Certain new doctrines emerge: The late Bra ̄hman.a opinion on the fate of
humans after death (punarmr.tyu), and most importantly, karmawhich is now
joined to the older concept of automatic rebirth (Kane 1962, Horsch 1971,
O’Flaherty 1981, Tull 1989, Göhler 1990). Most studies, however, fail to inves-
tigate these concepts in their proper setting, that is by asking: what happens, in
the view of Vedic people, at conception, at birth and at death to a human being
(Witzel 1984a, 1998, Ikari 1989)?
The older Vedic (and probably Indo-European) idea involved an automatic,
continuous cycle of human beings: after death, a stay in the blissful world of the
ancestors, limited only by the “amount” of one’s ritual actions (is.t.a ̄pu ̄rta,sukr.ta),
and a subsequent automatic rebirth (MS 1.8.6), preferably within one’s own
clan and usually after the third of fourth generation. Nobody wanted to escape
from this cycle of eternal return, except for the wealthy sponsors of S ́rauta ritual
who hoped to attain, eternally, the Heaven of the gods. The opposite, getting out
of the cycle by becoming a renouncer (sannya ̄sin), developed only during the Up.
period. The only other “escapees” are precisely those who have committed some
serious actions that undermine the closed Vedic system of exchanges: murder-
ers of embryos, of the brahmins’ cow, etc.: that is, destroyers of the all-
important “line of progeny” (praja ̄tantuTU 1.11, 11, Witzel 2000) and of poetic
inspiration (dhı ̄,dhena ̄), the “cow” (dhenu) of the Brahmins (Witzel 1991); all
these drop forever into “deepest darkness,” into the lap of Nirr.ti “destruction.”
The earlier system of automatic recycling was now replaced by one condi-
tioned by the moralvalue of the actions undertaken during one’s lifetime. The
new concept has its predecessors, on the one hand, in the fear of a second death
(punarmr.tyu) occurring after a limited stay in the ancestor’s world, and on the
other, by the fear of a retribution in the other world, as exemplified by the vision
of Bhr.gu (S ́B 11.6.1, JB 1.42): humans are cut up by trees felled by them and
they are devoured by animals slaughtered in this world.
The old concept of cause and effect thus was linked with some new anxieties.
One was no longer sure of the beneficial effects of ritual that allowed to neu-
tralize all violent, “evil” actions carried out in ritual, to “beat away the second
death,” and to attain the desired permanent stay in heaven (Schmidt 1997).
Now, allhuman actions (karma), not just the ritual ones, have their automatic
consequence, as expressed by the new and secret karmaidea. The juncture of the
old concept of automatic rebirth with that of the younger one of automatic
karmaset the stage (Schmidt 1968b) for the development of a consistent theory
of retribution in one’s next life according to the actions (karma) undertaken in
this one. This is the basis of nearly all of later Indian philosophy and should be
studied as such.
Once, ChU 5.3.7 clearly says that the karmaconcept was known only to the
Ks.atriyas, and in BA ̄U 3.2.6 Ya ̄jñavalkya takes his fellow brahmin A ̄rtabha ̄ga
apart to talk with him privately about karma. Apparently, the idea was not very
“popular” at first. It originated with some brahmins in Ya ̄jñavalkya’s time in
northern Bihar (Witzel 1989a), and spread at an uneven pace: even in the last
part of ChU, at 8.15, it was still felt necessary to speak about killing in ritual as
84 michael witzel