow of Death and Time overhanging as it were the whole gamut of manifested existence.

An ultimate decay and dissolution appears to be the ineluctable end of all individual existence. For, everything here in this material world seems to pass inexorably through the sequenced procession of birth and growth, and decay and death, with a period of transient stability in between (jāyate, asti, bardhate, viparimiti, apakṣayati, naśyati). Did not Arjuna on the battle-

¹ R. L. Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses (quoted by Ian Ramsay in Prospect for Metaphysics).

Page 3

field of Kurukshetra get overwhelmed with his vision of Time the Destroyer and cry out in awe and wonder:

"O Form universal, enormous are thy burning eyes; thy mouths gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction. People are hastening into thy terrible jaws and some are seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between thy teeth of power. The nations are rushing to destruction with helpless speed into thy mouths of flame like many rivers hurrying in their course towards the ocean or like moths that cast themselves on a kindled fire. With thy burning mouths, O Form of Dread, thou art licking all the regions around."¹

Indeed, '...Death prowls baying through the woods of life'², and the spectre of the ever-approaching tread of this dire Doom is the most sombre hurdle before embodied existence. And this has naturally generated a horror of death that is verily universal among mankind. The pathos and horror do not spring so much from the physical pain that often accompanies dissolution as from the unbearable mystery of it, from the 'absence of freedom, the compulsion, the struggle, the subjection to something that appears to be Not-Self,'³ also from the emotional tragedy to the subject and to the survivors — the abrupt and irrevocable cessation of the old familiar relations between near and dear ones.

Yet, somehow, in his race consciousness, man has refused to reconcile himself to the all-too-evident fact that all embodied life has to end in death and dissolution. This race refusal, sometimes vague and subconscious, has given rise to various attempts,⁴ continually repeated in spite of the invariably dismal experience of failure, to somehow escape death and disintegration. "The picture thus presented," as E. S. Hartland has aptly remarked, "of the desperate refusal of mankind to accept what seems a cardinal condition of existence is one of the most pathetic in the history of the race."⁵

¹ Bhagavad Gītā, Chap. XI. (Adaptation from Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Cent. Ed., pp. 365-66).

² Savitri, Book IX, Canto II., p. 587.

³Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine (Centenary Edition), p. 194.

⁴Cf. the alchemist's search for the Elixir of Life, or, in Indian tradition, for the mythical plant Viśalyakaraṇī or for the ambrosia Mrtasañjīvanī deemed capable of restoring life to the departed.

⁶ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Ed. James Hastings), Vol. IV, p. 411.

Page 4

Man's mythical lore — very often the repository of his unrealised dreams and aspirations — bears ample witness to this universal incredulity of mankind as to the necessity or naturalness of Death as a sequel to life. The forms through which this stubborn denial of death has expressed itself are indeed many and varied. To glance at only a few amongst these :^l

(i)Myths and legends concerning the origin of death: The unsophisticated man has sought to assure himself through various mythical accounts that, after all, from the beginning death was not pre-decreed for him. This sombre Adversary could force his advent in the kingdom of the living simply because of some act of disobedience on the part of man to some Divine Command (e.g., to abstain from the fruit of a certain tree, in the Genesis story) or due to the enmity or slackness of one of the lower animals, or perhaps owing to the fact that the heavenly message of eternal life for man was on the way interrupted and thwarted or somehow wrongly transmitted to him.

(ii)Escape of the soul: Amongst the races of primitive culture, death is often ascribed to some inadvertent escape of the soul from the body and means are adopted in the fond hope of catching the errant soul in its wanderings abroad and bringing it back to its old habitat.

(iii)Myths about effective or quasi-effective return from the land of the dead: The Babylonian myth of Ishtar and Tammuz and the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice illustrate this type.

In the Babylonian myth, Ishtar descends into Aralu, or Hades, demands entrance to 'the land whence there is no return' and after a series of adventurous experiences rescues from the world of the dead Tammuz, her only son, who was taken away before his time.

The descent-myth of Orpheus depicts how, after the death of Eurydice, his beloved wife, Orpheus descended into Hades, moved Pluto and Persephone to pity with the sweet notes of his lyre, and sought and received their permission to bring back Eurydice to the land of the living but 'on one condition — that Orpheus should precede her and not look back till they arrived on earth.' But alas, 'just before reaching the final limit, his love overcame

¹ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Ed. James Hastings), Vol. IV, p. 411.

Page 5

him. He looked round and lost her for ever' (Virgil, Georg. iv).¹ In India we have similar accounts in the- mythical restoration of life to Satyavan through Savitri's intercession with Yama, the Lord of Death, and to Lakhindar as a result of the loving venture of Behula. The Nachiketas Upākhyān of the Kathopanishad is also a case in point.

(iv)Myths about legendary heroes' avoidance of death: In Indian tradition, Yudhishthira, the eldest among the Pandava princes, is supposed to have ascended to heaven in his material body, and heroes like Vibhishana and Ashwatthama are considered to be immortal, still existing somewhere in their earthly bodies.

(v)Assumption and ascension:² Instances are recorded of supposed bodily 'assumptions' into heaven. This assumption is claimed to have been granted to some exceptional individuals like Abraham and Isaiah so that they might be informed of some spiritual truth. 'Assumptions' of this kind are temporary only and as the vision ends, the person returns to earth.

But there are legends, too, representing heroes and saints being permanently transported to the world beyond the grave, without having to suffer the experience of death. In the Sumerian mythology, Ziusudra, the hero of the Deluge, and in Jewish literature, Enoch and Elijah stand out as having been granted this high privilege.

There is a third group of legends claiming for their heroes an assumption after death, the forsaken body too being removed from earth and caught up to heaven. A classical example is the legend of Hercules. A Christian legend of the same kind is that of the 'Assumption of Mary', according to which first the soul, and then the body, of the Virgin were assumed to heaven.

Be that as it may, these legendary accounts, although springing from the subconscious need of the race to combat the stark proposition of the inevitability of death, have remained as myths and myths alone. For, they cannot and do not carry any conviction or solace in the moments of actual personal crisis in the life of the individual. The sting of Death which lies in 'the sense of being

¹Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. IV (Article: "Descent to Hades").

²J. H. Bernard, "Assumption and Ascension" in Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 151-53.

Page 6

devoured, broken up, destroyed or forced away' is too real and painfully sharp to be abrogated or even mitigated by the implied assurance of these mythical sagas.

Thus arises for man the metaphysical inquiry, also his spiritual urge to effectuate an intrinsic escape from the hold of suffering and the poignant sense of death.

Page 7