The Guide on the Far Road

A man has died, and his family stands by the fire that will take his body. They cannot go where he is going, and none of them knows the way. So the priest calls on the god who does.

"May Pushan carry you from here," he says to the dead man. "He is the guardian of the world, and none of his cattle is ever lost. He has the knowledge."

The mourners already know that name. Pushan is the god they call when a cow has strayed, the one who brings every animal back to the pen by evening and loses none on the road. The hymn asks him to do the same work now, with a person.

"May he hand you over to the Fathers," the priest goes on. "And may Agni give you to the gracious gods."

The task is shared out. The fire has the body. Pushan has the road. The hymn brings in two more helpers so that nothing is left to chance.

"May Ayu, the giver of all life, protect you and carry you forward on the long path. And may the god Savitr set you down where the good live, those who went before you."

The priest then turns from the dead man to the living, who are frightened, and speaks for them.

"Pushan knows all these regions. May he lead us too by the ways that are freest of fear and danger. He is watchful and wise. May he go in front of us."

The hymn then gives the reason why this one god can be trusted with such a journey.

"Pushan was born to travel the distant paths, on the road far from earth and far from heaven. He goes to both of the gathering places, there and here, and he comes back, and he knows them perfectly."

The other guides know one end of the road. Pushan was born on it. He has been to the place of the dead and has come back, as a drover goes to the far pasture and returns.

The Atharvaveda repeats these verses in its own long funeral hymn, and adds a line addressed to the powers of the other world. "Send Pushan here to us, to carry us on the paths the goat has trodden."

The goat is his animal. Goats pull his cart, and scholars guess that this is because a goat keeps its feet on steep paths. The Rigveda shows a goat of his at the great horse sacrifice of the kings.

The horse is led out, covered in rich cloth. In front of it walks a dappled goat, and the hymn says plainly whose it is.

"The goat, Pushan's share, goes first. It walks straight on, bleating, to the place dear to Indra and to Pushan. It goes ahead of the horse and announces the sacrifice to the gods."

Pushan's goat goes first to show the horse the way, and Pushan himself leads the dead man on the far road.

The Isha Upanishad is one of the shortest of the Upanishads, eighteen verses in all. Its last four are a prayer, and the old commentators say it is the prayer of a person who is dying. The same prayer stands in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

The dying man looks toward the sun and sees something in the way.

"The face of the True is covered with a golden disc," he says. "Open it, Pushan, so that I may see what the True is."

The commentators say that the disc hides the person in the sun. The light that shows the man everything else is, at this hour, a lid over the one thing he wants to see. He asks the god of the roads to open this one for him as well.

He calls again, and this time he calls the god by several names at once.

"Pushan, lone seer, Yama, Surya, child of Prajapati. Spread your rays apart and gather your light in. That fairest form of yours, I see it. The person who is there, I am he."

That is the turn the Upanishad gives the old prayer. In the funeral hymn Pushan takes the dead man by a far road to another place. Here the man asks for the lid to be lifted, and when it is, he says that what stands behind the sun is not different from himself.

After that he lets go.

"Let my breath go to the air, the undying. Let this body end in ashes. Om. Mind, remember. Remember what has been done."

The last line is spoken to the fire, and it asks for what the mourners in the old hymn asked for.

"Agni, lead us by a good path."