The First to Die

Before anyone had died, nobody knew where the dead should go.

The Rigveda does not tell this as a story with a beginning and an end. It gives a few lines, scattered over three hymns, and a song for a funeral. Put together, they say this.

Yama was the son of Vivasvat, the shining one. He was a mortal, and one hymn calls him the only mortal there was. A life without end was within his reach, and he did not take it. For the sake of the gods he chose death, the hymn says, and for the sake of those who would be born he did not choose to live for ever. He gave up his own dear body.

Then he went. He travelled to the high places far above us, searching, and he found the way. Nobody had walked it before him. At the end of it he found a place to live, and the poets are sure of one thing about that place.

"This pasture can never be taken from us."

So when the next person died, there was a road, and there was someone waiting at the end of it.

The longest of the hymns is sung at a funeral. For most of it the singer is not speaking to the mourners. He is speaking to the dead man, and he is giving him directions.

"Go forth, go forth on the old paths, the ones our fathers took before us. You will see two kings there, enjoying their feast: Yama, and the god Varuna."

"There are two dogs on the road. They are the sons of Sarama, brindled, with four eyes each. Run straight past them, and keep to the good path."

"Then you will come to the fathers, who are glad in Yama's company. Meet them. Meet Yama. Meet there the reward of everything you did and everything you gave. Leave behind what was wrong in you and come home. Put on a new body, bright with glory."

Then the singer turns, as if clearing the ground of something unwelcome.

"Away with you. Scatter. This place is his. The fathers made it ready for him, and Yama gives him a resting place bright with days, and waters, and light."

And then he speaks to the king himself.

"Those two dogs of yours, Yama, the four-eyed watchers who guard the path and keep their eyes on men: put this man in their care. Give him health, and let it go well with him."

The dogs are not only on the road. Dark, wide-nostrilled and never satisfied, they roam among the living as Yama's messengers. So the singer has a line for the people standing around the fire too.

"May they give us back a good life, here, today, so that we may go on seeing the sun."

What is at the end of the road? Another hymn has seen it.

There is a tree there, thick with good leaves. Under it Yama drinks with the gods. He is called the father there, the master of the house, and he looks after the people of long ago with love.

"Here is the seat of Yama, which they call the home of the gods. Here the flute is played for him. Here he is praised with songs."

Nobody is punished at that table. The hymns call Yama a king, and they treat him as one. They press Soma for him and pour butter, they spread grass and ask him to come and sit on it with the fathers, and they ask him for long days of life.

The funeral hymn ends by bowing to the seers of old, the ones who made the path.

By the time of the Mahabharata the pasture has become a palace, and a traveller has been inside it.

The sage Narada went everywhere, and one day he came to the court of King Yudhishthira. He described the halls of the gods to the king one by one, and one of them was Yama's.

"Vishvakarma built it," Narada said. "It shines like polished gold and it is more than a hundred leagues across. It is never too hot there and never too cold. Nobody in it is hungry or thirsty. Nobody grows weak with age. There is no grief inside those walls, and nothing unpleasant. The garlands smell sweet, and the trees around it bear whatever fruit you wish for."

Then he told the king who lived there.

"The kings of old wait on Yama in that hall, more than I can name. Yayati is there, and Nala, and Bhagiratha, and Rama the son of Dasharatha." He came to one more name. "Your father Pandu is there."

He went on. Time was in that hall, he said, and Death, standing among the courtiers. There were officers whose work was to count the days allotted to every creature. Those who had done wrong among men were there too. The Gandharvas and Apsaras filled the place with music and dancing and the sound of laughter, and the whole hall could move wherever its master wished.

Narada called its master two things in one breath, the king of the fathers and the god of justice.

The Atharvaveda had already put it in a single line, long before the epic. Yama was the first of mortals to die, the first who travelled to the world before us, and Death was his messenger.