, again,
in regard to the Fathers themselves (the Manes), while not differing
materially from the older view, offers novelties which show how little
the absorption-theory had taken hold of the religious consciousness.
The very fact that the son is still considered to be as necessary as
ever (that he may offer food to his ancestors) shows that the
believer, whatever his professed faith, expects to depend for bliss
hereafter upon his _post mortem_ meals, as much as did his fathers
upon theirs. In the matter of the burial of the dead, one finds, what
is antique, that although according to the formal law only infants are
buried, and adults are burned, yet was burial known, as in the Vedic
age. And the still older exposure of the body, after the Iranian
fashion, is not only hinted at as occurring here and there even before
the epic, but in the epic these forms are all recognized as equally
approved: "When a man dies he is burned or buried or exposed"
(_nik[r.][s.]yate_)[31] it is said in i. 90. 17; and the narrator goes
on to explain that the "hell on earth," of which the auditor "has
never heard" (vs. 6) is re-birth in low bodies, speaking of it as a
new doctrine. "As if in a dream remaining conscious the spirit enters
another form"; the bad becoming insects and worms; the good going to
heaven by means of the "seven gates," viz., penance, liberality,
quietism, self-control, modesty, rectitude, and mercy. This is a union
of two views, and it is evidently the popular view, that, namely, the
good go to heaven while the bad go to new existence in a low form, as
opposed to the more logical conception that both alike enter new
forms, one good, the other bad. Then the established stadia, the
pupil, the old teaching (_upanishad_) of the householders, and the
wood-dwellers are described, with the remark that there is no
uniformity of opinion in regard to them; but the ancient view crops
out again in the statement that one who dies as a forest-hermit
"establishes in bliss" ten ancestors and ten descendants. In this part
of the epic the Punj[=a]b is still near the theatre of events, the
'centre region' being between the Ganges and Jumna (I. 87. 5);
although the later additions to the poems show acquaintance with all
countries, known and unknown, and with peoples from all the world.
Significant in xii. 61. 1, 2 is the name of the third order
_bh[=a]ikshyacaryam_ 'beggarhood' (before the forest-hermit and after
the householder).

It w