1. Rebirth: Conundrums and Insightful Solutions

§1.1 This chapter recounts hitherto unasked, nonplussing questions posed by His Holiness on plausible problems in the rebirth of jīvas as humans, plants, and worms, and His detailed, definitive, scripture-based answers to them. A few of the questions: Was the jīva that animates some human embryo latent earlier in the father’s sperm or in the mother’s ovum or did it come from elsewhere? In the first option, since any viable sperm could have been the one that fertilized the ovum and the number of sperms that a man sheds into his wife is very large, must very many jīvas have been latent in the man? In the second alternative, is it that a female hosts, in her lifetime, many a latent jīva, for she is born with lakhs of egg-cells, a few thousands survive till she attains puberty, and any one of those that remain could have been fertilized? If it is supposed that the jīva of the embryo was not latent in the father or the mother but entered from elsewhere, then, is it that numerous jīvas are ever at hand to promptly animate every human embryo arising naturally, or even in vitro, at any place and at any time? His Holiness’s account of the details that He obtained about a flatworm (planarian) that has a remarkable ability to regenerate forms Section 1.2; His questions about jīvas and rebirth as planarians constitute Section 1.3; His minutiae and rebirth-related questions about the plant kingdom are given in Section 1.4 and those about humans in Section 1.5. His exhaustive answers, with many quotes from the Vedas, Upaniṣads, Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaṇa, Purāṇas, Brahma-sūtras, and Śaṅkara-bhagavatpāda’s bhāṣyas, are in Section 1.6, which includes His details on karma.

§1.2 On 7th June 1976, when I finished prostrating before His Holiness at Sringeri during His morning āhnika, He drew my attention to a lizard that was active on a wall.

His Holiness: Its tail is missing; I first noticed this last week. When in danger of being caught by a predator, a lizard may detach its tail and flee. I have seen a lizard do so once; the detached tail wiggled for minutes. That lizard grew a new tail in a couple of months; this one also will do so. A crab can regenerate a lost leg or claw. A lizard or a crab’s capability to regenerate is, however, no match at all to that of a type of worm, a flatworm¹; even a piece of it can grow into a complete worm, with a head and tail. It was three years ago (1973) that I first heard of this worm and its astonishing capability to regenerate. Hari, the one who informed me, had come to India from America to see his parents. His father and mother had come several times for my darśana when I was at Calcutta (in 1967, from 25th March to 21st April); as he was going to Bangalore for some work, they had asked him to make a trip to Sringeri from there. He told me that while academically and by profession, he was an engineer, worms greatly interested him; he read a lot about them and, with equipment purchased by him, studied some of them at his home abroad. I asked Hari which worm he found most intriguing; he mentioned this flatworm (planarian) and joyously spoke about it.

His Holiness (continuing): He said that these flatworms have a head with a brain, eyes, and a tail; they take in food and evacuate through the same opening. There are several species of such flatworms; depending on the species, they dwell in fresh water, the sea or on land and are less than half an inch to several inches long. He said that a species native to the United States dwelt in fresh water, was about half an inch in length, had superb regenerative capabilities, and had been studied by researchers; it was on this species of flatworms that he had privately conducted a few experiments to see for himself their regeneration and responses.¹ If this worm is transversely cut² into two, in weeks, the part with the head but no tail grows a full tail, while the part with the tail but no head grows a full head; each of the cut portions becomes a complete worm, not just in appearance but internally too. Even if, by transverse cuts, the worm is divided into multiple segments, each segment, inclusive of the ones that lack both the head and the tail, become complete worms. He told me that he had once cut a worm into seven and had seen seven full, healthy, and active worms form in weeks. If the worm is cut lengthwise into two, even then each half becomes a complete worm, with a brain and two eyes.

Highlighting the regenerative capabilities of flatworms, he pointed out that a scientist (Thomas Morgan), who studied them in depth at the turn of the century, found that even a 279th part of the worm regenerated.¹ That even such a small part of a flatworm could regenerate was striking. He said that the eyes of this flatworm are rudimentary; they are unfit to perceive forms and are essentially light-sensitive spots. The eyes are able to detect the presence of light and distinguish bright and dim light. The worm, which dwells in dark areas, reacts negatively to light; when its eyes are exposed to light, whether white or of some specific colour, such as red, it turns away; brighter light triggers a greater avoidance reaction. After this, he mentioned that, unlike humans, it is able to detect and react to light to some extent even without its eyes; decades earlier itself, a scientist had, on the basis of experiments, reported that a flatworm’s severed portion that lacks eyes but is able to move can react to light, though less accurately than a full worm.²

He proceeded to say that, unlike humans, the flatworm is sensitive to even weak electrical and magnetic fields¹. By way of evidence, he said that in an experiment that had been reported two years earlier (that is, in 1971)², the worm’s deviation from its path when exposed to a fixed light was found to vary with the orientation and strength of the magnetic field to which it was subjected.

An intriguing piece of information that he then gave me was that a flatworm may develop two heads, each with a brain and two eyes; the scientist (Thomas Morgan) who determined that even a 279ᵗʰ part of the worm can regenerate also reported that sometimes a thin long piece cut from the side of a worm bent and developed two heads, each with two eyes and a brain; because each head, directed by its own brain, sought to move straight ahead, the final movement of such a worm-segment with two heads was rather uneven.³ He added that a worm may develop two independent heads with a common tail if a lengthwise cut is made that passes between its two eyes and ends beyond its head; he had seen this happen twice. Another intriguing information that he gave me was that as per some experimental reports, when a flatworm is trained and then cut into two, the part with the head and the part with the tail exhibit, after regeneration into worms, some retention of the learning of the original worm. Hari added that among the accounts that he had read about transfer of learning, the earliest was an article of 1959¹ and the latest was a book of 1970² in which the controversies on this topic had been addressed. In response to my question, he clarified that to the best of his knowledge, the worm does not exhibit any sign of pain on being cut, whether partially or fully. He also pointed out that the only way in which some species of flatworms reproduce in nature is by dividing themselves into two, with one segment containing the head and the other the tail. The flatworms of other species have both ovaries³ and testes; while they can fertilize their eggs with their own sperm, such worms usually lay eggs fertilized by other worms; even such flatworms that produce new worms through eggs may, under some conditions, reproduce by dividing themselves. I asked him, “When a flatworm is cut into three, there must be internal constituents that ensure that the segment with the head develops a tail at the other end, the part with the tail grows a head at the opposite end and the portion with neither a head nor a tail forms a head on the side in which the worm’s head was and a tail where the worm’s tail was. Is my assumption correct, at least to some extent?” Hari said that it was. This led me to pose my main question, “You had spoken of a thin long piece cut from the side of a flatworm curving and forming a head on both ends. This indicates that the internal process leading to the formation of a head at the upper end of the strip and a tail at the lower end was, somehow, muddled. While this happened without the experimenter’s intervention, can chemical, magnetic, electrical or some such means be deliberately employed¹ to force a head with a brain or a tail to form on any chosen side of a headless and tailless piece or to cause a worm with cuts to develop multiple heads?” Hari said that while he had not read of this having been reliably accomplished till then, he was confident that with improved understanding of the flatworm and the factors impacting its regeneration, such control over a flatworm’s development would be reported.

§1.3 His Holiness indicated to me to wait and silently proceeded to complete His āhnika. He then continued.

His Holiness (continuing): Later, with this information about flatworms as the basis, I considered, on my own and as a matter of interest, some transmigration-related

8 questions and answers to them in line with the scriptures. As per our scriptures, worms have jīvas and a human may, on account of adharma, be reborn as a worm. For instance, in the Anugītā, while listing to Arjuna what those who sin persistently may be reborn as, Lord Kr̥ṣṇa includes, “kryādā dandaśūkāś ca kr̥mi-kīṭa-vihaṅgamāḥ – creatures that feed on carrion, snakes, worms, insects and birds.”¹ That a worm has prāṇa and, thus, a jīva is discernible from the statement, “ā śvabhya ā kr̥mibhya ā kīṭa-pataṅgebhyaḥ – up to (that of) dogs, up to (that of) worms, up to (that of) insects and moths,”² in the Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad about prāṇa’s food. In view of the scriptural statements, which are the means of valid knowledge³ in such matters, we must accept that the flatworm with amazing regenerative abilities too has a jīva. If the worm is cut into, say, five parts, five full worms arise that are replicas of the original worm. Being worms, these must, in the light of the scripture, be seen to be sa-jīva (with a jīva). If we take it that any of these regenerated worms does not have a jīva, that supposition would be discordant with our scripture. It cannot be justifiably contended that the scripture has referred to natural worms only, these are unnatural as their formation is initiated by splitting, and, therefore, the presumption that none of these has a jīva would not be incompatible with the scripture. This is because, as revealed to me by Hari, even in nature, there are such flatworms whose mode of multiplication is by splitting. Further, even the flatworms that commonly reproduce by laying fertilized eggs may, under some conditions, reproduce in nature through self-division. Moreover, the worms that form from a cut-out part of a worm are not only indistinguishable externally and internally from other worms, but also behave and reproduce like the latter. Hence, these too should, as said in the scripture, possess jīvas. Hari said that the regenerated worms – even those that develop from a segment without a head or tail – can exhibit some retention of what the initial worm learnt.¹ Since the norm is that the one who experiences something is the one who recalls it, does the regenerated worm’s retention imply that the jīva of a regenerated worm is, in essence, only the jīva of the initial worm? Is it that the jīva that animated the initial worm animates all the segments into which that worm is divided and, in this way, the full worms that form from the segments? There are, however, problems with conceding this. Suppose the initial worm is divided into ten parts and all the ten parts become full worms in a few weeks. At this stage, the initial jīva would have to be animator of ten different worms. Suppose that each of those ten worms is divided into ten parts and that, in a few weeks, each of those parts becomes a full worm. At this second stage, the initial jīva must be said to animate 100 worms. Proceeding in this fashion, in a matter of months, the initial jīva would have to be the animator of thousands and thousands of worms. This is farfetched. Moreover, while the Yoga-śāstra makes known that a yogin with powers can generate bodies and endow each of them with a mind that functions in accordance with his mind¹, it never gives even a mild hint that ordinary worms can do so. There is, thus, no scriptural support for the assumption that the jīva of the initial worm is the animator of all the worms that develop from the initial worm’s segments. If, on the other hand, the worms that arise from the parts of a worm are presumed to have their own jīvas, which are distinct from the jīva of the initial worm, then it must be accounted how what was experienced by just the initial jīva is remembered by the distinct jīvas of the regenerated segments. Also, the question arises whether all these jīvas, which are distinct from the initial worm’s jīva and from one another, were present in the initial worm prior to its being segmented? If yes, then, since the initial worm may be cut into many parts that would regenerate and each of these must receive a jīva that was latent in the initial worm, the initial worm must have at least as many latent jīvas as the parts into which the worm will be cut into later. Suppose that the initial worm has ten latent jīvas apart from its own jīva and it is cut into ten parts. Then, every part would become endowed with one of the ten jīvas but would not have spare, latent jīvas within it. What would happen if, after one such segment becomes a full worm, that worm is sliced into ten parts and these, in turn, regenerate into ten worms? How do these ten parts and, hence, the worms that they transform into become animated, for the worm that gave rise to them has just its own jīva and not a single latent jīva in it to pass on to any part?

The scriptural statements about worms having jīvas would, of course, be contradicted if it is supposed that these ten parts and the worms they become lack jīvas. For these parts to have jīvas, it will have to be assumed that the original worm had at least 110 latent jīvas and that it passed on 11 of these jīvas to each of its ten parts; each of the ten parts was animated by one of the 11 jīvas received by it and the remaining ten jīvas were latent in it; subsequently, when each of these ten parts became worms and those worms were cut into ten parts each, each worm passed on one of its ten latent jīvas to each of its own ten parts. The assumption of 110 latent jīvas in the original worm will suffice only up to the second level of segmentation into ten parts. If even a few more such generations of regenerated worms are considered, to cater to them having jīvas, it will have to be supposed that the original worm had thousands of latent jīvas to start with. All this is the consequence of supposing that the jīva that animates a cut-out part is different from the jīva of the worm that is segmented and also that this jīva of the cut-out part was present and latent in the parent-worm prior to the parent-worm’s division.

Suppose, as done till now, that the jīvas of the parts into which a flatworm is cut are distinct from the jīva of the initial worm and from one another, but that these were not present and latent in the initial worm prior to its segmentation. Then, it need not be assumed that the initial worm must have thousands of latent jīvas in it to cater to even a few generations of regenerated worms originating from it. However, it will have to be supposed that thousands and thousands of jīvas are at hand so that no sooner is any segmentation of a worm carried out, or occurs naturally, anywhere and at any time, each and every one of the parts that arises is straightaway animated by one of these.

His Holiness (continuing): Hari said that a researcher (Thomas Morgan) had found that a long thin segment cut out from the side of a worm curved and developed heads with brains on both ends; also, the curved two-headed, two-brained worm-segment moved unevenly because of attempting to move straight forward in the direction of each of the heads. Does what appears to be incongruent, dual control over the movement imply that the worm-segment with two heads was animated by two jīvas? If yes, is it that the number of animating jīvas is associated with the number of heads or, rather, the number of brains? Hari mentioned that a cut made in the head of a worm that passed between its eyes and extended beyond its head but was not so long as to sever the worm into two could result in two full heads developing in that worm itself; he had seen two worms, each with two heads and a single tail. Before the cut, such a worm was animated by a jīva. Is it the case that, on the analogy of the curved two-headed worm, after developing two heads with brains, this is animated by not one but two jīvas? If so, is one of them the earlier jīva and the other a jīva that was already present but latent, or one that entered after the cut? On the other hand, is it that both in the earlier case and in this one, only one jīva is the animator and the uneven movement reported in the earlier case is not due to incongruent, dual control? I thought that with improved knowledge of and control over the flatworm’s regeneration in the future, researchers may, through chemical, magnetic, or some other interventions, engender the formation of worms with three or more heads, fully functional and developed worms with a head on two ends but no tail, and such else. Perhaps, they may come across cases of worms with two or more heads giving rise, on being cut, to worms with two or more heads. Continuing with my speculation, I thought that the study of worms with more than one head may, in the future, throw light on whether multiple heads with full brains demonstrably result in disharmony in the worm’s behaviour and also on whether the disharmony between the brains would become replaced by their co-operative co-existence. If due to, say, chemical intervention, a worm with one complete head develops two additional heads or, a cut-out segment becomes a worm with three heads and it is distinctly observed that the three-headed worm is trying to move, at one time, in the directions of the three heads, should it be supposed that it is animated by three jīvas? If it subsequently moves in one head’s direction, should it be conjectured that the three jīvas have started to co-operate, with one of them dominant at that time? Or is it that the assumption of multiple jīvas in such a worm is uncalled for?

{His Holiness speculated in His last question to Hari that in the future, scientists might be in a position to trigger, by chemical, electrical, or other means, the formation of multiple heads in a planarian. Hari’s response that he was confident about this happening possibly motivated His Holiness to build on His conjecture and reflect, as described above, on the jīva-related implications of the induced formation of flatworms that have two or more heads with a brain in each and whose movements may be disharmonious. Induced formation of heads has since been reported and instances of incongruous behaviour recorded.

Researchers such as Alejandro Śanchez Alvarado and Peter Reddien have reported that when they inhibited the synthesis of beta-catenin, a multifunctional protein, in a planarian and amputated its tail, a head developed in its rear instead of a tail. Also, heads formed in the places where partial cuts were made in the body of a planarian with inhibited beta-catenin.¹ Inhibition of beta-catenin has led to the formation of planarians with two, three and even dozens of heads.

Identifying membrane voltage’s role in head-formation in a planarian, Michael Levin and his group reported² that when the head and tail of a planarian are cut off and the fragment is treated with the drug ivermectin to ensure that the voltage on the inside of the cell membrane is positive, then heads invariably form on both the ends.

In a study on the effect of gravity on the regeneration of planarians, the heads and tails of some planarians were amputated; the fragments were sent to the International Space Station, kept in the weightless condition there for five weeks, and brought back. One headless and tailless fragment spontaneously regenerated a full head on both the ends. When, subsequently, this worm’s two heads were amputated, its headless and tailless fragment grew into a worm with heads on both ends. The two heads of the latter worm were removed; what developed from the fragment without a head and a tail was, again, a worm with heads on both ends.¹

There are video recordings of planarians with more than one head trying to move in different directions at once; a planarian with eight heads from Reddien’s laboratory can, for example, be seen trying to move simultaneously in the different directions of its heads²; as a result of this, no useful movement is achieved in any direction.

There are also video recordings of planarians with more than one head moving in a direction due, perhaps, to a brain dominating here or to the brains co-operating. For instance, a planarian in Śanchez Alvarado’s laboratory with heads on both its ends can be seen advancing in the direction of one of its two heads, with the other head, which has a separate brain, yielding to what, for it, is an anomalous reverse motion.¹} His Holiness (continuing): Hari said that there is some experimental evidence that a flatworm from which the portion containing the eyes has been removed is also able to move to avoid light, though less accurately than a complete worm. Does this imply that a flatworm has indriyas (organs) that are absent in humans? As per the Bhagavad-gītā, while in a body, a jīva presides over the mind and the five sense-organs of hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell and, thereby, experiences objects; when the jīva departs from a body, it takes the mind and the five organs with it and proceeds to take up a different body.² In the Brahma-sūtras³, a question as to the total number of organs that are allied with a jīva is taken up; the conclusion spelt out by Bhagavatpāda in His bhāṣya is that the net number is 11, comprising the mind and the five sense-organs of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell and the five organs of activity (such as of speech).

If the eyeless flatworm is able to react to light because of some means of sensing distinct from the five sense-organs of hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell, would this not be incompatible with the position of the śāstra that a human may be reborn as a worm, that while in a body, such as that of a man, a jīva experiences objects, inclusive of light, by means of these five sense-organs, that it transmigrates with these five and that the total number of organs with a jīva is 11, which number would be exceeded were there to be a means of sensing apart from these five and the mind? Hari spoke of a study in which flatworms exhibited sensitivity to weak magnetic fields. Like the eyeless flatworms’ reaction to light, is this reconcilable with the stated position of the śāstras and, if so, how?

His Holiness (continuing): All these were the questions that I considered just out of interest a day after hearing the interesting information that Hari gave me about this flatworm with an extraordinary regenerative ability. I then readily answered them to myself in the light of the śāstra. I shall tell you about this on some other day.

§1.4 On the evening of 7th June 1976, before and partially during His walk in the fields and for a while thereafter, He spoke to me about plants and questions related to jīvas in them, as He had done in the case of planarians.

His Holiness: That the members of the plant kingdom are animated by jīvas is the clear position of our śāstras.

For instance, it is said in the Chāndogya-upaniṣad¹ with reference to the Banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis), “sa eṣa jīvenātmanānuprabhūtaḥ – This one is permeated by the jīvātman.” The Kaṭha-upaniṣad² refers in general to rebirth in the plant kingdom in the passage, “sthāṇum anye ’nusaṁyanti – Others enter that which is devoid of locomotion (such as a tree).” The Yajñavalkya-smr̥ti³, overtly speaks of rebirth as a grass, as a shrub, and as a creeper (tr̥ṇa-gulma-latātvaṁ). His Holiness (continuing): There are banyan trees in

India that have spread over an acre and are over a 100 years old. For instance, the ‘Dodda Alada Mara (Big Banyan Tree)’ near Bangalore covers an area of about three acres and is said to be about 400 years old; the ‘Thimmamma Marrimanu’⁴ in Anantpur District of the state of Andhra Pradesh covers around five acres and is believed to be more than 500 years old. Year after year, a banyan tree, which, as I just illustrated, can be very large in size and live for long, produces numerous fruit, with each fruit containing many seeds. The ripe, red-coloured fruit of this big tree is only about half an inch in size and the tiny seeds are so light that even blowing lightly makes them fly away from one’s open palm. Each of the many thousands of embryo-bearing, viable seeds¹ that a tree produces, and that too periodically, can, in principle, give rise to a banyan tree. Apart from forming from a seed, a banyan tree can develop from a cut out part of the tree. I have read and heard that in the third century BC, Aśoka’s daughter Saṅghamitrā took with her to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) a branch of the Bodhi Tree (the banyan tree under which Gautama Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment), that it was planted there and that it developed into a big banyan tree, which is seen to be alive even after the passage of over 2000 years.² Even a small piece of a branch can develop into a banyan tree. During my first tour (from March 1956 to July 1962), I was able to add much to my knowledge of banyan trees from a horticulturist. He loved planting various trees and requested me to plant a cutting from a banyan tree. I told him that while I was ready to do so, I would not be in a position to tend to it as I was to proceed from there in a couple of days. He assured me that if I placed a cutting in a pot, he would personally take care of it and, if it grew well, would later plant it in a suitable place. I agreed. He said he would get me a cutting but I told him that I would fetch one myself and that all he needed to do was to provide me a cutter and a pot. With him accompanying me, I went to the banyan tree nearby. Unaware that I was proficient at climbing trees, he exclaimed in surprise when I swiftly climbed it. I cut from a branch a piece that I felt would serve my purpose well. Having readied the cutting, I put soil in his pot and duly placed the cutting in it. The piece that I planted was neither hard wood nor a fully green, fresh growth; it had sap and nodes in it and was about nine inches long and about half an inch thick. I catered to it on that day and the next and then handed it over to his care. I later received information from him, first that the cutting had started showing signs of development and, thereafter, that he had planted the sapling in the ground elsewhere and that it was growing well. Hence, it was with some first-hand knowledge that I asserted earlier that a banyan tree can develop even from a small portion of its branch. Pomegranates and sugarcane, have, like the banyan, been mentioned in our sacred texts; for instance, pomegranates are referred to in the Mahābhārata¹ and sugarcane in the Taittirīya-saṁhitā². Each pomegranate fruit has hundreds of seeds, each of which can, in principle, give rise to a tree. A cutting from a pomegranate tree can also form a fruit-bearing tree; unlike a seed, a cutting yields a tree whose fruits are dependably just like those of the parent tree. As pomegranate trees are sought for their fruit, they are, and have been for long, propagated from cuttings; the Br̥hat-saṁhitā, which was written well over a thousand years ago, speaks of pomegranate-propagation from cuttings¹ and a commentator² on the work even quotes a verse of Sage Kāśyapa in this regard. It is by taking out from a cane a piece that contains one of its nodes and planting it horizontally that a sugarcane plant is grown; the sugarcane that develops is akin to its parent. As for growing sugarcane from its minute seed, while this is possible, it is challenging; I have not seen any farmer who cultivates sugarcane in his field by sowing seeds.

His Holiness (continuing): I mentioned that as per our śāstras, members of the plant kingdom are animated by jīvas and then took up banyan, pomegranate, and sugarcane propagation to illustrate how questions of the kind that I had taken up in relation to the flatworm with superb regenerative abilities may be posed even with reference to various plants. Pieces of the flatworm (planarian) can regenerate into flatworms of the same kind as the original worm; similarly, portions cut out from a banyan tree, a pomegranate tree, or a sugarcane plant can become a full banyan tree, pomegranate tree, or a sugarcane plant akin to the source of the cuttings. Hence, as in the case of the flatworm, there is occasion for questions such as, “Are the cuttings and, hence, the plants that arise from them animated by the very jīva that animates the source of the cuttings, or by distinct jīvas?” and also for the follow-up questions such as, “If each cutting is animated by a distinct jīva, was this jīva present earlier and latent in the source of the cutting, or did it promptly enter and animate the cutting upon the part becoming separated from its source?”

His Holiness (continuing): Though Hari told me about flatworms laying eggs fertilized by the sperm of other flatworms, in the course of my reflection on the next day, I did not consider jīva-related questions centred on the sexual reproduction of flatworms. Such questions can be encompassed in those on the propagation of plants from seeds. I will present them using the pomegranate tree as an example. Like a flatworm with both testes and ovaries, it has flowers that have both male and female parts. It also has purely male flowers. In response to a devotee’s request, I visited his personal orchard. There, two pomegranate trees in bloom drew my attention. I could distinguish two varieties of pretty flowers; one type had a broader base than the other. He said that a decade earlier he had planted two seeds taken from different pomegranates and that these trees had grown from those two seeds. While I was observing the two varieties of flowers, he told me that the ones with a broader base were flowers with male as well as female parts, while the other ones were male flowers. Before I could stop him, he took out one flower of each type and gave them to me to inspect them at close quarters. Wanting to cut open the flowers to show me their parts, he had a bag with some of his gardening tools brought there quickly. I, however, dissuaded him from cutting the flowers, informing him that I was familiar with the structure of the hibiscus¹, which too has both male and female parts, and with the separate male and female pumpkin flowers. I then asked him, “Did you plant two unrelated seeds to obtain two unrelated pomegranate trees so that the female parts of each tree’s male-cum-female flowers may receive pollen even from the other, unrelated tree’s flowers, resulting in more variety in the fruits?” He said that that was the exact reason for his doing so. He proceeded to describe an experiment that he had performed some years earlier. As flowers were forming, he used cloth meshes to preclude pollinators such as bees from gaining access to ten of a tree’s male-cum-female flowers; he said that while growing, these flowers are shaped like peanut shells and that is how he identified them. From his gardening bag, he took out and showed me a cloth mesh of the kind that he had used. I could see that when suitably tied, it would allow light and air to pass through to a flower but not bees. When the ten flowers had fully bloomed, he first uncovered two of them, pollinated² each of them with pollen¹ from its own male part and then put back its cloth mesh in position. He took out a paint brush from his bag and demonstrated how he had collected and transferred pollen using it; for his demonstration, he worked upon the male-cum-female flower that he had plucked earlier for me to inspect. Having uncovered two other flowers, he pollinated them with pollen from two male flowers of that very tree and then put back the cloth meshes in position. For pollinating four of the remaining flowers, he used pollen from the other tree. He pollinated two of these flowers with pollen from two male-cum-female flowers of the other tree and the next two with pollen gathered from two of the other tree’s male flowers. He did not uncover and pollinate the final two of the ten flowers. He later found that, as expected, neither of the two flowers that had been kept covered gave rise to a fruit; this provided him some confirmation that his meshes were effective. Out of the four flowers pollinated with pollen taken from flowers of the same tree, three were replaced by fruit; likewise, three of the four flowers pollinated with pollen from the flowers of the other tree resulted in fruits. He added that over the years, he had seen many bees going from the flowers of one tree to those of the other tree and, hence, was confident that cross-pollination², which he had manually experimented with, was taking place naturally. Consider the occurrence of cross-pollination involving different pomegranate trees, without giving thought to whether natural pollinators or humans play a role in effecting this cross-pollination. Pollen grains from the flowers of a tree reach the female parts of the flowers of another tree; the pollen grains give rise to sperms; sperms unite with the egg-cells in the ovaries of the male-cum-female flowers; pomegranate fruits are formed with numerous embryo-bearing seeds in each fruit. Even though what happens after self-pollination and cross-pollination are equivalent, I purposely emphasized cross-pollination. This is because when the pollen grains and the egg-cells belong to the same tree, the embryo-bearing, viable seeds have just that tree as their source, as do cuttings obtained from that tree; consequently, the jīva-related questions that I had presented based on cuttings apply equally to the case of these seeds. On the other hand, there is occasion for some other jīva-related questions in the case of embryo-bearing, viable seeds resulting from cross-pollination. Suppose that during a season, a tree bears ten fruits due to cross-pollination and that each fruit has 500 viable seeds; while the number of seeds can vary from much less to much more than 500, for convenience, I picked this acceptable number¹. A pomegranate tree can, in principle, grow from each of the 5000 embryo-bearing, viable seeds. When a fruit becomes overripe, it cracks open and birds can easily eat it; seeds eaten by birds pass, I learnt, undigested and undamaged through their digestive tracts and are excreted; those that land in places suitable for them to sprout do so. Any one of the 5000 seeds of the tree could be amongst those that are eaten, excreted and end up where they can sprout and do so. A person may arbitrarily extract a seed from one of the ten fruits on the tree and plant it somewhere else to get a new tree. In view of all this, is it that all the 5000 embryo-bearing seeds house jīvas and so do the fertilized eggs laid by a flatworm and by, say, a bee, a cobra, and a hen? If not, is it that pomegranate seeds that are without jīvas can sprout even at locations that are far from those of the trees that provided pollen grains and egg-cells, and a flatworm’s fertilized eggs that are without jīvas can develop independently into worms? Such a supposition would, however, be discordant with the statements in our śāstras that plants and worms have jīvas. On the other hand, if it is admitted that the numerous, viable seeds and all the fertilized eggs of a flatworm do house jīvas, then the related questions that straightway arise are, “How do jīvas come to inhabit seeds and fertilized eggs? Were they earlier in the sperms that united with egg-cells and resulted in the seeds and fertilized eggs, or were they earlier resident in egg-cells, or did they come in from outside?” Suppose that sperms are the bearers of the jīvas. Because sperms arise from pollen grains in flowers, a follow-up supposition would be that sperms receive their jīvas from pollen grains. A pomegranate tree produces an enormous number of pollen grains in its lifetime, and any fit pollen grain from any flower on a pomegranate tree may end up on any male-cum-female flower of another tree and result in the fertilization of an egg-cell and seed formation. Hence, if it is supposed that sperms and pollen grains house jīvas, will it not follow that a pomegranate tree houses lakhs of jīvas? Likewise, as testes produce sperms in large numbers, will it not follow that a flatworm houses a great number of jīvas? Let us now pass on to the second of the three options; the supposition that the jīvas in seeds and in fertilized eggs resided earlier in egg-cells, not sperms. As a male-cum-female pomegranate flower may have many egg-cells and as an egg-cell in any flower on a tree may be among those that are fertilized, this option too implies that a tree houses a large number of jīvas.¹ The third alternative – that the jīvas in the seeds come there not via sperms or egg-cells but from outside – seems to presuppose that many jīvas are ever at hand and that one of them enters as soon as any egg-cell in any flower on any tree becomes fertilized at any place and at any time.

His Holiness (continuing): Besides seeds and cuttings, grafting¹ is commonly used for propagating plants. Jīva- related questions of the kind that I had posed with regard to flatworms with two or more heads may be posed even in the context of grafting. Consider the hibiscus plant. We find hibiscus flowers of various colours, such as red, yellow, purple and white. While hibiscus plants can be grown from cuttings with ease, it is by means of grafting that we can obtain one that bears flowers of different colours. To grow, for instance, a hibiscus plant that concurrently bears red, yellow, and white flowers, start with three plants, one with red flowers, one whose flowers are yellow and one having white flowers. With a sanitized, sharp knife cut out from each of the three plants, a segment of a healthy branch with a flower at its end.² Take out the flower and leaves on it and prune it to get a piece that is 3 to 4 inches long and has nodes. Then, with a couple of smooth cuts with the knife make one end of each of the three pieces wedge-like, with the lengths of the slanting, straight edges being about an inch. The plant (the rootstock) to which these three (the three scions) are to be grafted is, say, six months old and has its roots in the soil in a flower pot. Cleanly cut its stem horizontally, about nine inches above the soil. Make three, inch-deep, downward cuts from the circular top surface, with the cuts being on three sides of the top surface. The inch-long, wedge-like ends of the three pieces that are to be grafted should fit snugly in the three cuts made in the rooted plant’s stem. With the pieces and the stem properly placed thus in close contact, secure them by taping them with a plastic tape; thoroughly wrap the joint and the top surface tightly with the tape. While tape that is specifically meant for grafting is ideal, an electrical insulation tape and even strips cut from a big plastic cover can be used for the taping. Finally, enclose the grafted pieces and the stem up to a little below the joint in a plastic cover and tie its downward-facing opening closed. This entire grafting procedure can be comfortably completed in less than five minutes.¹ After separation from its parent plant, a branch has no supply of water from a root till such time that it becomes effectively united with the stem. It is to prevent it from drying up and dying before this that its leaves, through which it can lose water, are removed prior to grafting; the tight wrapping by tape prevents exposure to air that would dry it; the plastic cover helps to shield it from being adversely affected by wind and rain. Remove the protective plastic cover after a month. Sprouting should be seen on the three grafted portions (the three scions). After a few more weeks, carefully take out the tape. The grafted pieces (the scions) and the stem (the rootstock) should be well united by now and leaves should be seen as in normal hibiscus plants. The plant soon becomes beautified by red, yellow, and white flowers. Does this plant with three grafts have four jīvas or one or none? The last option is, obviously, discordant with the scriptural position that all living plants are animated by jīvas. As hibiscus plants grow readily from cuttings, the portion of the branch that was taken from the plant with red flowers for grafting could have grown into a full plant had it been planted. It was alive and healthy when it was placed in effective contact with the stem of the six-month-old plant and remained so; it was taped and covered to help it stay alive. Hence, as in the case of a live flatworm segment and that of a live cutting from a banyan tree, it can be contended that it has a jīva. Similar is the case of what was taken for grafting from the plant with yellow flowers and the one with red flowers. The plant upon which grafting was done must have been animated by a jīva, like any other living plant; even after its stem was sliced some inches above the soil, it was alive and quite capable of growing into a complete plant; moreover, but for its continuing to be alive, with functioning roots, the whole plant with three kinds of flowers could not have formed. Hence, is it that the final plant with the stem and three grafts has four jīvas? To an extent, the plant functions as multiple plants, with the branch whose source was the plant with red flowers bearing just red flowers, the branch that originated in the plant with yellow flowers giving rise to just yellow flowers, and the branch born of the plant with white flowers producing just white flowers. Does this imply that the four jīvas concurrently animate different parts of the plant? Or, is it that only one jīva animates the plant, with the other jīvas lying latent or having departed upon the grafted parts and the stem uniting? Or, should it be seen as a single plant with a single jīva animating it because, exactly as in the unitary plant that bears just red flowers, its roots take in water and nutrients from the soil and provide them, without distinction, to each and every branch, and the leaves on all the branches produce food using sunlight (photosynthesis) for even the stem and the roots? The questions that I posed now about the jīvas in the plant with three grafts were without reference to the seeds of this plant and to any cuttings taken from it. If pollen from the male portion of a red or a yellow or a white male-cum-female flower of this plant is transferred to the female part of that very flower, the resulting seed will be similar to a cutting and the jīva-related questions centred on cuttings will apply here. On the other hand, if pollen from a red flower on this plant is put on the female part of a yellow or white flower, the resulting seed will on be par with a pomegranate seed resulting from cross-pollination involving the two pomegranate trees considered earlier; hence, the jīva-related questions posed earlier in connection with pomegranate seeds will apply even to such a seed of this plant. Incidentally, it cannot be argued that grafting is entirely unnatural¹ and, hence, jīva-related questions are out of place. This is because grafting does occur in nature, though far less often than grafting performed by humans. An instance is a natural fusion that occurred between the roots of a sandalwood tree and an Indian blackberry tree² (Eugena jambolana Lam.), resulting in the blackberry fruits having a sandalwood taste and smell. About two decades ago, an associate of Kadambi, an expert who had formulated the forest management plan for the State of Mysore (for 1941-1961), told me that Kadambi had recorded this.³ His Holiness (continuing): I had considered whether an eyeless flatworm’s reaction to light implies that it has some means of sensing other than our five sense-organs and, if so, would that not contradict the position of the śastras about the organs associated with a jīva.

Consider the sunflower¹ plant. A young plant’s flowers face east at dawn; as the sun moves across the sky, they track its movement, turning themselves in the direction of the sun; at sunset, they face west. During the night, they gradually turn from west to east, such that by the next dawn, they once again face east. After the plant matures, the flowers remain facing east.² Speaking in terms of the jīva animating it and the indriyas (organs) that are listed in the śāstra as associated with the jīva, does the sunflower plant sense light by some means that is different from the visual organ that is specified in the śāstras, for the plant lacks eyes and still tracks the movement of the sun? If it is supposed, perforce, that it does, would not the view of the śāstras about the jīva’s indriyas and their net number be contradicted?

§1.5 Two days later, on 9 June 1976, His Holiness took up human reproduction and told me, as he had done with regard to planarians and plants, the jīva-related questions that He had posed to Himself and answered in the light

of the śāstras. His Holiness: A human body forms from a single cell that is the result of the fusion of an egg-cell from a woman’s ovary and a sperm. The explicit position of the śāstra is that a fetus has a jīva and that this jīva is distinct from that of its mother. Does this jīva reach there through the sperm or the egg or does it come in from elsewhere at the time of the union of the egg and sperm? Suppose that a sperm is the carrier of such a jīva. Since any of the sperms that are released into a woman’s body by a man and are healthy may, in principle, be the one that manages to reach, enter and fertilize the egg, and since a man deposits crores of sperms into a woman at a time, will it then have to be presumed that the man housed crores of jīvas? If the number of sperms deposited by a man in his wife over the course of years be considered, will it not follow that he housed and transferred many crores of jīvas? Suppose that the carrier of a jīva is not a sperm but an egg. I heard that a female has about 10 lakh eggs at birth, with the number of eggs decreasing as she grows older. Because any one of the eggs that she was born with can be among those that survive till she attains puberty and might be the one that is later released and fertilized, it may, in this case, have to be supposed that she carried lakhs of jīvas. I was told that during her life as a fetus, a female has up to a few crores of basic eggs. In view of this, should it be supposed that she housed a few crore jīvas, and not just lakhs of them? If it is held that the jīva comes to a fertilized egg from outside and not via a sperm or an egg, will it not follow that ever so many jīvas are ever at hand to immediately enter every human egg that is fertilized in any woman, at any time and at any place? Entry from outside may have to be conceded even if a sperm is regarded as the carrier of a jīva to a fertilized egg. This is because a male is not born with sperms; it is only much later that his testicles start producing them and continue to do so. Even if eggs are regarded as the bearers of jīvas, entry from elsewhere at some time may have to be assumed. While a female is born with eggs, how did the jīvas come into her eggs? Did they do so from elsewhere when her ovaries formed while she was in her mother’s womb, or did they enter from elsewhere into the fertilized egg from which her life began?

His Holiness (continuing): Some additional questions arise if identical twins, triplets, etc., are considered¹. A doctor came to Sringeri with his wife a month before my Guru’s disembodied liberation (on 26th September

1954). He respectfully submitted to my Guru that he was nearing 50 but was still childless; he and his wife had consulted eminent gynaecologists and, later, two senior Āyurveda-vaidyas, but all to no avail. He made a fervent appeal to my Guru to bless them with a child; his wife also did so. I was present at this meeting. My Guru compassionately said that their desire would be fulfilled and that within a couple of years, they would, by God’s grace, have not just one but two children, a pair of twins. He directed them to receive initiation into a mantra from me and to perform its japa with faith for obtaining progeny. I gave them mantropadeśa the next day as per my Guru’s instruction to me. Less than two years later, the doctor came to see me in the first week of my stay at Kalady (from 13th July 1956 to 27th September 1956). For some unknown reason, I had felt that he would be coming that afternoon and had told my attendant to lead him promptly to my room for a private meeting. Having prostrated in front of me for a long time, he ecstatically informed me that his wife had delivered a pair of male twins 12 days earlier; it had been a normal delivery and both the mother and the babies were doing well. I was surprised when I learnt that he was yet to see his children. He said that both he and his wife were clear that he should first see me, receive blessings and prasāda from me for the babies, and then see them. I was also surprised to hear from him that his wife had not seen any gynaecologist during her pregnancy and, as desired by her, delivered not in a hospital under the care of a gynaecologist but in her parents’ house in a village, with a local, elderly midwife doing the needful. The unusual reason for this was that she was sure, and he was in full agreement, that her pregnancy was due solely to grace and that, again solely on account of grace, she would give birth successfully. He said that he had no idea if his sons were fraternal twins¹ or identical twins. He started to speak about the two types of twins but stopped midsentence and sought my pardon; he felt that speaking on such matters with me might be inappropriate. I told him to go ahead and tell me about twins and that I was more than willing and happy to hear from informed persons about science, medicine, engineering, agriculture, etc. He said that one egg is what is commonly released from a woman’s ovaries per menstrual cycle; a single child stems from the fertilization of such a single egg by a sperm. When not one but two eggs are released and each of these is fertilized by a distinct sperm, the end result is a pair of fraternal twins. Both of these twins may be males or both may be females, or one may be male and the other female; apart from being of the same age, they are on par with siblings born one at a time. Identical twins, on the other hand, stem not from the fertilization of two eggs by two sperms but by the fertilization, as in the case of a single child, of one egg by one sperm, followed afterwards by a split. Fertilization occurs in a (fallopian) tube, which extends from close to an ovary on one end to the womb on the other; moving through the tube towards the womb, the fertilized egg divides in over a day into two similar, smaller cells; it continues to progressively divide, resulting in a ball of four cells in two days, and in a ball of 12 or some more cells in three days; the embryo begins to connect to the uterus around the sixth day, a couple of days before which it becomes organized as a hollow ball with liquid within and a set of cells at one end. The split that results in a pair of identical twins may occur, at the earliest, at the two-cell stage; following the separation, each of the two parted cells gives rise to one of a pair of identical twins. Identical twins are of the same sex and look alike. When fertilization of a single egg by a single sperm and two splits are involved, the result is identical triplets. Identical quadruplets and quintuplets form from one fertilized egg and three and four splits respectively. I first asked him how researchers had obtained details directly in the case of humans about the fertilization of an egg and what normally happens thereafter in the first week. At the close of his answer, he mentioned that just three weeks earlier, he had seen, in an article that appeared in an American journal and was sent to him by a friend from the United States, photographs of a one-and-half day old human embryo in the twocell stage and a four-day old one with almost 60 cells.¹

I asked him if it is possible for a women to have triplets, comprising a pair of identical twins from one egg and a child from a second egg fertilized by a distinct sperm. He said that it is but he was yet to read of such a case.

I then asked him if he had read of any case of identical quadruplets or identical quintuplets who were delivered without surgery, were normal, and lived past childhood.

He replied that he had. He said that about twenty years earlier (that is, in the 1930s), a woman gave birth to five identical female babies at her farmer husband’s and her house in Canada. None knew that she was carrying five babies and her doctor expected her to give birth only two months later. All the babies were born in an hour and were delivered by the doctor and two midwives. The prematurely born babies were remarkably tiny and highly underweight but all of them survived and grew to be normal, healthy children and youth. He said that the family name of these famous quintuplets is ‘Dionne’ and that there are articles and books about them.²

His Holiness (continuing): The next question that I posed to him was whether a partial split of a single cluster of cells stemming from a fertilized egg is possible and, if it is, what is a possible consequence. He answered that it is possible and that conjoined, identical twins may result. He then spoke of a pair of conjoined, identical twins who were born in Italy about 80 years earlier (that is, in the 1870s). Their birth was uncomplicated. Referring to them as the ‘Tocci’ twins, he told me that they were conjoined at the level of the middle of their ribcages; they had two heads, two necks, two hearts, and two pairs of arms, but only two legs; while their stomachs were separate, they shared a common large intestine and anus; from the navel downwards, they looked just like a single person. Each of the twins had sensations from and control over one of the two legs; each sensed and controlled the two arms on his side. There were times when one slept, while the other was awake and when one was hungry, while the other felt full and burped. One of them was talkative, while the other was quiet. While they generally got along very well, at times, they did fight between themselves. He concluded his short account of these conjoined twins by saying that after being exhibited in several countries in Europe during childhood and then touring the United States as youths and making money, they retired when they were in their twenties and, subsequently, married two women.

His Holiness (continuing): My final question was whether researchers had, as part of their experimental studies on embryos, compelled complete and partial splitting of non-human embryos and, if so, whether such splitting had resulted in independent and conjoined embryos.

He said that towards the close of the previous century (the 19th century), a German researcher (Hans Driesch) experimented with a small sea-creature (sea-urchin). This creature’s eggs are translucent; the development of the embryos in them can be seen from outside with a microscope. He split embryos at the two-cell stage of development by vigorous shaking. Complete separation resulted in two distinct, normally-developing embryos.¹

Afterwards, another German scientist (Hans Spemann) experimentally investigated embryonic development in an animal (newt, a type of salamander) that dwells in water and on land, as does a frog, and resembles a lizard. By using a child’s fine hair as a lasso, he sectioned an egg into two soon after its being laid; two normal embryos developed. Constricting an egg by means of a hair shortly after its being laid resulted in an embryo with two heads and a tail.²

His Holiness (continuing): After spending half an hour with me, during which he presented scientific material for 10 to 15 minutes, he received prasāda for his twins and wife. Just before leaving, he told me that he would come to Sringeri with his family for my darśana and that if I were to give him permission and the opportunity to present some medical information as on the present occasion, he would feel delighted and blessed to do so.

His Holiness (continuing): He came to Sringeri in 1963, a month after the kumbhābhiśeka (consecration) of the shrine of my Guru (on 3 March 1963). When I saw his children, I recognized that they were fraternal twins. During his meeting with me, I asked him if he was ready with some medical news to present to me. He said that he was and that he knew for certain that I would not have forgotten the request that he had made years ago and that I would grant it. A piece of information that he gave me was that in 1959, a researcher (M. C. Chang) had extracted eggs from female rabbits and exposed them in vitro¹ to sperms of male rabbits; he transferred eggs that became fertilized and developed to the 4-cell stage into the tubes (fallopian tubes) of six independent rabbits; four of these gave birth to 15 healthy rabbits.² He then told me about an experimental triumph that was reported, he said, just the previous year (that is, in 1962). He stated that a researcher (J. B. Gurdon) destroyed the nucleus¹ of a frog’s egg-cell by means of ultraviolet light². When he started to explain what a cell’s nucleus is, I told him that I knew about it, that it houses DNA and genes, which are strands of DNA, and that it is a cell’s control centre, like the brain in a human or the driver of a car. The researcher then took a cell from a tadpole’s intestine and extracted its nucleus. He put this nucleus into the egg-cell whose nucleus he had eliminated. A few of such egg-cells began to divide just like normal egg-cells fertilized by sperm and gave rise to healthy tadpoles. Every such tadpole was dissimilar to the frog whose egg-cell was used but was just like the tadpole whose intestinal cell’s nucleus was inserted into the egg-cell. Replicas of a tadpole, male or female, were created thus from the nuclei of its intestinal cells.³ His Holiness (continuing): When he told me about the fertilization of a rabbit’s egg in vitro, I presumed that someday, with improved techniques, scientists would be able to do the same with a human egg-cell. When he came next to Sringeri three years ago (in 1973), he told me that that year, a medical team in Australia had extracted an egg-cell from a woman who was unable to conceive, successfully fertilized it in vitro with her husband’s sperm and, after the fertilized cell became a cluster of eight cells by division, implanted it into her uterus. Unfortunately, however, the pregnancy did not last.¹ He felt sure that a successful human pregnancy involving in vitro fertilization would be achieved before long. He also informed me was that nine years earlier (in 1964), researchers had adopted a means to preserve sperm indefinitely by freezing and keeping it at the very low temperature at which nitrogen is a liquid, thawed frozen sperms after one to six months and injected them into women; four of the women delivered babies.² He added that till then, there had been no human births from frozen embryos; however, a calf was born that year (1973) from an in vitro embryo that was frozen, thawed after some days, and inserted into a cow.³

His Holiness (continuing): Regardless of whether it is supposed that a jīva comes to a fertilized egg-cell via the fertilizing sperm or that it was present in the egg-cell concerned prior to fertilization or that it entered from outside at the time of fertilization, the possibility of the formation of identical twins, triplets, etc., from a single fertilized egg-cell gives room to some questions. Is it that to cater to the possibility of splitting resulting in multiple embryos, each of which is animated by a distinct jīva, the number of jīvas in a fertilized egg-cell is more than one? For instance, as identical quintuplets can develop, is the number of jīvas in a fertilized egg at least five? In case it is possible for ten identical embryos to arise, is the number of jīvas in any fertilized egg at least ten to cater to this possibility? Or, is it that a new jīva promptly enters whenever and wherever splitting results in an additional embryo? In the instance of the conjoined ‘Tocci’ twins, the presence of two distinct jīvas must be admitted, for they sensed and controlled distinct hands and legs, did not feel hungry or sleep at just the same times, had temperamental differences, with one being talkative and the other quiet, and they sometimes even fought with each other. As there exists the possibility that a partial split may occur and result in conjoined twins with separate brains as in the case of the Tocci twins, is it that a fertilized egg-cell houses at least two jīvas? If, as is the norm, no partial splitting occurs, does one of these depart or remain dormant?

His Holiness (continuing): Extending the experimental accomplishments that the doctor informed me about (in 1956, 1963, and 1973), I supposed that someday it would be possible to take the nucleus of a cell from the flesh or skin of a man or woman who has just died, put it into an egg-cell whose nucleus is removed, activate cell division, split the cluster of, say, four cells, into four individual cells, freeze the four cells, preserve them in the frozen state, thaw the four in four different months, insert one cell each in four different women and obtain four babies that are born at different times but all of which are copies of the man or woman whose single flesh or skin cell’s nucleus was taken. While I had been told only about the transplantation of the nucleus of an intestinal cell, I assumed that the cell from another part of the animal’s (newt’s) body could also have been used and, hence, considered a cell from a person’s flesh or skin. While I did recognize that the case of an egg-laying, lizard-like animal that dwells in water and land is quite different from that of a human, I thought that scientists would, in due course, experiment with and succeed in nucleus-transfer in animals that give birth. I knew that skin from human cadavers had been grafted successfully on burn wounds and, hence, thought that even the yet-to-die skin-cell of a person who has just died would be sufficient. I did not suppose at that time that all of this would be actually done in the case of humans, disregarding moral and ethical considerations and experimenting with humans as with flatworms. I did, however, presume that embryo-splitting, insertion of a flesh or skin cell’s nucleus into an enucleated egg-cell, freezing and subsequent thawing of sperm, egg-cells and embryos, and other such procedures would someday be used even commercially in the case of animals to obtain, say, identical cows or a young version of a dear pet animal that is moribund or has just died. What, I presume, will someday be possible in respect of even human reproduction prompts some jīva-based questions. If the skin-cell whose nucleus is extracted is the bearer of the jīva or jīva-group that passes into the egg-cell into which the nucleus is put, then, since any one of the donor’s healthy skin-cells could have been used, is it that the person has crores and crores of jīvas in his or her skin? What is more, is it that crores and crores of jīvas are present even in a dead one’s skin-cells to cater to the possibility of the nucleus of any one of the yet-to die cells being taken to give rise to an embryo?

Suppose that a jīva enters, not by means of a skin-cell and its nucleus, but from outside into the egg-cell into which the nucleus is inserted. This egg-cell is induced to divide like a common egg-cell fertilized naturally by sperm and forms, as assumed in the example, a cluster of four cells that can develop into a child. This cluster of four cells is frozen. What happens to the said jīva if the budding embryo is kept indefinitely in a frozen state without thawing and placing it into a woman’s uterus? Does it just remain latent there indefinitely or does it depart after some time? In case it departs after some time and the budding embryo is thawed subsequent to that, inserted into a woman, and arrives in the world as a normal baby, how does that baby have its own jīva?

With reference to the example, I mentioned only the questions that are not included in the ones that I took up earlier, such as in the context of identical twins. While I did presume that someday, in vitro fertilization and even the insertion of a specific sperm into a specific egg-cell would successfully result in the birth of healthy children, I noted that jīva-related questions pertaining to these are covered in the ones that I spoke of earlier.

It was in 1973 that I mentally posed in one session and answered in the light of the scripture, the jīva-related questions centred on flatworms, plants, and humans.

{Some contextually relevant, post-1973 developments:

(1) In vitro Fertilization (IVF): The first human birth as a result of IVF, which involves placing an egg with many sperm in a petri dish, was that of a female, Louise Brown, on 25 July 1978, in England. Millions of pregnancies have, since then, been initiated by IVF.

(2) Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI): It was on 14 January 1992 that the first child was born (in Belgium) from the fertilization of an egg by injecting a single sperm into it. ICSI has since made possible many a pregnancy.

(3) Cryopreservation: The first human birth from a frozen embryo was that of a female, Zoe Leyland, in Australia, in 1984. Her mother’s ovum was fertilized in vitro with her father’s sperm; the embryo was frozen, thawed after two months, and put into the woman’s uterus. There is no limit to how long an embryo, egg or sperm can be cryopreserved. An embryo was frozen in 1992, thawed after 27 years, and inserted into a woman in her 20s; a normal female child, Molly Gibson, was born in 2020.

(4) Embryo-splitting: The birth of many identical pairs of animals such as sheep, cattle, and horses has been realized by either surgically bisecting an embryo or extracting a subset of its cells with a micropipette in order to get two embryos in the place of one. For instance, in 1981, the extraction of a cell from a two-cell bovine embryo and the transfer of the resulting two embryos into two cows fructified in the birth of a pair of identical calves. Experimental studies have been reported (since October 1993) on the splitting of budding human embryos, but, to date (2023), no split embryo has been put into a womb.

(5) Cloning: The cloning of mammals by ‘Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT)’ took off with the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996; cats, dogs, cattle, camels, horses, and even monkeys have been cloned. Cells from the ear of a bull, ‘86’, were frozen in 1985; in 2000, a cell’s nucleus was put into an enucleated egg; a male calf, ‘86 Squared’, was born that year. A pet dog, Dylan, was cloned using a skin cell that was collected twelve days after its death in 2015; Dylan’s body had been refrigerated, not frozen. In 2014, subsequent to the transfer of the nuclei of two men’s skin-cells into enucleated eggs, eight-cell embryos and even blastocysts developed. However, no embryo due to SCNT has been put into a womb till now (2023).}

§1.6 His Holiness started on His second all-India tour on 1 November 1976 and returned to Sringeri on 7 January 1978. In May 1978, during my stay at Sringeri, He told me a portion of the scripture-based answers that He had thought of in 1973 to the jīva-related questions (centred on flatworms, plants and humans) that He had posed to Himself (and spelt out to me in 1976). He deferred telling me some parts of His answers till He had graced me with the opportunity of learning from Him Bhagavatpāda’s bhāṣyas on the Bhagavad-gītā, Taittirīya-upaniṣad and Brahma-sūtras and parts of Bhagavatpāda’s bhāṣyas on the Chāndogya and Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣads. What He told me on this topic in the period 1978-81 has been merged here.

His Holiness: In the Mārkaṇdeya-purāṇa, in the Devī-māhātmya (also known as Durgā-saptaśatī), it is said:

– Seeing the Asuras, who were afflicted by the group of Mothers (mātr̥s), fleeing, the enraged, mighty Asura, Raktabīja, arrived to engage in battle. Whenever a drop of blood fell on the ground from his body, there arose a powerful Asura of the same measure as him. With mace in hand, the mighty Asura (Raktabīja) fought with Indra’s Śakti (counterpart Aindrī). Then, Aindrī struck him with her thunderbolt. Much blood flowed out fast from him, who was hurt by the thunderbolt. From it arose warriors who looked just like him and equalled him in valour. As many drops of blood fell from his body, that many persons arose, equalling him in prowess, strength, and heroism. Even those blood-born persons fought the Mothers ferociously, striking with terrifying weapons.

From this account, it is clear that, though identical in appearance with Raktabīja, the beings who arose from his drops of blood were distinct from him. There is no scope whatsoever provided by the text to suppose that Raktabīja actively created, by yogic powers, the bodies of the new beings and endowed them with minds that were subservient to and attuned to his mind; none of the commentaries that I have read states or even drops a hint that, as per the text, the blood-born entities were not distinct individuals. As the text refers to the blood-born entities by the words puruṣa and asura, it cannot be supposed that the entities were mere automations and, thus, unanimated by and bereft of jīvas. The upshot of all this is that the jīva that animated Raktabīja’s body was different from the jīvas that animated the bodies of the beings that arose from his blood; also, the jīva in a blood-born body was not the jīva in another blood-born body.

His Holiness (continuing): In the light of the story of Raktabīja and the Asuras born of his blood presented in the Devī-māhātmya, flatworms that develop from small portions of a flatworm, plants that stem from cuttings taken from a plant, and persons whose birth may, in the future, be initiated by the extraction of nuclei from cells in the skin or some other bodily part of a person may all be presumed to have distinct jīvas. As per the narrative in the Devī-māhātmya, Raktabīja’s animosity towards the Mothers and his ability to wield weapons appeared straightaway in the blood-born Asuras; Raktabīja’s jīva was, nonetheless, not the one that animated the Asuras who arose from his blood. Hence, even though there may be, as experimentally observed, transfer of learning from a flatworm to the flatworms arising from its parts, there is no need to suppose that the jīva of the original flatworm is the one that animates the latter flatworms.

His Holiness (continuing): A sarcastic objection may be that Raktabīja is a fictitious character in a fanciful story and that drawing conclusions on transmigration based on him is like, for example, turning to the well-known Pañcatantra tale of the monkey and crocodile in which they converse to contend that dogs and cats actually converse and that too in the same language as did the monkey and crocodile.¹ There is, however, justification for relying upon, as was done, the portion of the Devī-māhātmya about Raktabīja and the blood-born Asuras. Suppose that a scholar authors a fictitious story, with several subplots, with the key intention of illustrating interestingly that one reaps in one’s present life the fruits of karma, good or bad, that one performed in one’s earlier lives and that one who leads a virtuous life will definitely experience happiness in the future. This writer cannot include, in any subplot, an account of, say, a good man’s jīva ceasing to be upon his being killed, for this would be incongruous with the overall theme of definite fruition of karma and rebirth. As for the Devī-māhātmya, its internal consistency is patent; none of the commentaries on it that I have read has noted or tried to account for any inconsistency in the text. It is a revered work with potent mantras and is replete with statements that are in line with those of the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad-gītā.² The text’s opening and ending are rebirth-related. Thus, irrespective of whether one takes the story of Raktabīja to be a literal or embellished account of what occurred in another epoch of creation, or as figurative or as just fictitious, there is no ground to suppose that anything explicit or implicit here might be out of line with the rest of the text and the teaching of the scripture about jīvas and rebirth.

His Holiness (continuing): With respect to the Maruts, the presiding deities of 49 winds, the śruti says “sapta-gaṇā vai marutaḥ – There are indeed seven groups of Maruts.”¹ Each of these seven groups consists of seven Maruts. The Rāmāyaṇa and the Purāṇas contain similar accounts of their birth. According to the Rāmāyaṇa², Viśvāmitra told Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa at Viśālā that ages ago, distraught at the death of her sons, the Asuras, at the hands of the Devas, Diti pleaded with her spouse, Sage Kaśyapa, for a son who would kill Indra. Though Kaśyapa consented to fulfil her request, he stipulated that she would have to scrupulously maintain purity for a specified, long period. When she became pregnant, he left to resume his austerities. Indra came to Diti and served her dedicatedly. Shortly before the end of the specified period, Diti faltered once in her observance of the norms of purity and slept in a way that she should not have. Making use of this opportunity, Indra cut her fetus into seven; the parts did not, however, die. He then apologized to Diti and told her that he had done this to save his life. Diti forgave him, holding that the fault was hers. Wishing that what he had done become favourable to both of them, she said that the seven should become the guardians of the seven groups of seven winds, be well-known as the Maruts, and be led by him. The term ‘marut’ reflected Indra’s words, “mā (do not) rudaḥ (weep)” to them as he split up Diti’s fetus. Viśvāmitra then told Rāma that the city of Viśālā was founded by Viśāla, a son of Ikṣvāku (the first king of the solar dynasty to which Rāma belonged), at the place where Diti had engaged in austerities to obtain her desired offspring and Indra had served her. I read in the Viṣṇu-purāṇa, Bhāgavata-purāṇa and Vāmana-purāṇa similar accounts about the origin of the Maruts; an additional point in these Purāṇas is that after Indra divided Diti’s fetus into seven, he split each part into seven, resulting in seven groups of seven Maruts each.¹

The story of the Maruts originating from the division of Ditis’s fetus by Indra is recounted even in the Veda-bhāṣya (Sāyaṇa’s authoritative commentary, Vedārtha-prakāśa, on the four Vedas). In hymns in the R̥g-veda, the Maruts have been referred to as the sons of Rudra (Śiva) and Rudra has been spoken of as the father of the Maruts. The Veda-bhāṣya explains this by stating that as per a narrative of yore, Indra slayed the Asuras; desirous of a son who would kill Indra, their mother, Diti, obtained, on account of her husband and by means of austerities, a fetus; becoming aware of this, adopting a subtle form, Indra entered her womb and divided her fetus into seven; he then divided each of these into seven; emerging from Diti’s womb, they wept; Pārvatī asked Śiva to make them whole, male children for her delight; Rudra (Śiva) transformed them into identical looking persons bedecked with similar ornaments and gave them to Pārvatī saying, “May they be your sons.” Hence, states the Veda-bhāṣya, in Vedic hymns on the Maruts, they are praised as the sons of Rudra and in Vedic hymns on Rudra, He is eulogised as the father of the Maruts.¹ As per the Rāmāyaṇa, Purāṇas and Veda-bhāṣya, Diti bore a fetus that was to become a single individual who would kill Indra; it follows that that live fetus was animated by one jīva. After that fetus was divided into parts, each part, which was alive, finally became a full, distinct, pro-Indra individual; it follows that each part and the pro-Indra individual it became was animated by a jīva, that this jīva was different from the jīva of the original fetus, and that this jīva was not the animator of any other live part and the complete, distinct individual that that other part developed into. In view of this, it may be presumed that if a flatworm is completely divided into two or more fragments, the flatworms that arise from these parts are animated by distinct jīvas; the case of a flatworm that divides itself would be on the same footing. Likewise, if, in the future, two or more live human fetuses result from in vitro embryo-splitting, they would be animated by distinct jīvas. Two or more fetuses that are the result of the natural splitting of an embryo in a woman’s womb are also animated by distinct jīvas; it is, in any case, definite that identical twins, triplets, etc., are distinct humans.

His Holiness (continuing): The story of the genesis of Pr̥thu – the king after whom the earth is said to be called pr̥thivī – from a part of King Vena’s corpse is narrated in the Mahābhārata¹ and the Purāṇas. It is written in the Śānti-parvan of the Mahābhārata that Lord Kr̥ṣṇa freed Bhīṣma from pain, blessed him with omniscience, and asked him to teach Yudhiṣṭhira. As part of his answer to a question of Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīṣma recounted that King Vena was in the grip of likes and dislikes, flouted dharma, and ill-treated his subjects. R̥ṣis proficient in the Vedas used kuśa-grass powered by mantras to end his life. Then, chanting mantras, they churned the right thigh of Vena’s corpse. This resulted in the emergence of a dwarf who looked like a burnt wooden post. They then churned Vena’s right hand. A magnificent person originated. As he stemmed from a part of Vena’s body, he is referred to in the text as Vena’s son (‘Vainya’). This story of Pr̥thu finds a place in several Purāṇas such as the Agni-purāṇa, Brahma-purāṇa, Padma-purāṇa, Viṣṇu-purāṇa and Bhāgavata-purāṇa, with a little less or more information, but with the core preserved. For instance, the Agni-purāṇa omits the churning of Vena’s thigh; the Bhāgavata-purāṇa additionally makes known that Vena’s mother, Sunīthā, preserved Vena’s body by some means and it was this preserved body that the r̥ṣis worked upon.¹ As it was only from parts of Vena’s corpse that the r̥ṣis brought forth two persons, the jīva that had dwelt in and animated that body during Vena’s lifetime was different from the jīvas that animated the two bodies that emerged; buttressing this difference is report of the Viṣṇu-purāṇa that Vena’s jīva was saved from dwelling in naraka by the birth of his son, Pr̥thu.²

In the light of the said narrative in the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas, it may be presumed that a distinct jīva is the animator of a fetus, be it human or non-human, resulting from a cellular nucleus or some other element of even a dead body. A secondary point is that as per the texts, Vena’s sinfulness passed to the person first produced from a portion of his corpse³; in view of this and the distinctness of this one’s jīva from Vena’s jīva, it may be presumed that though some transmission of learning may occur from a flatworm to one stemming from a part of it, the two need not have the same jīva. His Holiness (continuing): Narratives in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata about the genesis of persons have been relied upon in the context of transmigration in the authoritative Brahma-sūtras themselves. Explaining the Brahma-sūtra, “smaryate ’pi ca loke – Moreover, it (the attainment of a body without the role of a woman) is recorded in the smr̥ti (Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa),”¹ Bhagavatpāda has written in His Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya, “droṇadhr̥ṣṭadyumnaprabhr̥tīnāṁ sītādraupadīprabhr̥tīnāṁ cāyonijatvam – (It is recorded in the smr̥ti that) those such as Droṇa and Dhr̥ṣṭadyumna, and those such as Sītā and Draupadī did not take birth from a womb.” As per the Mahābhārata, Droṇa arose from just the seed of Sage Bharadvāja, while Dhr̥ṣṭadyumna and Draupadī directly emerged from fire; the Rāmāyaṇa chronicles that Sītā manifested in the earth.

His Holiness (continuing): Bhagavatpāda has mentioned at a few places in the Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya some views about reproduction that were subscribed to in those times but which we now know to be incorrect. Towards the end of His exposition of the aforesaid Brahma-sūtra (“smaryate ’pi ca loke”), He writes, “balākāpi antareṇa eva retaḥsekaṁ garbhaṁ dhatta iti lokarūḍhiḥ – It is a popular belief that a female crane conceives without receiving any seminal discharge.” A statement of His in the bhāṣya on the Brahma-sūtra “devādivad api loke – Also, (Brahman creates the world without external aids) like the Devas, etc., (as seen) in the śāstra”² is “balākā ca stanayitnu-rava-śravaṇād garbhaṁ dhatte – Further, a female crane becomes pregnant from hearing the sound of thunder.” In His bhāṣya on the Brahma-sūtra, “dr̥śyate tu – However, it is seen,”¹ He has said, “dr̥śyate hi loke cetanatvena prasiddhebhyaḥ puruṣādibhyo vilakṣaṇānāṁ keśanakhādīnām utpattiḥ, acetanatvena ca prasiddhebhyo gomayādibhyo vr̥ścikādīnām – It is seen in the world that from beings such as men who are known to be sentient stem insentient hair, nails, etc., and from cow dung and such else that are known to be insentient arise sentient creatures such as scorpions.”

Actually, however, a female crane cannot give rise to a young crane by itself, without the involvement of a male crane’s sperm; it lays eggs and does not bear a fetus (‘garbhaṁ dhatte’); thunder neither causes any crane to conceive nor fertilizes a crane’s egg.² A female scorpion retains her fertilized eggs within her without laying them, and her young emerge from the eggs, come out of her body, and climb on to her back; no scorpion originates from cow dung. The biological incorrectness of these instances does not, however, affect what they were meant to illustrate. Moreover, biologically sound, equivalent examples are available to serve the purpose. A flatworm stemming from a piece of another flatworm without any involvement of sperm is equivalent to the example of the crane and serves the latter’s purpose. An extracted nucleus of a cell and an enucleated cell are, like cow dung, not sentient entities. I first learnt in 1963 that the nucleus of a tadpole’s intestinal cell put into an enucleated egg-cell gave rise to live tadpoles. This can be presented as equivalent to the insentient-dung-live-scorpion example. What is primarily pertinent in the present context is that even the supposed origin of a creature from a single creature with no part played by sperm, and of a live creature from an insentient entity were not only not seen by Bhagavatpāda as posing any difficulty to the scriptural position on rebirth but were mentioned by Him while elucidating sūtras that state the Vedāntin’s definitive position (siddhānta). The glosses on Bhagavatpāda’s Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya such as the Bhāmatī, Bhāṣya-ratna-prabhā, Nyāya-nirṇaya, Prakaṭārtha-vivaraṇa, and Brahmavidyābharaṇa, and the glosses on glosses such as the Vedānta-kalpataru and Parimala do not note any rebirth-related difficulty on account of these.¹ I referred earlier to the compatible accounts in the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas about the origin of Pr̥thu from the right hand of Vena’s corpse; neither the Caturdharī (Nīlakaṇṭhā’s traditional gloss on the complete Mahābhārata) nor the Bhāvārtha-bodhinī (Śrīdhara’s valuable gloss on the Bhāgavata-purāṇa) mentions any transmigration-related problem caused by such genesis of a being from a corpse’s part.

His Holiness (continuing): Some scriptural material is germane to the issue of whether a flatworm with two or more heads, or a plant comprising grafts, or a pair of conjoined twins may be associated with two or more indwelling jīvas. As per the scripture, the body of Virāt-puruṣa, a jīva, is the cosmos. For instance, it is stated in the Puruṣa-sūkta, “tasmād virād ajāyata virājo adhi pūruṣaḥ”¹; the first part conveys that from the Supreme Being (tasmāt) arose virāj, the cosmic body; the word virāj has the etymological sense of ‘that in which various (vividhāni) objects shine (rājante)’; the cosmos is virāj; the next part conveys that there arose a Puruṣa over (adhi) – presiding over and identifying with – the cosmic body (virājaḥ); an etymological derivation of the word puruṣa is ‘he who dwells (śete) in the body (puri)’; this Puruṣa – Virāt-puruṣa – is a jīva who has the cosmos as his body. From his primal body, manifested everything, inclusive of the sun, moon, earth, and beings such as the Devas and humans. The Supreme Being is the one who appears as Virāt-puruṣa and is the material and efficient cause of everything; though appearing, in part, as the world, He is truly untouched and transcendent; that all this is endorsed by the Puruṣa-sūkta is explicated in the Veda-bhāṣya. Virāt-puruṣa is referred to in the scripture even as ‘Virāj’ and as ‘Prajāpati’. The Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad says that at first he experienced fear, promptly realized the non-dual Truth, and became free from fear¹; it also expresses that in an earlier life, he destroyed, prior to others, all the obstacles to his becoming Virāt-puruṣa²; thus, the Upaniṣad patently presents him as a jīva. It also puts across that while remaining the same Virāj, he partitioned himself into two and proceeded to manifest the host of male and female creatures; having done so, he discerned, “aham vāva sr̥ṣṭir asmi – I am indeed all this creation.”³ Thus, Virāt-puruṣa is a jīva, and his body includes many a body animated by a jīva. The sun and the earth are parts of Virāt-puruṣa’s body; one prescribed form of meditation involves conceiving the sun as his eye and the earth as his feet.⁴ We know from the scripture that there is a jīva whose body is the sun and another whose body is the earth. The Atharva-veda-saṁhitā has a beautiful hymn – the Bhū-sūkta – addressed to the goddess with the earth for her body. Two descriptive verses of this Bhū-sūkta are: “yasyāṁ samudra uta sindhur āpo yasyām annaṁ kr̥ṣṭayaḥ saṁbabhūvuḥ / yasyām idaṁ jinvati prāṇad ejat sā no bhūmiḥ pūrva-peye dadhātu – May the Earth (goddess identified as the earth), wherein seas, rivers, and other waterbodies exist, wherein food and humans came to be, and wherein what lives and stirs obtains enjoyment bestow upon us precedence in what is fit to imbibe.”¹ “girayas te parvatā himavanto ’raṇyaṁ te pr̥thivi syonam astu – O Earth (goddess of the earth), may your hills, snow-clad mountains, and woods be pleasing (to us).”²

It can be seen that a goddess – and not an inert object – is reverentially addressed here and also that she is described as having seas, rivers, mountains, and forests, all of which, we know, are located in our familiar earth; clearly, the earth is presented here as the goddess’s body. In, especially, the Itihāsas and Purāṇas, she is also portrayed as having the form of a glorious female with hands and legs and with a size far less than that of the earth. This is, however, not incompatible with her being a jīva with the whole earth as her body; Lord Kr̥ṣṇa, for instance, had the form that was seen in the battlefield as seated in Arjuna’s chariot and also the cosmic form (viśva-rūpa) that He enabled Arjuna to behold. Rivers that are in the body of this Bhū-devī are, in turn, the bodies of goddess such as Gaṅgā and Yamunā, who are jīvas. In the Mahānārayaṇa-upaniṣad, a mantra that, as per the Veda-bhāṣya, is meant to be chanted while standing in navel-deep water for a bath and which we chant during pūjā to invoke the presence of holy rivers in the water to be used for the Lord’s abhiṣeka is: “imaṁ me gaṅge yamune sarasvati śutudri stomaṁ sacatā paruṣṇiyā / asikniyā marudvr̥dhe vitatastayārjīkīye śrṇuhyā suṣomayā – O Gaṅgā, O Yamunā, O Sarasvatī, O Śutudrī, O Marudvadhā, together with Paruṣṇī, Asiknī, Vitastā, Ārjīkīyā and Suṣomā, hear this hymn of mine and (entering this water) become coupled (with me).”¹

Goddesses identified with rivers are addressed here and not inert, flowing waters. As per the Rāmāyaṇa, while crossing the river Gaṅgā, Sītā offered prayers to Goddess Gaṅgā, addressed her as “devi subhage – O goddess, O blessed one”² and even referred to deities “tvat tīravāsīni – dwelling on your banks.”³ Later, while crossing the Yamunā in a raft, she prayed to Goddess

Yamunā, saying, “svasti devi tarāmi tvāṁ – O goddess, may all be well. I am crossing you.”¹ It is clear that Sītā viewed the flowing waters of the Gaṅgā and Yamunā as the bodies of the deities, for, while addressing them, she said, “your banks” and, “I am crossing you.” Hence, as revealed by the scripture, the body of a river-goddess, a jīva, is a part of the body of the earth-goddess, a jīva, and that body is a portion of the cosmic body of Virāt-puruṣa, a jīva. Apart from rivers, the Bhū-sūkta speaks of the ocean as a part of Bhū-devī’s body. There is a jīva whose body is the big ocean (samudra). The Rāmāyaṇa conveys that Samudra-deva rose up entirely from the waters of the ocean, stood in front of Lord Rāma, and humbly stated that, by nature, “agādho ’ham aplavaḥ – I am fathomless and (hence) not fordable.”² These words of his are about his body, like that of a person who says with reference to his body, “I am a human.” The text states that Samudra-deva emerged from the ocean accompanied by serpents, had lotus-petal-like eyes, and was adorned with various ornaments. Having stated that in Bhū-devī’s body, there is a jīva whose body is the ocean, I opted to show that as per the Rāmāyaṇa, Samudra-deva is fathomless as the ocean and also has a godly form far smaller than the ocean just to illustrate that the scripture does present such dual aspects as compatible for the deities of the earth, ocean, and rivers.

Apart from rivers and the ocean, the Bhū-sūkta plainly mentions – and I cited this part (‘araṇyam te pr̥thivi’) – forests as a part of Bhū-devī’s body. As forests consist of trees, and trees have, says the scripture, jīvas, there reside in Bhū-devī’s body, jīvas whose bodies are trees.

His Holiness (continuing): A fetus is animated by a jīva and so is a woman. Hence, in the case of a woman with a fetus in her womb, there are two jīvas abiding within her; as in the case of the jīvas of Virāj and Bhū-devī, the domains of these two jīvas are not identical. After Indra divided Diti’s single fetus into 49, there were 49 distinct fetuses and, thus, 49 jīvas within her body, which was animated by a separate jīva, that of Diti herself; here too, the domains of the jīvas were not identical. In the Antaryāmi-brāhmaṇa of the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad, Uddālaka tests Yājñavalkya by asking him two profound questions. Before this, he tells him how he first heard these questions and their answers. He says: “madreṣv avasāma patañcalasya kāpyasya gr̥heṣu yajñam adhīyānās tasyāsīd bhāryā gandharvagr̥hītā tam apr̥cchāma ko ’sīti so ’bravīt kabandha ātharvaṇa iti so ’bravīt pātañcalam kāpyaṁ yājñikāṁś ca vettha nu tvaṁ kāpya tat sūtraṁ yenāyaṁ ca lokaḥ paraś ca lokaḥ sarvāṇi ca bhūtāni sandr̥bdhāni bhavantīti so ’bravīt patañcalaḥ kāpyo nāhaṁ tad bhagavan vedeti – We dwelt in Madra in Patañcala Kāpya’s home, studying the scriptures on sacrifices. His wife was possessed by a Gandharva. We asked him, ‘Who are you?’ He replied, ‘I am Kabandha, Atharvan’s son.’ He questioned Patañcala Kāpya and those learning the texts on sacrifices saying, ‘Kāpya, do you know that sūtra (literally thread, referring here to Hiraṇyagarbha, the cosmic prāṇa) by which this world, the other world, and all beings are strung together?’ Patañcala Kāpya said, ‘Venerable sir, I do not know it.’”¹

Kabandha, the Gandharva, then asked Kāpya whether he knew about that ‘antaryāmin’ who controls all from within. Kāpya said that he did not know. Kabandha then highlighted the greatness of the knowledge of the sūtra and the antaryāmin and, “tebhyo ’abravīt – He described both these to them.”² From this account, it is inferable that the Gandharva’s jīva entered into and controlled the whole of the body that belonged to another jīva, that of Patañcala Kāpya’s wife; the entry was not into a dead body but into one wherein Kāpya’s wife’s jīva continued to be; the Gandharva remained in and held control over Kāpya’s wife’s body for only a while with the aim of imparting the profound, invaluable teaching to Kāpya and his pupils. Unlike the case of the fetus and a woman where there are two jīvas present within the woman’s body but with different spheres of influence, here, for a while, the whole of a woman’s body was the common domain of two jīvas, but with one exercising full control over it and the other willy-nilly quiescent. In the Anuśāsana-parvan of the Mahābhārata, Bhīṣma, blessed with omniscience, is said to have recounted to Yudhiṣṭhira the story of Vipula.¹ Devaśarman knew that attracted by his wife Ruci’s great beauty, Indra longed to copulate with her; he successfully kept Indra at bay. When he was to leave to perform a sacrifice, he told his dear disciple Vipula to safeguard Ruci from Indra during his absence; Vipula promised to do so. He spelt out to his disciple how Indra could, by his power of illusion, assume just about any form, and then departed. Vipula reflected on how to counter every possible approach of Indra. He concluded that shielding Ruci from outside would not be infallible and that he needed to enter into Ruci’s body to rule out all scope for Indra defiling her. He was an adept at yoga and had the ability to leave his body and move into another one. He assessed the implications of occupying his Guru’s wife’s body. Not discerning any other infallible means to thwart Indra, and firm that he must, at any cost, carry out his Guru’s instruction to safeguard Ruci, he passionlessly entered Ruci’s body in its entirety. Taking up an extraordinarily handsome form, Indra came to where Ruci was. He saw nearby Vipula’s body, with eyes fixed and without any sign of life. Ruci was struck by his handsomeness and wanted to rise and enquire who he was. However, she found that she was unable to get up because Vipula, who was within her, held her body in check. She was unaware of Vipula’s presence in her body. All she knew was that she wanted to rise but could not do so. Indra told her who he was and that he had come to her full of desire for her. Vipula heard this. Noticing from signs in her body that she wanted to rise and speak to Indra, he restrained her body and all her senses by his power of yoga. Distressed at finding her unresponsive, Indra repeatedly asked her to come to him. She wanted to respond to him. However, the words that came from her mouth were not those that she wanted to utter. Vipula spoke through her mouth and disapprovingly asked Indra, “What is the point of your visit?” Ruci was pained to find that she said this. Indra became sad. The linguistic refinement in what he heard from Ruci led him to realize that the words were not those of Ruci. With his divine vision, he then saw that Vipula was in Ruci’s body. Observing that Vipula was endowed with intense tapas, he was overcome with fear. Vipula quit Ruci’s body and returned to his own body. He then severely reprimanded Indra; he added that as he found him wretched, he did not wish to punish him; he told him that his sagacious Guru possessed tremendous power and warned Indra in no uncertain terms that his Guru would annihilate Indra if he showed up before him. Without saying a word, Indra fled in fear. A muhūrta (48 minutes) later, Devaśarman returned to his āśrama. Vipula prostrated before him. After his Guru had rested and was seated with Ruci, Vipula reported all that had transpired. Devaśarman approved of and appreciated what Vipula had done and specially blessed him. In this case, for some time, there were two jīvas – those of Ruci and Vipula – in a single human body; both were simultaneously, independently, and even incompatibly active, with Ruci and Vipula having different thoughts, feelings, and intentions; unlike the jīvas of a woman and a fetus, both had the same domain, Ruci’s full body.

A narrative in the Taittirīya-saṁhitā is: “devāsurāḥ saṁyattā āsan te devā bibhyato ’gniṁ prāviśan tasmād āhur agniḥ sarvā devatā iti te agnim eva varūthaṁ kr̥tvāsurān abhyabhavan – The Devas and the Asuras were set for war; scared, the Devas entered into (the body of) Agni; hence, it is said, ‘Agni is all the Devas.’ Making (the body of) Agni their fortification, they vanquished the Asuras.”¹ The import of the statement, ‘They (Devas) entered into Agni (te agniṁ prāviśan)’ is clarified in the Veda-bhāṣya; by recourse to the yogic means to enter into the body of another, the Devas, that is their jīvas, left their bodies and went into Agni’s body. Here, though independent, the jīvas in Agni’s body fully cooperated and, using that fiery body, achieved their end of defeating the Asuras.

His Holiness (continuing): Thus, as per the scripture, inside one jīva’s body, there can be the body of another jīva, with the experiential domains of the two jīvas being their own bodies, one of which includes the other; for instance, Bhū-devī’s body and sphere of experience, the earth, is within Virāt-puruṣa’s sphere of experience and body, the whole cosmos. Further, there can be, as in the cases of Kabandha and Kāpya’s wife, Vipula and Ruci, and the Devas and Agni, two or more jīvas dwelling in and having for their domains one and the same body, in its entirety. It is also contextually relevant that the bodies of two distinct jīvas can be partially distinct and partially united. There is scriptural support for this. I shall present it in two parts to cover two kinds of union. When a river such as the Gaṅgā merges with the ocean, it no more has the form of a river or its own name. An example in the Praśna-upaniṣad is, “yathemā nadyaḥ syandamānāḥ samudrāyaṇāh samudraṁ prāpyāstaṁ gacchanti bhidyete tāsāṁ nāma-rupe samudra ity evaṁ procyate – Just as rivers flowing towards the ocean reach the ocean and disappear, their names and forms cease to be, and they are referred to as just the ocean…”¹

The Muṇḍaka-upaniṣad has this example: “yathā nadyaḥ syandamānāḥ samudre ’staṁ gacchanti nāma-rūpe vihāya – Just as rivers flow on and disappear into the ocean, relinquishing names and forms…”² An example presented in the Chāndogya-upaniṣad is: “imāḥ somya nadyaḥ purastāt prācyaḥ syandante paścāt pratīcyastāḥ samudrāt samudram evāpiyanti sa samudra eva bhavati – Good-natured one, these eastward rivers flow to the east and the westward ones to the west. Their fountainhead is the ocean (by way of evaporation, clouds, and rain) and they merge into the ocean itself. They become just that ocean.”¹ A river ceases to be a river and loses its identity upon its fully merging with the ocean; the Upaniṣads take this as a given. It follows that where the river Gāṅgā becomes one with the ocean, the river-body of Goddess Gaṅgā, a jīva, unidentifiably dissolves into the body of Samudra-deva, a jīva. I shall now consider the case of a river uniting with another river. The river Yamunā unites with the river Gaṅgā at Prayag; this is observable and is spoken of even in the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata, and the Purāṇas. That the Gaṅgā flows to the ocean and the Yamunā is a tributary of the Gaṅgā is evidenced, for instance, by Lord Rāma referring to the river Gāṅgā as “sāgaraṁ-gamām – she who attains the ocean”² and the Rāmāyaṇa pointing out, “gaṅgāṁ yamunābhipravartate – The river Yamunā flows to the Gaṅgā.”³ The river that flows after the confluence of the Gaṅgā and the Yamunā at Prayāg is not at all called Yamunā and is known as just Gaṅgā. Nevertheless, there are a few significant differences between the merger of the Yamunā with the Gaṅgā and the merger of a river with the ocean as highlighted in the Upaniṣads. After a river merges with the ocean, it loses its riverine form (rūpa) and just the ocean, which is not a river, persists; on the other hand, even after the merger of a river with another river what continues is a river only. Importantly, the scripture speaks of even tributaries of rivers as going to the ocean. Thus, it is stated in the Mahābhārata, in the Vana-parvan, “samudragā mahāvegā yamunā yatra pāṇḍava – O Pāṇdava (Yudhiṣṭhira), the fast-flowing Yamunā, which attains the ocean, is present there.”¹ The Matsya-purāṇa, Mārkaṇḍeya-purāṇa, and the Brahma-purāṇa list the rivers originating in the Sahyādri range (Western Ghats); the Godavari, Krishna, Tungabhadra, and Bhima rivers are listed by all of them. For instance, the list of the Matsya-purāṇa is: “godāvarī bhīmarathī kr̥ṣṇaveṇī ca vañjulā / tuṅgabhadrā suprayogā vāhyā kāverī caiva tu / dakṣiṇāpatha-nadyas tāḥ sahyapādād viniḥsrutāḥ – The Godāvarī, Bhīmarathī (=Bhima), Kr̥ṣṇa-venī (=Krishna), Vañjulā, Tuṅgabhadrā, Suprayogā, Vāḥyā, and the Kāverī are rivers of the south having their source in the Sahya-mountains.”² We know that the Godavari, Krishna, and Kaveri do flow into the sea; that the Tungabhadra is a tributary of the Krishna, joins the latter from the south, and is itself the outcome of the confluence of the Tunga and the Bhadra; and that the river Bhima is a tributary of the Krishna and joins the latter from the north. It is significant that the Matsya-purāṇa, Mārkaṇḍeya-purāṇa, and the Brahma-purāṇa unanimously go on to assert, after giving a few more lists of rivers, that every one of the rivers listed reaches the ocean. For instance, the Brahma-purāṇa declares: “sarvāḥ puṇyāḥ sarasvatyaḥ sarvā gaṅgāḥ samudragāḥ – All of them are sacred, are like the Sarasvatī and the Gaṅgā, and go to the ocean.”¹ In line with the scriptural position that tributaries attain the ocean, Bhagavatpāda has mentioned the Yamunā along with the Gaṅgā in His bhāṣya on the cited passage of the Praśna-upaniṣad: “tāsāṁ cāstaṁ gatānāṁ bhidyete vinaśyete nāma-rūpe gaṅgā-yamunetyādi-lakṣaṇe – The names and forms, such as Gaṅgā and Yamuṇā, of those rivers that have become merged (into the ocean) come to an end.”² Even after the rivers Tunga and Bhadra meet, neither loses its name, for the river that continues after they join is, as mentioned in the scripture itself, ‘Tuṅgabhadrā’. Hence, while upon a river merging with the ocean, it no more has its form (rūpa) as a river or its name (nāma), when a river joins another, what results is a river and, further, it can even be that both their names continue, as in the case of the rivers Tunga and Bhadra. Since the scripture makes known that the rivers such as the Gaṅgā and the Yamunā are the bodies of jīvas and that even after a river unites with another, it too proceeds to the ocean, and since it is known that a single river continues from the confluence of two rivers such as the Gaṅgā and the Yamunā, it follows that distinct jīvas may have bodies that are partially distinct and partially combined.

His Holiness (continuing): The bodies of conjoined twins are partially distinct and partially shared. For instance, the ‘Tocci’ twins about whom I first heard in 1956 had different heads, necks, arms, hearts, and stomachs but looked like one person below the navel and shared an undivided large intestine and anus. What the scripture has made known about two distinct jīvas with watery bodies that are partially distinct and partially combined can be applied to and serve as an analogy for conjoined twins. Thus, with the scripture in mind, we accept that conjoined twins such as the Tocci twins have different jīvas. As we admit two distinct jīvas in conjoined twins, we readily appreciate the possibility of conjoined twins having their own personalities, thoughts, feelings, and views; not falling asleep and awakening simultaneously; being at odds at times, and usually co-operating with each other; the case of Vipula and Ruci is illustrative of discordance between two jīvas in a body, while the case of the Devas and Agni is illustrative of the jīvas in a body co-operating. In the course of my first stay at Calcutta (in 1964, from 25th March to 21st April), I heard from a senior doctor about a strange case of conjoined twins. A boy born in Bengal in the 18th century had two heads; but for the second head, he looked like a normal person with one head, one face, one neck, one torso, two arms, and two legs; the second head, with a full face, was coupled to the top of the other head, was inverted, and ended in a neck-like stump unlinked to the torso. The inverted mouth attempted to suck when the boy’s mother placed her breast to it; the eye movements in the two heads were generally independent; when the boy slept, the eyes in the abnormal head could be open and move; the expressions in the two faces were not the same, with, for instance, a smile in the normal face not being mirrored in the other one. The inverted and the normal head housed brains that were independent. When four years of age, the two-headed boy died due to being bitten by a cobra. On the day after he told me all this, the doctor showed me a sketch of the boy that had been originally published years ago; the inverted head with a dead-ended, partial neck was astonishing.¹ As a contrast to this case, he mentioned that a pair of conjoined twins born in Thailand in the 19th century were two full persons joined by a band of tissue at the base of their chests; they shared sensations only in its middle.²

The presence of two jīvas is readily presumable in the case of the twins born in Thailand; a pair of rivers that are the bodies of two jīvas and join at almost the end of their courses towards the ocean may be invoked as a scripture-based analogy for these conjoined twins who shared only a short band of tissue, and more specifically, the middle of that band. In the radical case of the two-headed boy, the presence of two jīvas may be admitted by invoking as a scripture-based analogy either a fetus borne by a woman or a river merging with the ocean. Lacking a heart, lungs and stomach, the inverted twin was dependent for survival upon the main twin, like a fetus on its mother. Taking into consideration factors such as that the inverted skull was fused with the main skull and there was skin-continuity, the primary twin’s body can be thought of as subsuming the inverted head. Therefore, on the scripture-based analogy of the fetus’ jīva’s body being within and nourished by the mother’s jīva’s body, it is presumable that in the case of the two-headed boy, there were two jīvas, that of the secondary twin and that of the main twin, with the former jīva’s body, the odd head, being within and nourished by the latter jīva’s body. If the secondary twin’s body, the odd head, is viewed as uncontained in the primary twin’s body, the presence of two jīvas may be presumed based on the two-jīva river-ocean analogy. Like a river joining the ocean, the secondary twin’s body joined the primary twin’s body and, like the ocean providing water to the river via, as recognized in the scripture, evaporation, clouds, and rain, the primary body provided sustenance via blood to the secondary body.

His Holiness (continuing): The scripture makes known that worms have jīvas and provides different instances – such as of Virāt-puruṣa and Bhū-devī, a mother and a fetus, Kabandha and Kāpya’s wife, Vipula and Ruci, the Devas and Agni, the river Gāṅgā and the ocean, and the river Yamunā and the river Gaṅgā – of the possibility of there being more than one jīva in a body, of a jīva’s body containing and nourishing another jīva’s body, of dominance, discordance and co-operation among jīvas in a body, of a jīva’s body merging with another jīva’s body, and of jīvas having partially distinct and partially shared bodies. Hence, as in the human cases of the Tocci twins, the twins from Thailand, and the two-headed boy of Bengal, we presume, with the scripture as basis, that flatworms with two or more heads with distinct brains house two or more jīvas and recognize the possibility of some conflicting and mostly non-conflicting behaviour in such worms.

His Holiness (continuing): I shall now take up the case of jīvas in grafted plants. Unlike humans and flatworms, plants have no heads, brains or nerves; also, conflicting behaviour such as that of a two-headed worm trying to move in two directions simultaneously is not noticed in plants. However, the scripture not only explicitly says that plants have jīvas, as do humans, but also that, like a jīva in a human body, the jīva in a plant experiences joy and unhappiness. It points out the effect of a tree’s jīva withdrawing from a part of the tree. Also, it draws several parallels between humans and trees. It is said in the Chāndogya-upaniṣad: “asya somya mahato vr̥kṣasya yo mule ’bhyāhanyāj jīvan sraved yo madhye ’bhyāhanyāj jīvan sraved yo ’gre ’bhyāhanyāj jīvan sravet sa eṣa jīvenātmanānuprabhūtaḥ pepīyamāno modamānas tiṣṭhati / asya yadekām śākhāṁ jīvo jahāty atha sā śuṣyati dvitīyāṁ jahāty atha sā śuṣyati tr̥tīyāṁ jahāty atha sā śuṣyati sarvaṁ jahāti sarvaḥ śuṣyati – Amiable one, if one were to strike at the root of this big tree, it would, living on, exude fluid; if one were to hit its middle, it would, being alive, exude fluid; if one were to strike its top, it would, still living, ooze fluid. Being pervaded by the jīvātman, this tree stands, freely drinking (water and nutrients through its roots) and experiencing joy. If the jīva discards one (diseased or damaged) branch of this tree, that branch dries up; if it leaves a second branch, that dries up; if it abandons a third branch, that dries up. If it leaves the tree completely, the whole tree dries up.”¹

Tree-human parallels in the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad: “yathā vr̥kṣo vanaspatis tathaiva puruṣo ’mr̥ṣā / tasya lomāni parṇāni tvag asyotpāṭikā bahiḥ // tvaca evāsya rudhiraṁ prasyandi tvaca utpaṭaḥ / tasmāt tad ātr̥ṇṇāt praiti raso vr̥kṣād ivāhatāt // māṁsāny asya śakarāṇi kināṭaṁ snāva tat sthiram / asthīny antarato dārūṇi majjā majjopamā kr̥tā // yad vr̥kṣo vr̥kṇo rohati mūlān navataraḥ punaḥ / martyaḥ svin mr̥tyunā vr̥kṇaḥ kasmān mūlat prarohati //… yat samūlam āvr̥heyur vr̥kṣaṁ na punar ābhavet / martyaḥ svin mr̥tyunā vr̥kṇaḥ kasmān mūlat prarohati //… vijñānam ānandaṁ brahma – It is true that as is a large tree¹, so is a person. His hairs are its leaves; his skin is its outer bark. Blood flows out from his skin; sap oozes out from its bark; thus, like sap issuing from a tree that is cut, blood comes out from a person who is wounded. His flesh is its inner bark. His tendons are its inmost layer of bark; both are tough. His bones, which are inner to the tendons, are its wood, which is within the inmost part of its bark. His marrow is on par with its pith. If a tree is cut through, it grows up anew from its roots. From which root does a person spring up again (in a new life) when cut down by death? ... If a tree is taken out with its roots, it does not grow again. From which root does a man arise after he is cut down by death? ... (The Upaniṣad’s answer to the question:) Brahman, which is absolute consciousness and bliss.”²

As made known by the Chāndogya-upaniṣad, unlike a branch that is animated by a tree’s jīva, a branch that the jīva quits dries up. It is indisputable that the drying up of a branch that has been vacated by the jīva is not instantaneous; it is gradual, depending on factors such as the ambient temperature, humidity and breeze. As the scripture has spoken of a tree’s jīva giving up even an unseparated, damaged branch, surely, the jīva leaves a branch that is severed from the tree; such a branch too starts to dry up. If duly planted before it dries out, the cut-out branch might begin to develop into a tree and be animated by a distinct jīva; after all, as per the scripture, every living plant is animated by a jīva. While a branch that has been planted may become animated by a jīva, nowhere does the scripture state or suggest that in and of itself, a chopped out branch is animated by a jīva. If it were the case that even a severed branch is enlivened by a jīva, it would be on par with an uncut, live branch of the tree; however, it is comparable to a jīva-forsaken, unseparated branch that starts to dry up.

The Manu-smr̥ti and the Mahābhārata have likened a dead human body to a piece of wood and a clod of mud;¹ a corpse is unanimated by and bereft of a jīva and so is a piece of wood that is not a part of a tree, and a clod of mud. Unlike a branch that is chopped off from a tree and discarded by the tree’s jīva, a live stump of a tree with the roots intact in the ground and in a position to regrow into a tree continues to be animated by the tree’s jīva; accordingly, in the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad, after comparing a tree and a human body, it is pointed out that a tree that is cut through leaving a stump with the roots intact and is alive regrows from its roots into one with a fresh form. Similarly, in the case of grafting that I had given earlier, the branches that are cut out, for being grafted, from three hibiscus plants that bear red, yellow and white flowers are discarded by the jīvas of the three plants, while the hibiscus plant that is cut through a few inches above the soil and onto which the grafting is done continues to be animated by that plant’s jīva. After the portions obtained from the three hibiscus plants are coupled to this plant, its jīva itself begins to animate the three grafts. The grafted portions become integral parts of this plant and it then bears red, yellow and white flowers in different branches; the whole plant is animated by this one jīva. As in this case, a bud taken from a rose plant is unanimated by that plant’s jīva but becomes animated by the jīva of the rose plant to which that bud is properly grafted. Similarly, a branch that is cut from a tree and grafted to a branch of another tree is animated by the latter tree’s jīva as a part of that tree.

His Holiness (continuing): I had mentioned an instance of grafting occurring in nature; a sandalwood tree and an Indian blackberry tree had some coupling between their roots and, consequently, the blackberry fruits had a sandalwood taste and smell. In cases of natural grafts such as this one, the scriptural analogy that is applicable is that of two rivers combining. Like any other tree, this Indian blackberry tree had its own jīva and so did the sandalwood tree; like two independent rivers joining at almost the ends of their courses, the bodies of these jīvas were distinct except for the coupling at the level of the roots; the case of the conjoined twins of Thailand who were attached by just a band of tissue is a rough human parallel. A long-used method of grafting in the case of mangoes¹ is as follows. A hardy mango plant is grown in a pot and taken near a tree that yields the desired variety of mangoes, such as Banganapalli. A branch of the mango plant in the pot is partially sliced lengthwise for a few inches and the same is also done on a low-lying branch of the tree that yields the desired mangoes. The pot is placed such that the two exposed portions are accurately aligned; they are duly pressed against one another and bound. In due course, the two branches become joined. After this, the branch of the tree is separated from the tree by cutting it below the joint; the consequence is that the branch is thereafter coupled to, and a part of, just the potted mango plant, which, when planted in the ground, grows and yields fruits of the desired variety. In this case, the two plants are fully separate initially and animated by separate jīvas. When a part of one’s branch and a part of the other’s branch are conjoined, the analogy of two rivers that join is applicable, with the two jīvas having bodies that are largely separate and partially common. After its separation, the branch that was initially animated by just the jīva of the tree and was then associated with both the jīvas, becomes a portion of just the potted mango plant and is, from then on, animated by just that

plant’s jīva. His Holiness (continuing): I had told you that I learnt from Hari that some response to light had been seen in flatworm-segments without eyes and that flatworms had been found to be sensitive to weak electric and magnetic fields¹. With regard to plants, I described the instance of sunflowers facing east at dawn, following the sun and turning from east to west during the day, and turning from west to east during the night so as to once again face the east by morning; the sunflower plant, like every other plant, lacks eyes. In such cases, some sense-organs other than those of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell appear to be involved; however, as per the scripture, the jīva transmigrates associated with just these five sense-organs, five organs of action such as that of speech, and the mind.¹ I shall, with some examples, go into the basis and scope of the scriptural classification and how such data becomes included in it. Sage Kaṇāda classifies karma (activity) in the Vaiśeṣika-sūtra, “utkṣepaṇam avakṣepaṇam ākuñcanaṁ prasāraṇaṁ gamanam iti karmāṇi – Propelling upwards, throwing down, contraction, expansion, and movement constitute action.”² Considering the potential objection that this fivefold classification of activity does not cover many other forms of activity, Praśastapāda explains in his esteemed bhāṣya: “gamanagrahaṇād bhramaṇarecanasyandanordhvajvalanatiryakpatananamanonnamanādayo gamanaviśeṣā eva na tu jātyantarāṇi – As gamana (movement) is mentioned, rotation, evacuation, flowing, flaming upwards, falling obliquely, prostrating, rising, etc., are all included as varieties of movement, not something disparate.” Lord Kr̥ṣṇa tells Arjuna that four kinds of pious people worship him: ārta, one who is afflicted (such as by disease or thieves); arthārthin, one who seeks wealth; jijñāsu, one who seeks to know (the Lord in reality); and jñānin, the knower of the Truth.³ It is not that the devotees who seek progeny or heaven or a means of enjoyment are left uncovered, for, as is pointed out in a sub-commentary (‘Bhāṣyārthaprakāśa’) on Bhagavatpāda’s bhāṣya and in commentaries based on the bhāṣya such as those of Madhusūdana-sarasvatī and Śrīdhara, such devotees are covered under the head ‘arthārthin, the seeker of artha, wealth’; it is pertinent that the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad includes the means to attain a higher world under ‘vittaiṣaṇā, the desire for wealth.’ Thus, in these instances, the classifications do encompass even what might seem to have been left out. The Vedānta-śāstra says that the Supreme’s māyā or prakr̥ti (root-nature) has no existence apart from the Supreme, manifests as everything material, inclusive of the five sense-organs and the mind, and has three ‘guṇas’; the three guṇas are ‘sattva,’ ‘rajas,’ and ‘tamas.’ The word ‘guṇa’ here is, as Bhagavatpāda has pointed out in His Bhagavadgītā-bhāṣya¹, a technical term² and does not refer to a quality or attribute different from and inhering in prakr̥ti. Māyā and prakr̥ti (root-nature) are spoken of in the Śvetāśvatara-upaniṣad as one and as wholly subservient to the Lord: “māyāṁ tu prakr̥tiṁ vidyān māyinaṁ tu maheśvaram – Know that māyā is prakr̥ti and that the great Lord is the master of māyā.”³ The guṇas are referred to in this Upaniṣad in, as per the bhāṣya that has been ascribed to Bhagavatpāda, the following mantras that describe the Lord and the jīva: “sarvam etad viśvam adhitiṣṭhaty eko guṇāṁś ca sarvān viniyojayed yaḥ – He who directs all the guṇas, He singly rules over this entire universe”¹ and “sa viśva-rūpas triguṇas trivartmā, prāṇādhipaḥ sañcarati sva-karmabhiḥ – He has various forms, is associated with the three guṇas, has three paths, presides over prāṇa, and transmigrates in keeping with his karmas.”² In the Bhagavad-gītā, the Lord has explicitly named the three guṇās and described their role, inclusive of in mental functions, in terms of the predominance of one or the other of the triad of guṇas. The interaction between a magnet and iron is referred to in an example in the Śānti-parvan of the Mahābhārata: “abhidravaty ayaskāntam ayo niścetanaṁ yathā / svabhāvahetujā bhāvā yadvad anyad apīdr̥śam – Just as an inert piece of iron promptly goes to a lodestone, so do the nature-born inclinations and all such else of a life become associated with the jīva in the next life.”³ While it is not stated anywhere in the scripture that the three guṇas are involved in any magnet’s influence, nonetheless, because it is specified in the scripture that māyā or prakr̥ti is what turns into everything and is characterized by these three guṇas, it follows that even a magnetic field should be deemed to involve the guṇas. This is discernible even from Lord Kr̥ṣṇa’s pointing out to Arjuna in the Anu-gītā after speaking extensively about the three guṇas: “paryāyeṇa pravartante tatra tatra tathā tathā / yat kiñcid iha loke ’asmin sarvam ete trayo guṇāḥ – These three guṇas characterize whatever there is in this entire world; they act serially everywhere and in all the circumstances.”¹

Just as Sage Kaṇāda’s classification of karma (activity) under five heads is, as properly understood, all-inclusive and the Lord’s fourfold grouping of devotees is, as duly discerned, comprehensive, so is the fivefold scriptural classification of sense-organs; just as the universality of the three guṇas and their inherence in a magnetic field are inferable from the scriptural teaching that the Supreme’s māyā or prakr̥ti manifests as the entire world and that it is characterized by the three guṇas, it can be known from the scriptural accounts of the five elements that the said five sense-organs are sufficient.

His Holiness (continuing): The Taittirīya-upaniṣad states that the element ‘ākāśa (space)’ arose from Brahman, and then, in causal succession, the elements ‘vāyu (air)’, ‘agni (fire)’, ‘āpas (water)’ and ‘pr̥thivī (earth).² Each of these has one characteristic quality; the characteristic qualities of these five elements are, in order, ‘śabda, (sound)’, ‘sparśa (touch)’, ‘rūpa (colour)’, ‘rasa (taste) and ‘gandha (smell)’; also, an element gets the qualities of the elements causally preceding it. This is spelt out in, for instance, the Śānti-parvan of the Mahābhārata in an account of Sage Vyāsa’s instruction to Sage Śuka.³

The five subtle elements that stem from the Supreme cannot be apprehended by means of the sense-organs. From what is stated in the Chāndogya-upaniṣad¹ about the Supreme combining subtle fire, water, and earth to give rise to gross fire, water, and earth and, thereby, the sun, moon, etc., and from the fact that the subtle elements ‘space’ and ‘air’ are also listed in the Taittirīya-upaniṣad, it is admitted that five gross elements arise, via combinations, from the five subtle ones and make up the familiar world, with the perceptible attributes of the objects in the world being but the five attributes – śabda, (sound)’, ‘sparśa (touch)’, ‘rūpa (colour)’, ‘rasa (taste), and ‘gandha (smell)’ – of the five elements. Each of the five sense organs is capable of grasping exactly one of the five perceptible attributes of the objects of the world; this is spelt out, for instance, by Lord Kr̥ṣna in the Anu-gītā.² Thus, from the scriptural accounts of the five subtle elements, their five attributes, and the five sense-organs, it follows that every kind of sensory perception in the world by every living entity, be it a worm, a plant or a human, is accounted for via these five sense-organs, just as all activities are covered in the Vaiśeṣika-sūtra under its five heads, the four-fold classification of devotees made in the Bhagavad-gītā is comprehensive, and as everything material, inclusive of a magnet’s field, is viewed as based on three guṇās.

His Holiness (continuing): In the Mahābhārata, in the Śānti-parvan, there is an in-depth account of a dialogue between Bharadvāja, the disciple, and Sage Bhr̥gu, the Guru; this occurs in the Nārada-purāṇa too. As part of a question, Bharadvāja remarks that trees lack sense-organs.¹ Sage Bhr̥gu teaches him, with examples as an aid, that a tree does have a jīva, has five sense-organs and that that jīva experiences pleasure and pain; for instance, he says that trees do sense and are affected by heat, with the withering of their leaves and flowers.² Thus, the scripture conveys, even explicitly, that plants and trees do have jīvas attended by five sense-organs. While the scripture does refer to functions that seem to call for additional sense-organs in trees and plants, it categorizes sense-organs into five only; it follows that the scripture includes, at least implicitly, such functions in the ambit of its fivefold classification of sense-organs.

While the case of sunflowers following the movement of the sun in the sky from east to west is not mentioned in the scripture, the case of lotuses blooming at sunrise and closing upon the sun setting is referred to therein. For instance, the blooming of the lotus upon sunrise is referred to in the Mahābhārata’s Śānti-parvan itself, before and after the portion containing Sage Bhr̥gu’s answer to Bharadvāja about the sense-organs in plants.³ Besides, Sage Bhr̥gu himself indicates, with the aid of an example, that plants can, through the organ of sight, sense light.¹ Thus, the scripture recognizes that though lacking eyes, plants can sense and respond to light and does so without positing that a plant’s jīva is associated with more than the said five sense-organs. The Aitareya-upaniṣad pithily refers to jīva-animated life-forms on earth under four heads, while the Chāndogya-upaniṣad does so under three heads;² one head is ‘aṇḍaja, born of an egg’ and another is ‘jarāyuja, born of a womb’; all members of the plant kingdom are referred to in both these Upaniṣads by means of the term ‘udbhijja’, whose literal meaning is “born of that which penetrates upwards.” In the Anu-gītā, where also earthly life-forms with jīvas are mentioned under four heads, Lord Kr̥ṣna refers to all members of the plant kingdom through the term ‘udbhijja’ and explains it thus: “bhittvā tu pr̥thivīṁ yāni jāyante kālaparyayāt / udbhijjāni ca tāny āhur bhūtāni dvijasattamāḥ – O best amongst the twice-born, those entities (plants) are called udbhijja as, in due course, they separate the earth (soil) and come forth.”³

A seed sown in the soil produces a shoot that grows in the upward direction through the soil and emerges from the ground; this characteristic of plants is referred to in their appellation, ‘udbhijja.’ Soil is opaque and a seed sown in and fully covered by it is, in contrast to a lotus in bloom, not exposed to light. Still, even a seed that has been sown without regard to its orientation gives rise to a shoot that grows in the direction of the surface and a root that develops in the opposite direction; this fact is recognized even in the scripture. For a seed that has been sown without regard to its orientation and is fully covered by opaque soil to produce a shoot that heads in a direction that is the opposite of that of the earth’s gravitational pull¹ and a root that, on the other hand, grows in the direction of the earth’s gravitational pull, plants must be able to sense and respond growth-wise to gravity. By asking an agricultural scientist, I confirmed that such is the case; he also said that the phenomenon has been experimentally studied since the last century (19ᵗʰ century) and described some of the experiments to me; one of the points that I gathered is that if the ends of the roots (the root-caps) are cut off, the direction of root-growth ceases to be that of the pull of gravity.²

Not only in the Upaniṣads and the Mahābhārata but also in the Purāṇas¹, the word ‘udbhijja’ is preferentially employed to refer to the members of the plant kingdom when grouping life-forms animated by jīvas; the upward growth of a shoot from a seed sown in the ground is, thus, a scripturally underscored characteristic of plants. For a shoot to grow in a direction opposite to that of earth’s gravitational pull, some means of sensing other than the five sense-organs (of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell) seems to be called for but the very scripture that pointedly mentions such growth never recognizes, even tacitly, the existence of any additional sense-organ. Moreover, with regard to the upward-directed growth of a creeper that entwines a tree-trunk, the scripture points, in the form of Sage Bhr̥gu’s teaching, to the need for a means of sensing direction and to one of the five sense-organs, not one other than the aforesaid five.² Thus, though the scripture does not overtly say anything about the role of a sense-organ in the upward-directed growth of a shoot stemming from a seed planted in the ground, there is justification to take it that the scripture implicitly accepts the role of a means of sensing here also but not of one distinct from the five sense-organs spoken of by it. Sage Bādarāyaṇa devotes a Brahma-sūtra³ to elucidating what the word ‘udbhijja’ occurring in the Chāndogya-upaniṣad’s classification of life-forms encompasses and, while expounding this aphorism in the Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya, Bhagavatpāda brings out the etymological sense of the word ‘udbhijja.’ However, He does not see any difficulty whatsoever in the number of sense-organs associated with a jīva being just five, as clearly ascertained by Him earlier in the Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya, and a sprout arising from a seed sown in and covered by soil being reliably able to grow, as implied by the word ‘udbhijja’, in the upward direction. At this point, I thought (in 1973, while thinking of śāstra-based answers to the self-posed questions about worms, plants and humans,) of the possibility of scientists someday finding that, like gravity, magnetism can influence the growth of plants from seeds.¹ As the śāstra classifies all that falls within the ken of the senses under five heads and specifies exactly one sense-organ for each of these five categories of sense-objects, there will be no need to posit any additional sense-organ to account, in the terms of the scripture, for plants sensing magnetism just as there is no requirement to do so for plants sensing the direction of gravitational attraction or sensing light. Likewise, in the light of the scriptural classification of sense-objects and sense-organs under five heads each, no additional sense-organ need be admitted to account for any sensitivity to light displayed by a flatworm in the absence of eyes or by it to electric and magnetic fields.

His Holiness (continuing): I had posed to myself (in 1973) correlated questions of the following kind on the number of jīvas possibly involved in the actual and potential births of flatworms, plants, and humans: “If a worm is cut into several parts, each of which regenerates into a worm, do the parts become animated by jīvas that were latent in the first worm or by jīvas that entered the parts from elsewhere? If it is supposed that the jīvas were latent in the initial worm, it will have to be presumed that the initial worm had very many jīvas latent in it since the worms arising from the parts of the initial worm can, in turn, give rise to worms upon being sectioned, and the latter worms can, in their turn, give rise to worms, and the jīvas animating all such generations of worms must be those that were latent in and passed on from the initial worm. If it is presumed that the jīvas enter the segments of a worm from elsewhere, then it would have to be supposed that ever so many jīvas are ever at hand to enter and animate every regenerating segment of every flatworm that is sectioned or divides naturally at any place and at any time. Is the jīva that animates a planted cutting one that was earlier latent in the tree from which the cutting was taken? If yes, that tree must house numerous latent jīvas in it for it to be able to pass on jīvas to animate every tree-forming cutting that is ever taken from it. Alternatively, are very many jīvas at hand to enter and animate growing cuttings obtained from any plant at any time and at any place? Was the jīva that animates some human embryo latent earlier in the father’s sperm or in the mother’s ovum or did it come from elsewhere? In the first alternative, since any viable sperm could have been the one that fertilized the ovum and the number of sperms that a man sheds into his wife is very large, it may have to be supposed that very many jīvas were latent in the man. In the second alternative, it may have to be supposed that a female hosts, in her lifetime, many a latent jīva, for she is born with lakhs of egg-cells, a few thousands of these survive till she attains puberty and any one those that remain could have been the fertilized ovum. If it is supposed that the jīva of the embryo was not latent in either the father’s sperm or the mother’s ovum but entered from elsewhere, then it may need to be supposed that many jīvas are at hand to straightaway animate every human embryo arising naturally, or even in vitro in a laboratory, at any place and at any time. Similar are the options and their implications in the case of flatworms arising from the union of one worm’s ovarian egg-cell and another worm’s sperm and the case of a plant developing from a seed that results from an egg-cell-containing flower of a plant receiving sperm-yielding pollen from a flower of another plant.” My response to myself (in 1973) to the questions was directly based on what is revealed by the scripture about jīvas, such as their number and how and why they acquire a specific body.

His Holiness (continuing): As per the Garuḍa-purāṇa: “nānāvidhaśarīrasthā anantā jīvarāśayaḥ – Infinite are the jīvas, which occupy different kinds of bodies.”¹ That the kinds of bodies are very many but amongst them, the human body is what is uniquely suitable for a jīva to attain liberation from transmigration is taught therein thus: “caturaśītilakṣeṣu śarīreṣu śarīriṇām / na mānuṣaṁ vinānyatra tattvajñānaṁ tu labhyate – Among the 84 lakh kinds of bodies dwelt in by jīvas, the realization of the Supreme Reality is attained only in a human body.”²

The scripture recognizes jīva-animated organisms that are too minute to perceive; for instance, it is said in the Mahābhārata, “sūkṣmayonīni bhūtāni tarkagamyāni kānicit – These are creatures that are so minute that their existence is only inferred.”³ If there are many lakh different kinds of bodies and these include those that are too tiny to see, the number of individual bodies with jīvas must be very much greater. In fact, nowhere does the scripture accept that the number of jīvas is finite¹. No jīva has, as per the scripture, any beginning or end. This is ascertained in the Brahma-sūtra, “nātmāśruter nityatvāc ca tābhyaḥ – The jīvātman has no origin, for the Upaniṣads do not refer to its origin and because its eternality is known from them.”² The cycles of creation and dissolution too have no beginning or end. It is said in the Brahma-sūtras, “upapadyate cāpy upalabhyate ca – Also, this is logical and is stated in the scripture.”³ In His commentary on this aphorism, Bhagavatpāda has, cited the Veda and the Bhagavad-gītā and then written, “purāṇe cātītānāgatānāṁ ca kalpānāṁ na parimāṇam astīti sthāpitam – Furthermore, it is established in the Purāṇas that the previous and future cycles of creation are endless.”⁴ Suppose the number of jīvas, which have no origin, is finite in a cycle of creation. In each cycle, some jīvas do attain liberation; this is discernible even from the words of the scripture that at the close of a cycle, the jīvas in Brahma-loka attain absolute bodiless liberation along with Hiraṇyagarbha.⁵ Hence, the finite number of transmigrating jīvas must keep decreasing and the cycles of creation cannot continue forever. This implication of the supposition that the number of jīvas is finite is discordant with the scriptural position that the cycles of creation and dissolution are endless and has been mentioned in the Brahma-sūtras themselves.¹

The upshot of all this in the context of the questions is that no matter which of the alternatives mentioned is considered, the number of jīvas is never insufficient to satisfy it.

His Holiness (continuing): It is in keeping with its karma that a jīva animates or quits a body and never arbitrarily; the scripture is clear about this. A flatworm-segment or planted cutting or embryo is enlivened only by a specific jīva and not by just some jīva from among many. Even where the scripture refers to the passing of a jīva from a man into a woman, it speaks of only a particular jīva doing so. The passing of a jīva, via semen, from a man into a woman is spoken of in the Chāndogya-upaniṣad and Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad in the specific case of the jīvas returning from a heavenly realm to this world and being reborn here. These Upaniṣads and Lord Kr̥ṣṇa in the Bhagavad-gītā detail two paths; after describing the paths, the Lord tells Arjuna, “ekayā yāty anāvr̥ttim anyayāvartate punaḥ – By one, a person attains the state of non-return (by reaching Brahma-loka and finally attaining liberation there) and going by the other, he (reaches a heavenly realm and subsequently) returns again.”¹ The Lord later says about persons who perform Vedic sacrifices, acquire puṇya, and go by the second path to heaven: “te taṁ bhuktvā svargalokaṁ viśālaṁ kṣīṇe puṇye martyalokaṁ viśanti – Having enjoyed the extensive world of heaven, upon the exhaustion of their puṇya, they pass into the world of mortals.”² A part of what the Chāndogya-upaniṣad says about how a jīva comes back from a heavenly realm and takes a human birth is: “abhraṁ bhūtvā megho bhavati megho bhūtvā pravarṣati ta iha vrīhiyavā oṣadhivanaspatayas tila-māṣā iti jāyante ’to vai khalu durniṣprapataraṁ yo yo hy annam atti yo retaḥ siñcati tadbhūya eva bhavati – After becoming (associated with) a white cloud, he becomes (associated with) a rain-bearing cloud and descends as rain. The returning jīvas become (associated with) paddy, barley, herbs, trees, sesame, beans, etc. Release from these is indeed more difficult. He becomes one with (becomes associated with) whoever eats food and sheds semen into a female.”³ As ascertained in the Brahma-sūtras and explicated by Bhagavatpāda in His bhāṣya thereon and in His bhāṣya on the Chāndogya-upaniṣad, what the passage conveys is not that a jīva returning from a heavenly realm literally becomes an ‘abhra, a bearer of water but not a producer of rain⁴, a white cloud’ but that it merely becomes associated with such a cloud; it, likewise, only becomes associated with a ‘megha, what is capable of pouring down¹, a rain-bearing cloud’, with rain, and then with a plant such as rice, barley or sesame; the plant is not animated by this jīva and what animates it is a different jīva that abides and functions there in keeping with that jīva’s fructifying karma; in contrast to the jīva that animates the plant, the returning jīva is latent and, being akin to an unconscious person, experiences no pleasure or pain regardless of what happens to the plant. When a man eats what is got from the plant such as cooked rice or barley, the jīva passes into and becomes associated with him; here too, the jīva is dormant and experiences no pleasure and pain in that person’s body, which is animated by a distinct jīva due to that jīva’s fructifying karma. In the passage, this person is specified as the one who ‘annam atti, eats the food’ and ‘retaḥ siñcati, discharges semen into a woman.’ It is only after passing, via the discharged semen, into a woman that the jīva proceeds to obtain and animate, by virtue of its karma fructifying, its own body. The latent jīva’s return journey up to the stage of association with a plant and from the plant to the eater and shedder of semen is, as succinctly stated in the portion “ato vai khalu durniṣprapataraṁ – Release from these is more difficult,” fraught with many a difficulty. The difficulties are strikingly illustrated in the bhāṣya on the Chāndogya-upaniṣad.¹ Rain with which a returning jīva comes down from a rain-bearing cloud to the ground may fall on a precipice on a mountain, on a desert or on the ocean; the jīva-bearing water may be drunk by some animal or be carried by a river into the ocean; in every such case, as the water with which the jīva is associated would be unavailable to a plant such as barley or sesame, the latent jīva would not pass into the plant; if it ends up in the ocean, it would have to wait till it rises up with water evaporating from the ocean, becomes associated with a rain-bearing cloud and then comes down once again as associated with rain to pass into a plant such as barley. Passing from a plant to the right person is, as per the Upaniṣad, even more difficult. The plant may be eaten by an animal, or food, such as rice, obtained from it may be eaten by a child, a life-long celibate, a very aged man or a eunuch. In all such cases, the jīva would fail to end up in that person via whose semen it passes into a woman. The Chāndogya-upaniṣad’s next passage is, in part, “tad ya iha ramaṇīya-caraṇā abhyāśo ha yat te ramaṇīyāṁ yonim āpadyeran brāhmaṇa-yoniṁ vā kṣatriya-yoniṁ vā vaiśya-yoniṁ vā – Among them (returners from a heavenly realm), those who were doers of virtuous karmas in this world (in an earlier birth as a human being) quickly attain a good birth, as a Brāhmaṇa or a Kṣatriya or a Vāiśya.”¹

It is in a human birth that one is able to perform fresh karma and acquire merit and demerit; accordingly, the performance of karma is spoken of in this passage as having been done “iha, here, in this world.” By the word ‘abhyāśaḥ, quickly’, the Upaniṣad conveys that following association with the said male, the jīva that has returned from heaven with karma that is to fructify attains its own body soon.² The jīvas spoken of in this passage are those that experienced in a heavenly realm the fruit of, and exhausted, the karma responsible for their stay in that realm and return to this world with residual karma that bears fruit here. That jīvas return from a heavenly realm with residual karma has been ascertained in the Brahma-sūtra, “kr̥tātyaye ’nuśayavāṇ dr̥ṣṭasmr̥tibhyāṁ yathetam anevaṁ ca – On its virtuous karma (ensuring its stay in heaven) being exhausted, the jīva (returns to this world) with residual karma, as is known from the śruti and the smr̥ti, along the path by which it went there and differently also.”³ A smr̥ti-passage instanced by Bhagavatpāda in His bhāṣya on this Brahma-sūtra is the following Dharma-sūtra of Sage Gautama: “varṇā āśramāś ca svakarma-niṣṭhāḥ pretya karmaphalam anubhūya tataḥ śeṣeṇa viśiṣṭa-deśa-jāti-kula-rūpāyuḥ-śruta-vr̥tta-vitta-sukha-medhaso janma pratipadyante – Persons of different castes and orders of life who dedicatedly perform the karmas prescribed for them enjoy after death the fruits of their karmas (in heaven) and then, through their residual karmas, are reborn in first-rate environments, castes and families, endowed with good looks, long lifespans, much learning, proper conduct, affluence, happiness and great intelligence.”¹

The norm is that a virtuous and a sinful karma do not mitigate or cancel each other and that each of them distinctly yields its fruit. Thus, it is quite possible for a person who goes to heaven on account of his having performed virtuous karma to return and experience the fruit of his sinful karma through birth as an animal. The Chāndogya-upaniṣad teaches: “atha ya iha kapūya-caraṇā abhyāśo ha yat te kapūyāṁ yonim āpadyeran – Among them (returners from a heavenly realm), those who were performers of sinful karmas in this world (in an earlier birth as a human being) quickly attain a pitiful birth” and mentions, by way of illustration, rebirth as a dog or as a pig. It is said in the Purāṇas: “avaśyam eva bhoktavyaṁ kr̥taṁ karma śubhāśubham – One has to experience the fruit of every virtuous or sinful karma done by one”² and “nābhuktaṁ kṣīyate karma kalpa-koṭiśatair api – Without its fruit being experienced (by the one that performed it), no karma comes to an end even with the passing of hundreds of crores of cycles of creation.”¹ That the fruit of a virtuous or sinful karma done by a person in a life unerringly accrues to him in a subsequent life and not, due to any mix-up, to some other jīva is expressed in the Mahābhārata thus: “yathā dhenu-sahasreṣu vatso vindati mātaram / tathā pūrvakr̥taṁ karma kartāram anugacchati – A calf identifies and goes to its mother in the midst of very many cows; likewise, the karma done by a person in an earlier life follows him.”² From all this, it is clear that on returning from heaven, the jīva animates nothing else, be it a plant or an animal, other than the body that it acquires because of the fructification of the residual karma with which it returns; regardless of how great or many the potential difficulties might be in its passing into a plant such as barley and into a man through whose semen it reaches a woman, the jīva definitely obtains the body that it is to animate; as illustrated in the Chāndogya-upaniṣad by the mention of rebirth as a Brāhmaṇa soon (abhyāśaḥ) after the jīva becomes associated with a man and in the Gautama-dharma-sūtras by the mention of place, caste, family, and appearance, there is nothing arbitrary about which man it finally reaches, in which woman and when its body is conceived, and which body it acquires as per its karma. In this context, I thought (during my reflection in 1973) of the following words of the Nyāyasūtra-bhāṣya that accord with the scripture: “sattvasya garbhavāsānubhavanīyaṁ karma pitroś ca putraphalānubhavanīye karmaṇī mātur garbhāśaye śarīrotpattiṁ bhūtebhyaḥ prayojayanti – The karma of a person to experience a stay in a womb along with his father’s and mother’s karmas to experience parenthood prompt the formation, from the elements, of his body in his mother’s womb;”¹ “na sarvo dampatyoḥ saṁyogo garbhādhānahetur dr̥śyate tatrāsati karmaṇi na bhavati sati ca bhavati – It is seen that not every sexual union between a husband and wife results in a pregnancy; conception takes place following a sexual union when there is the karma for its occurrence and does not occur when such karma is absent.”² His Holiness (continuing): After presenting the two paths, by one of which a jīva attains Brahma-loka and does not return here and the other by which a jīva goes to a heavenly realm from which it has to come back, and describing how a jīva returns here and acquires a body, the Chāndogya-upaniṣad reveals: “athaitayoḥ pathor na katareṇacana tānīmāni kṣudrāṇy asakr̥d āvartīni bhūtāni bhavanti jāyasva mryasvety etat tr̥tīyaṁ sthānam – Then again, there are those who do not go by either of these two paths; such are these small creatures that take birth here again and again. This is the third state; it is referenced by the words (of direction of God), ‘Be born and die.’”¹ The number of jīvas returning from heaven and being reborn here at any time is a very small fraction of the jīvas that directly transmigrate here itself at that time; the latter include all the jīvas involved in the non-circuitous rebirth in this world of a human as a human, a human as an animal, a human as a plant, an animal as a human, an animal as an animal, a plant as an animal, and so on. There is no arbitrariness in which jīva passes from which body to which incipient body, this being settled even at the time of departure of the jīva. It is explained in the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad by means of an example how a jīva passes from the body that it is dwelling in to what shall become its next abode: “tad yatha tr̥ṇajalāyukā tr̥ṇasyāntaṁ gatvānyam ākramam ākramyātmānam upasaṁharaty evam evāyam ātmedaṁ śarīraṁ nihatyāvidyāṁ gamayitvānyam ākramam ākramyātmānam upasaṁharati – Just as a leech on a blade of grass goes to the end of the grass, takes hold of another blade of grass and then withdraws itself there, so does this jīvātman set aside this body – make this body senseless – take hold of new body and withdraw itself there.”² As explained by Bhagavatpāda in His bhāṣya on the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad, what is indicated when it is stated that the jīvātman sets aside, or renders senseless, its current gross body is that it ceases to identify itself with that body, as it does when it starts to dream; the import of the portion that it takes hold of a new body is that it envisages, through mental impressions, its next body; the import of the portion that it withdraws itself there is that it identifies itself with the envisioned new body, just as it creates a body in a dream and identifies itself, in the dream, with that body. Thus, just prior to leaving a body, a jīva obtains, involuntarily, an awareness of its next body, which it gets as per its karma; that this is so even in the case of a jīva on the verge of quitting a plant has been pointed out by Bhagavatpāda in His bhāṣya on the Chāndogya-upaniṣad. His Holiness (continuing): Direct acquisition of new bodies by jīvas even without their becoming associated with food or sperm is accepted by the scripture. This is taken up in the Brahma-sūtra, “na tr̥tīye tathopalabdheḥ – The specification of the five oblations (semen, food, etc.,) does not apply to the third state (that is mentioned in the Chāndogya-upaniṣad as that of those who do not go by either of the two paths) for this is discernible in the scripture.”¹ In His Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya, Bhagavatpāda has, while commenting on the Brahma-sūtra, “darśanāc ca – And because of observation,”² mentioned plants and organisms emerging from moisture and pointed out, “evam anyatrāpi bhaviṣyati – It is thus elsewhere also.”¹ The Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad speaks, in its khila-kāṇḍa (supplementary section), of a smr̥ti-based ritual known as ‘mantha’ to be performed by the householder who seeks to obtain that greatness which would enable him to acquire harmlessly the wherewithal to perform Vedic sacrifices; he is required to first observe a vow of subsisting on milk for 12 days, maintaining celibacy and restraint of speech, and sleeping on the bare ground. He should collect in a bowl or cup made of fig wood all the herbs that he is able to obtain and also various grains including the ten grains, such as rice and barley, that are specifically listed, crush them and soak them in curd, honey, and ghee in that fig-wood vessel, and stir them with a rod. Oblations of the resulting paste – the mantha – should be offered by him into fire, with the chanting of the prescribed mantras. Only a knower of prāṇa is qualified to perform this rite. After making the oblations, he should touch the mantha thinking of it as the cosmic prāna and chant a mantra. Finally, he should chant mantras and drink the mantha in four instalments. Just eulogizing the mantha rite, the text says, “ya enaṁ śuṣke sthaṇau niṣiñcej jāyerañ chākhāḥ praroheyuḥ phalāśāni – If he (who meditates on prāṇa) were to sprinkle this sanctified mantha on a dry stump, branches and leaves would start to grow.”² In His bhāṣya on this, Bhagavatpāda has explained “śuṣke sthāṇau, on a dry stump” as “on a lifeless stump (gata-prāṇe).” This then grows branches and leaves; it becomes, explains Bhagavatpāda, “one that has life (jīvataḥ),” one having a jīva. Direct entry of a jīva from without into the stump is implicit in the coming to life of the dead stump spoken of in this passage of the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-upaniṣad. The yogic power to leave one’s body and enter into another body, living or dead, is mentioned in various texts. For instance, the Yogaśikhā-upaniṣad states: “jitendriyāṇāṁ śāntānāṁ jitaśvāsa-vicetasāṁ…parakāyamanoyogaḥ parakāya-praveśakr̥t – For those who have conquered their senses, are tranquil, have controlled breath, and are discerning, … total focus of the mind on another’s body gives rise to the power to enter another’s body.”¹

In the Bhāgavata-puraṇa, it is said that various yogic powers inclusive of that of being able pass into another body accrued spontaneously to R̥ṣabha but he was not interested in them.² The Mahābhārata speaks of Vipula entering into his preceptor’s wife Ruci’s body to protect her and of Sulabhā entering the body of Dharmadhvaja-janaka, having a discussion with him, and returning to her body the next morning.³ The scripture thus accepts that a jīva may pass directly from a body into another.

His Holiness (continuing): A virtuous karma such as a Vedic sacrifice ends long before the performer attains its fruit, heaven, after his death; moreover, karma is inert; being transient and inert, it cannot confer its fruit at the right time on its performer. As per the scripture, it is Īśvara, who presides over everything and is all-knowing, who bestows the fruits of karma on all. Two of the Brahma-sūtras in this regard are: “śrutatvāc ca – Besides, Īśvara is the giver of the fruit of karma for the reason that the Upaniṣads so teach;” and “pūrvaṁ tu bādarāyaṇo hetuvyapadeśāt – Refuting the view that karma or karma’s unseen potency itself gives rise to the fruit, Bādarāyaṇa regards Īśvara as the giver of the fruit of karma on account of His having been characterised in the scripture as the cause of karma.” ¹ Which karma will give rise to which fruit in a future life is knowable only from the scripture and not through observation or logic or scientific experiments; only the scripture is the means to know, for instance, that the fruit of the Vedic jyotiṣṭoma-sacrifice is heaven or that the fruit of the proscribed act of coitus with one’s Guru’s wife includes multiple births as a grass, a shrub, and a creeper;² as the fructification of a subset of one’s karmas of earlier lives accounts for one’s present life, the workings of karma cannot be fathomed without reliance on the scripture by even a deep scrutiny of just one’s present life. When which karma bears fruit and how depends on several unfixed and interactive factors; Bhagavatpāda points out in His Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya “upasthitavipākatvaṁ ca karmaṇo deśakālanimittopanipātād bhavati … śāstram apy asya karmaṇa idaṁ phalaṁ bhavatīty etāvati paryavasitaṁ na deśakālanimittaviśeṣam api saṅkīrtayati – A karma begins to fructify when the place, time, and causative factors turn out to be apt for this…Even the śāstra stops with specifying that such and such karma has such and such fruit without mentioning the particular place, time, and causative factors for its fructification.”¹

Īśvara, who impartially bestows the fruits of karma, is the one who sustains all the laws of nature. Thus, when the karma of a jīva responsible, for instance, for its life as a deer ends, the deer dies, not causelessly but due to, say, a disease or being hit on a road by a fast vehicle.

His Holiness (continuing): Not one of the alternatives mentioned in the questions being taken up faces any difficulty because of the large number of jīvas required to satisfy it; the reason is that, as seen in the light of the śāstra, the number of transmigrating jīvas is limitless. Actually, however, there is no need to suppose that a flatworm, plant or human must house numerous latent jīvas in sperms, pollen grains or egg-cells or elsewhere to cater to the possibility of any sperm or pollen grain or egg-cell or flatworm-segment or plant-cutting being the one that leads to another flatworm, plant or human; nor again is it necessary to suppose, alternatively, that many jīvas must ever be at hand to ensure that one of them promptly enters into the new life-form when and where it arises. This is because there is no arbitrariness, as per the scripture, in which jīva passes, via sperm or directly, into and takes over which particular incipient body; it is only in keeping with its fructifying karma that it does so; moreover, even before it quits its previous body, it involuntary gets an awareness of the body that it is to take up next; when and where a jīva is reborn and to whom are also not arbitrary. Ipso facto, there would be no need for numerous latent jīvas even if, someday¹, fertilization is successfully achieved in vitro by putting some sperm from among many into some egg-cell from among several, and, finally, a healthy child is born. Likewise, even if, someday², it were feasible to take the nucleus of any intact skin-cell from among the numerous skin cells of even a person who has just died, fuse it with some ovarian egg-cell whose nucleus has been removed and finally obtain a healthy child akin to the person whose skin-cell was used, there would be no need to conjecture that that person housed very many latent jīvas in his skin or that numerous jīvas were at hand to enter into the fused cell or incipient child. I had asked if multiple jīvas should be present in each budding embryo to cater to the possibility of splitting resulting in identical twins or even quintuplets. The scripture-based answer is: If the karma of the parents is such that only one child is to be born, only one jīva will, as per its own karma, inhabit her womb; else, exactly as many as are to be born as per karma will do so. I had conceived of a jīva-animated human embryo kept frozen in a state of suspended animation for an arbitrarily long period, thawed, and implanted in a womb to become a child, or left frozen; I had then mooted the options of the jīva staying on open-endedly or leaving after a fixed time and the implications of the thawing being done after the jīva going. The state of the jīva in the frozen embryo is similar to that of the jīva in an unconscious person and the latter has been clarified in a Brahma-sūtra.¹ Just as the entry of a jīva into a life-form depends on its karma, so does its departure; the exit of the jīva in the frozen embryo is no exception. Were it to go before the frozen embryo is thawed, the embryo would, simultaneously, turn out to be unviable; Bhagavatpāda has written in His bhāṣya on the said Brahma-sūtra that if an unconscious person’s karma ends, his life ends, without his regaining consciousness. I concluded that every one of the many questions I had posed about jīvas in worms, plants, and humans can be easily answered in the light of the śāstra.

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