Bridges Across Humanity: Free Chapter Read: Akhil Gupta
Afterlife
[T]he fact that early humans did decorate corpses, lay out the bodies
in particular postures or bury people with flowers, aligned horns or
tools would support the notion that some ritualization of death is a
very ancient human activity.
—Pascal Boyer
The question of what happens after death is one of the most prominent expressions of human curiosity. Several proposed answers to this question have been offered to make meaning of the universal phenomenon of death. It is timeless and perplexing, and we will never cease to think about this question and we will likely never receive a clear answer. Many philosophers argue that there can be no religion without some provisional answer to this existential question about death and afterlife, especially since other disciplines of
knowledge (like science) cannot address it either. Essentially, religions are almost forced to address this big question to reduce the uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding questions about why we must die. Not surprisingly, all religions have some sort of postulation about
what happens after death, and that has huge implications for the complex beliefs and principles of conduct that comprise each religion. After all, assuming we do continue to exist in some form after death, we all want to achieve the most favourable circumstances in the afterlife. In some respect life after death (for those who believe in it, which included my father) is more important than life on earth, as it is free from the limitations of our physical reality.
The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, believe that we have one life on earth, after which there is an eternal afterlife. According to these faiths, those who are righteous in life will be resurrected after death. As the Hebrew Bible explains, ‘Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will shine as the brightness of the expanse. Those who turn many to righteousness will shine as the stars forever and ever.’2
Generally speaking, in all three traditions, it is believed that the soul continues after death. Additionally, there is a foretold date, the day of resurrection or judgement. On this day, the souls of the dead will be judged according to their deeds in life and receive the appropriate rewards or punishments. The concept of a ‘day of judgement’, when people’s fates will be determined according to how they lived, carries over across all three traditions. In the Christian Bible: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies.’3 Meanwhile, the wicked ‘will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.’4 And the Qur’an teaches that, ‘Every soul shall have a taste of death: and only on the Day of Judgment shall you be paid your full recompense. Only he who is saved far from the fire and admitted to the garden will have attained the object (of life): for the life of this world is but goods and chattels of deception.’5 Interpretations vary across these traditions and even across the various intra-religious sects: some claim that the physical bodies of the righteous dead will be resurrected, while others claim that only the souls survive death, some claim that good and bad souls will go to heaven and hell respectively, while others claim there is only heaven and no hell to speak of. In any case, the general belief is that the righteous will meet a better eternal fate than the sinful, which means that we should do everything we can now to live good lives here on earth. For instance, by
being kind and charitable to others.
Comparing this to the religions of India, like Hinduism and Buddhism, the specific concepts and narratives differ quite a bit, but the overall message and implications are actually quite similar in many ways. Hindus, for instance, speak of a soul that never dies, which is reminiscent of the enduring quality of the soul in the Abrahamic traditions. The
Buddha has taught similarly. When the Aggregates arise, decay and die, O bhikkhu, every
moment you are born, decay, and die. This, even now during this lifetime, every moment we are born and die, but we continue. If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can’t we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or a Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body? Again, this is broad enough that it remains fairly well in agreement
with the Abrahamic religions: the assertion here is simply that the ‘self ’ we identify with may, in some form, carry on beyond the death of the physical body. Explanations, however, diverge a bit from the Abrahamic traditions. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs all believe
in reincarnation, i.e., the idea that we live many lives on earth, and therefore, experience many deaths and rebirths in a process known as samsara. The long-term goal is to escape samsara so that our souls no longer return to earth, while the short-term goal is simply to
achieve more meritorious births while we remain in samsara. This is accomplished by doing good deeds while on earth (a feature in common with the Abrahamic traditions). Our sum of good and bad deeds, stretched out across our numerous incarnations on earth,
determines our karma, which in turn determines the nature of our next reincarnation. This can range from being a lowly insect to a human being, and in many cases, there are even states of reincarnations that go beyond these two poles like ghostly states or demigods and Gods.
My father had a difficult life, but he accepted all his hardships, believing they were the result of his past life, and so long as he endured those consequences gracefully in this life, his next life would be beautiful. When I asked him, ‘if there is a God, then why do billions suffer?’, this
concept of karma was always his answer. He was a very well read and erudite man who had deep roots in his faith.A person’s state of mind at the time of death is thought to be pivotal
in many schools of Hindu and Buddhist thought. In the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, the Hindu God, Krishna, states, ‘Those who remember me at the time of death will come to me. Do not doubt this. Whatever occupies the mind at the time of death determines the destination of the dying.’
And, in Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead details the process whereby the living help to guide a dying person by reciting certain phrases that serve as directions for the conscious soul as it travels towards its next state of existence. This concept of a journeying soul that must be guided is also a common one across religions, going back to very ancient civilizations. According to scholar Ruth Chang, ‘It was common in Han tombs to paint images of either the occupants travelling to paradise or to another world in the after-life, and the travel was often done on a mythical animal. Sometimes there is also a figure that guides
one to the next life.’ Further back, ancient Egyptians also believed in Gods depicted as mythical animals, some of whom had important roles in the afterlife. Anubis, a God with the head of a jackal or wolf, would judge dead souls by weighing their hearts to determine whether they had lived righteously or not. If they had, they would be guided to the afterlife, but if not, their hearts would be eaten by Ammit, the God with a crocodile head, thus denying them an afterlife. And so, the element of judgement in the afterlife existed even before the Abrahamic traditions, marking an important commonality that spans across religions, both ancient and modern.
The ancient Greeks, who had a great deal of interaction and cultural exchange with both ancient Egyptians and ancient Hindu civilizations, share traits with these conceptions of the afterlife. Like the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks believed in a mythical guide figure: Charon, the ferryman, who would row the souls of the dead across the mythical river Styx,to lead them to their afterlife in the underworld. Hindus also believe that souls are guided through communion with a river, although in this case it is a river on earth, rather than in the mythical underworld. Hindus believe that cremating dead bodies by the river Ganges can help to free souls from samsara, and in any case, it is a symbolic action that
nicely corresponds with Hindu doctrines of the soul (atman) as arising out of and merging back into a state of oneness (brahman). In all of these narratives, the general meaning being expressed is that death is not the final state of a person’s being. It is not the end of a soul’s journey, but rather the beginning of a new phase of the journey. As one metaphorical
expression from the Baha’i faith puts it, ‘We may compare the body to a vehicle which has been used for the journey through earthly life and no longer needed once the destination has been reached.’This brings us to one of the most universal dimensions of the afterlife,
which is the disposal of dead bodies. Anthropologist Pascal Boyer describes the ubiquity of burial rituals as follows: ‘From embalming to cremation, all sorts of techniques are used to do something with the corpse. But the point is, something must be done. This is a constant
and has been so for a long time.’10 Countless civilizations, cultures and religions have come and gone throughout human history, but all have taken the matter of how to dispose of dead bodies seriously. After all, the physical remains of a dead person are the only aspect of the afterlife that we, as the living, have direct evidence of. There are practical reasons for disposing of a dead body that are applicable at the physical level—removing the stench of decay and the spread of disease—but we also care for the dead body to provide ourselves with the solace that comes from caring for a loved person one last time. Hindus actually cremate their dead, as they believe that the body is like a dress that you strip away at death, bringing along your eternal soul into a new life clothed in a new body. As the Bhagavad Gita puts it, ‘As a person sheds worn-out garments and wears new ones, likewise, at the time of death, the soul casts off its worn-out body and enters a new one.’Ultimately, we have no final answers about what happens to a person’s soul or consciousness after death.
This has been poetically expressed by the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu: ‘We can point to the wood that has burned, but when the fire has passed on, we cannot know where it has gone.’ What we do know is that we can choose how to live our lives, and how to treat others in our lives, while we are still around. In this way, thinking about death—even without any
definitive answers—is an important part of working towards living a fuller life. The religious focus on death and the afterlife that we see across traditions is not just making predictions about what happens when we die; it has more to do with reminding us to live more consciously and to express our love for others as much as possible.
Read about the common thread of such concept in all major comparitive religions in Akhil Gupta’s #BridgesAcrossHumanity