Thanks everybody for the thoughtful and friendly contributions. I hope I can return in kind.
@Jayarava, that’s true, some do. But as you know the classification of “Vedas” is somewhat messy. I hoped this would have been clear from my post, but to clarify, by “the Vedas” I meant the earlier strata, not the Upanishads. Because of course rebirth is present in the Upanishads, nobody would deny that.
I agree, “Old Indic-speaking Indo-Europeans entering the subcontinent ca 1500 BCE did not believe in a cyclic afterlife.” My suggestion is—though this can of course never be known absolutely—that their non-rebirth beliefs may have survived in India for longer than is commonly assumed, that only after the Buddha they got essentially swept away.
@Vaddha, thanks also. It’s hard to respond to any specifics if you tell us it takes hundreds of pages to understand, so here are some more general thoughts:
Also, it is somewhat of a ‘big ask’ to ask for a clear, abstract, philosophical statement about the nature of the afterlife process in the RgVeda—these types of texts are simply not how the RgVeda operates.
But the Rig Veda often is extremely direct and plain, though, arguable even more so than the Pali suttas. For example, some prayers to the gods are things like “let us defeat our enemies”, “grant us cows and horses”, “give us great riches”, “let us live a hundred years”, and so on. Now, why would it certainly be “intentionally ambiguous”, as you said, when the context is more “mystical”, like the afterlife? To say, “grant me a good rebirth”, for example, would not be a weird or complicated wish, nor would or “let me be born in a wealthy family” or any of the endless ways such wishes could have been worded very plainly. But this never happens. (While even in the Pali Canon, although it is much more pessimistic about life and not about wanting things, we do find such wishes.)
However, there actually are very plain wishes about the afterlife in the Rig Veda, but they are always things like “may I be immortal”, “bring me to the permanent, deathless world”, “send him to the Fathers”, and so forth. Or for example RV10 says that Agni lifts one to immortality (rather than rebirth) of the Fathers, where one bears another body in heaven. None of these statements are very ambiguous at all, so I’d say there actually are clear philosophical statements about the afterlife in the Rig Veda. But none of them plainly refer to rebirth, which I personally think would be odd if rebirth was indeed a significant belief of the early Vedic society. Why would rebirth be ambiguous, while so many other things are not?
(I mean, I’m not concerned about the supposed underlying rebirth process even, I’m just asking about one clear reference to something like “another birth”. If that is already a “big ask”, I don’t know what to say… then I feel sorry for the priests who recited these texts, for if it’s indeed all so cryptic, then they surely also must have had no clue of what the composers originally had in mind. Then they were wishing for a permanent immortal heaven but it was actually just more rebirth!)
This prevalent Vedic theme of immortality (amrita), which happens after a single life, is the opposite of rebirth. That’s exactly why the Buddha used the same concept (amata, the Deathless) to refer to nibbāna, the end of rebirth. Just for these reasons alone I’m skeptical about Lopez’s assertion that the concept of immortality started shifting in relatively early Vedic times to include rebirth, which is the very antithesis of immortality. Also, in Buddhism, it’s actually the continuation of consumption of the four nutriments that leads to rebirth, and if you stop consuming the four metaphorical nutriments, rebirth and existence will end. But in Lopez’s thought, it is the opposite. If you stopped eating heavenly food, you actually got more existence in another life. That seems somewhat unintuitive with the obvious underlying concept of “food = life”.
What I think is more intuitive is that “again dying” refers to a permanent death in the heaven realms, as even Lopez and Shushan admit may be what’s meant, not rebirth. This would also explain why these texts indeed mention “again dying” but never “again born”. “The theory of rebirth does not appear in the Vedas; but the theory of re-death appears at a very early stage indeed,” is Wendy Doniger O’flaherty’s opening line in Karma and Rebirth in the Vedas and Puranas (an essay in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions). Then, quoting a certain David M. Knipe, she says the quest for immortality reflects a “desire to prevent the dissolution of an after-life for the deceased [i.e. a permanent ‘re-death’] […] The need to provide ritual food for the deceased ancestors would then be based on the desire to keep them there in some sort of heaven […] to prevent them from suffering ‘repeated death’.” I.e. from oblivion or alike.
(That may be exactly why the Buddha told us to stop consuming the metaphorical nutriments, which to Brahmins would have sounded like a crazy idea! Because unlike the Brahmins his aim actually was to stop existence altogether!)
About the later development of these ideas of re-death Doniger O’flaherty then says: “It may be that ancient Indian ideas about [re]death predate and indeed predetermine the later theory of [re]birth.” Keith likewise wrote: “There can be no doubt that [in the Vedas] the repeated death is [only] in the next world, not in this: it is applied to the Fathers […] It remained only to transfer [this idea of repeated death] to the present world and the effect of transmigration was reached. But though this step is taken in the Upanisads it is by no means universally to be found there. […] The earliest notice of the doctrine of transmigration preserved for us, apart from a few very dubious allusions in the Çatapatha Brahmana, is to be traced in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad.”
So, while many things are very unambiguous in the Vedas, there is no unambiguous mention of “again birth” or something like that prior to the Upanishad, nor is rebirth very evident in other ways. That’s just the state of the matter, otherwise so many scholars wouldn’t be claiming that rebirth isn’t found in the early Vedas, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion! This absence of rebirth continues in the Brahmanas, at least in general. “The Upanisads hold in some degree at least the doctrine of transmigration,” wrote again Keith, “[but] these views are not those of the Brahmanas, which, taken all in all, know not transmigration. […] The Brahmanas contain on the whole no acceptance of the doctrine of transmigration: the soul aims at the [permanent] world of the Fathers as before.” More recent scholars have echoed these views, so I would not say any of these things are long uncontroversial.
I also think we disagree on what counts as “unambiguous”. To see rebirth in some of these texts we must be willing to rely on metaphors and inferences, as I said before, and as you seemed to agree. But then I would also quote Shushan: “When are we to take something literally, and when are we to consider it as metaphorical; and how are we to identify symbols, and interpret and understand the symbolism?” Those are not easy questions to answer, surely. It’s definitely not impossible to put on certain tinted glasses (e.g. the glasses of the Upanishads) and read the metaphors through those lenses, as Reat warned against in my opening post. It’s a human tendency to see patterns in chaos. I tend to be more reserved about various connections some scholars you’ve mentioned are making.
That said, some references to the JB you gave seem more compelling references to rebirth, at least at first glance. I would need to study them more to be convinced, because in each passage it would seem to hinge on only one or two words for me. Either way, this already moves us into the Brahmana period, probably centuries after the earliest Vedas, by which time the Aryans would have thoroughly cross-pollinated with other cultures, including I assume the native Indians (correct me if I’m wrong). Also, even if we do have rebirth in some pre-Upanishadic passages, the idea still remains marginal there.
I may read some of those books you mentioned one day, perhaps they are more compelling. For now I remain unconvinced that rebirth was a concept of any real significance to the early Brahmins (perhaps even to many of the later Brahmins) and still think it was totally absent in at least the earliest layers of the Vedas, especially the Rig Veda.
Because Jurewicz’ interpretation of those Rig Vedic verses (since you keep referring to them) were unconvincing to me. Curious grammar aside, the very translations she argues against actually seem much more contextually appropriate. The context is cremation, so what’s going on is the person leaving this world for the Fathers, not them coming back from there (just like the smoke of the cremation fire only goes up, not down) and to speak about “bodily remains” at a cremation also seems more suitable than “offspring”. (That’s just some quick thoughts to not get into the weeds.)
Her suggestion that a certain verb can evoke multiple meanings at once seems also somewhat farfetched. If I say “I’m going home” it means I go to my house, and if I say “I’m going out” it means I am going from my house, but these different usages do not give us any good reason for the phrase ‘am going’ to ever imply both ‘to’ and ‘from’ in some other context. I don’t see why it would be any different in the case she is discussing. That’s not really how language tends to work generally, where we derive the meaning from the direct context in question, not by evoking “the images and concepts stored in memory”. In this case, one naturally goes to the Fathers at one’s cremation, not coming back from there.
The translations she disputes are also less “weighty” in meaning, so to speak, by which I mean they don’t infer a conceptually heavy idea (that of rebirth) which is absent in the earlier parts of the RV. In other words, the comparatively simpler concepts and greater consistency with the rest of the text speak in their favor as well. Regardless, if I’m wrong—and since I’m outside of my own area of expertise (which is Pali, not Sanskrit) I may well be—rebirth still would be a fringe concept in the Rig Veda itself, far outweighed by the single-afterlife ideas.
You mentioned Obeyesekere a couple times too, but in that article he himself even says that “in the Rg Veda the chief place for the dead is heaven. The soul at death, driven by a chariot or on wings, takes the route of the fathers and reaches a place of eternal rest.” That is, the Fathers is a permanent abode, not a way to rebirth, like Jurewicz suggests.
To all:
To me it seems not unreasonable to assume that rebirth was the belief of India pre Aryan migration, but that the Aryans brought in other ideas with the Vedas, as Jayarava also said. The two different belief systems then blended together, resulting in inconsistent texts like the Upanishads. I think it’s also telling that the Upanishads have conflicting rebirth beliefs, and (if true) that some passages even “clearly reject rebirth” (wrote Jayatilleke, I’m not sure which passages he refers to). It shows that there was controversy about these ideas even among the Brahmins themselves. It would be natural for such controversies to have arisen when different beliefs about the afterlife met one another. It wouldn’t very naturally happen if the Aryans of the Rig Veda held rebirth beliefs and then migrated to a place which had similar beliefs. In various suttas it’s also clear that ancient India was a melting pot of different beliefs about the afterlife. Some of the wrong views such as those of in DN1 also very much fit the Vedic ideas of a single human life resulting in one immortal afterlife, although they are worded more abstractly there than in the Vedas. E.g. “a permanent healthy percipient Self after death”, seems to mean after a single death, and references to such a Self having a body (“form”) are similar also to the aims of some Rig Vedic prayers (although they don’t call it a Self).
Now, a lot of early Vedic concepts, like specific sacrifices, the names of Gods, the priest class, the idea of amata, etc. all survived rather unscathed into the Buddha’s time, perhaps a whole millennium or more after their initial conception! So it’s not at all far-fetched to assume the earliest Brahmanical afterlife beliefs would have survived as well, at least among more traditional brahmins (who may well have made up the majority of Brhamins). And to me it very much seems this belief was not that of rebirth.
I’m saying this to again question the common assumption that rebirth was the clear majority belief of India at the Buddha’s time. We’ll never know for sure wheter it wa or wasn’t, but I don’t think that we should just assume things without question, as is often done.
What does it matter? Pragmatically not much, perhaps, but how you look at the society of the time does influence the way you read the suttas, and how you interpret the Vedas influences the way you look at the Buddha’s responses to them. I shared some ideas on the four nutriments already. As another example, perhaps the Buddha talked about rebirth a lot not because everybody already believed it, but to actually convince people of it. After all, there is little reason to teach things everybody already agrees with.
For those reasons, like Venerable Sujato, I’m also happy this discussion is here. But Imma leave it for now! Because it doesn’t seem fair to argue further without having read some of the referred sources, and I don’t have access to them (nor the willingness right now, to be honest). I hope others will also consider reading some of the works I have mentioned—while keeping in mind that it is logically impossible to prove the absolute absence of things, e.g. the absence of rebirth in certain texts, and that there also isn’t too much to say about things being absent. Also, I encourage everybody to read at least a translation of the Rig Veda for themselves, and make a judgement based on that. When I did so myself, I didn’t see rebirth anywhere, like many more learned scholars.
Thanks everybody for the contributions. Hopefully the discussion continues, and hopefully somebody else will further (and more skillfully) argue for the views I supported, because I think they have some merit.
Perhaps it’s not what you mean by a “primer”, but very comprehensive (and open access) is Keith’s The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads. (But as for the discussion we’re having here, keep in mind that he presents only one side.)
For the Upanishads Olivelle wrote a great general introduction in his translations to the Early Upanishads. His translations are very readable as well, and definitely read the Bhrdaranyaka and Chandogya. (Again, for this discussion about rebirth in the early Vedas please note Olivelle also has voiced similar thoughts as Keith.)
Be forewarned that the Vedas and Upanishads, being the creation of various clans and religious leaders rather than a single individual, as is basically the case of the early Buddhist suttas, are much, much less uniform than the suttas. Don’t expect one single coherent doctrine, which is also a reason a short primer is unlikely to do these texts much justice.