MAHALAYA AMAVASYA BY ABHAY CHARAN MUKHERJEE

MAHALAYA AMAVASYA

BY ABHAY CHARAN MUKHERJEE

Amavasya is the last day of the dark fortnight of a lunar month, and is in every season considered by the Hindus to be a day especially set apart for the performance of religious ceremonies in honour of the spirits of departed ancestors. Of all Amavasyas, the one that is universally observed as the chief day for the worship of the dead, is Mahalaya, the fifteenth or last day of the moonless fortnight of the month of Knar or Asxvin (Septem¬ber-October). The whole of the fortnight preceding Mahalaya is collectively called the Pitri Paksha, or the fortnight sacred to the memory of departed ancestors. Every day of this fortnight is sacred, and witnesses the observance of various ceremonies in honour of the dead by thousands of Hindus in every part of India. A well-known Sanskrit text says, “ Each day of this holy fortnight is equal in point of sanctity to a day spent at Gaya,”—Gaya being the place regarded as holiest for all kinds of religious rites in memory of the dead. Whatever the actual date of a man’s death may be, his Sraddha (or annual worship of his departed spirit) must be performed on one of the days of this parti¬cular fortnight. If a man’s father died, say, on an Ekadashi (the eleventh day of the moon, waxing or waning), the Ekadashi or eleventh day of this holy fortnight is observed as a day of special religious rites in his memory, the general worship of his spirit being, however, continued throughout the fortnight. And since there are only fifteen days of the moon, every day of this fortnight is a day of Sraddha for some individual or other. Sometimes the day of the full moon (Purnamashi) immediately preceding the commencement of the dark fortnight is included in the Pitri Paksha, which is thus extended to sixteen days in order to give a chance of performing Sraddha to those who may have lost one of their ancestors on the day of a full moon.

One day of this ancestral fortnight, namely, the ninth, is set apart for the worship of dead female ancestors, especially the mother ; and hence this day-is called ‘Matri Navami.’ The annual oblations to all female ancestors must be offered on this ninth day of the moon, irrespective of the tithi of their death.

The first half of the month of Kuar—the Pitri Paksha—is considered sacred to the memory of deceased ancestors in accordance with a belief, which finds mention in the Hindu scriptures, that as soon as the sun enters the sign of Kanya or Virgo, the spirits of departed ancestors leave their abode in the regions of the dead, and, coming back to the world of living mortals, occupy the homes of their descend¬ants to receive their homage and worship. And this homage and worship is not only ungrudgingly given, but is regarded as the highest of all earthly duties, by high and low alike. Even Protestant Hinduism has not shaken off its faith in the efficacy of ancestor-worship, which lies at the very root of the Hindu religion. No important religious ritual or domestic ceremony is complete without it. It has to be done before each of the principal Sanskaras or purificatory rites that a high-born Hindu has to perform through life. Before Annaprasana (the ceremony of feeding a child for the first time with rice or grain food—which takes place about the seventh month); before tonsure ; before Upana-yana, or the ceremony of investing a boy with the sacred thread, the mystical cord symbolical of regeneration ; before marriage ; in fact, before every event in the household or religious life of every Hindu, the deceased ancestors must be worshipped in a prescribed form. The Pitri Paksha is the fortnight immediately preceding the great Nava-ratra, the ‘nine days’ during which the goddess Durga, the Universal Mother, is worshipped through¬out India, and this order of time is a proof that the worship of ancestors is regarded by the Hindus as a preliminary even to the worship of the gods.

The principles of ancestor-worship are perfectly intelligible. The dead ancestor is deified into a household god, and is believed to be still protecting his own family and receiving worship and reverence from his descendants as of old; indeed, from his present position among the blessed spirits, he is regarded as wielding greater authority and entitled to greater veneration that when he dwelt on earth. Ancestor-worship is one of the earliest attempts made by the Hindu mind to solve the problems of life, death, and eternity, and the old solution is none the worse for being so old; for ancestor-worship still forms a living part of the daily faith of the whole Hindu world, the only exceptions being those few who in their headlong zeal for reform have not scrupled to transgress the barriers of society and religion alike.

Ancestor-worship, such as it prevails in India, does not, however, mean that all the ancestors of a Hindu are worshipped by him during the ancestral fortnight. It is only those who have lost their father that owe this sacred duty ; those who have their father still alive are exempt from this obligation. This shows that the so-called “ an¬cestor-worship “ is really the worship of the spirit of the deceased father alone, though as a matter of fact the grandfather and the next ancestor also come in for their share of the offerings and oblations. But these latter only derive their right from the father, and are worshipped after the father. The father is in Hindu households regard¬ed as the earthly representative of God ; he is the present God—the visible, living incarnation of the Supreme Being, and is therefore an object of daily worship; and the same father, when departed from the world, continues to be the prime object of worship as long as the son lives, even after the son himself has become a father or grandfather.

The ceremonies customary in this season are of two kinds : (1) the Sraddha, which is performed on one day of this fortnight, the day corresponding to the tithi of the death ; (2) the Tarpana, or offering of water, which is continued every day throughout the fortnight. The term ‘Sraddha’ literally signi¬fies a ‘gift offered with faith’ or simply a ‘pious offering’—not necessarily to an ancestor, but to any dead relation to whom this honour is due. There are twelve kinds of Sraddha enumerated in the Shastras, in addition to the annual Sraddha performed during the Pitri Paksha, which, though of yearly recurrence, is in no way less elaborate in ceremonial than the obsequies performed on the eleventh day after the actual death of an ancestor, the only difference being that the latter function is accompanied by multifarious gifts of food, clothing and utensils, which are dispensed with in the case of this annual Sraddha. In all forms of Sraddha the chief act is the offering of pinda or balls of cooked rice and libations of water to the accompani¬ment of proper prayers.

The term ‘ Tarpana ‘ literally means ‘ refresh¬ment,’ or more precisely ‘ a refreshing drink of water.’ It is divided into three parts, as the libations are offered first to the gods, next to the rishis or sages, and lastly to the ancestors. The gods specially named are Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, and Prajapati; the sages too are mentioned by name, and they are the principal sages honoured by the whole Hindu world,—Bhrigu, Narad, Atri, Vasishtha, Angiras, Maricha, &c. The ancestors too must be mentioned by name, the father being the first to receive his share ; next comes the grandfather, and then the great-grandfather ; then come the mother, the grandmother, and the great-grandmother,—making up six in all in the paternal line. Then come the maternal ancestors, three male and three female,—the females of the latter group receiving only a single libation, whereas all others receive three each. After these come the collateral ancestors, and all others (not specified by name) who have died childless, and who have there¬fore no direct representative to offer oblations to their spirits. At the conclusion of the whole cere¬mony, the votary bows down his head to the ground and repeats a short text, the literal meaning of which is:—’ The Father is Heaven, the Father is religion (or duty), the Father is the highest form of penance, prayer, or meditation ; it is by pleasing the Father that all the gods are propitiated.” This text forms as it were the cardinal doctrine of the Hindu faith in “ancestor-worship,” and it also serves to illustrate the restricted sense in which the custom of ancestor-worship is to be understood, as signifying principally the worship of the father, and not the whole series of one’s ancestors.

Rules of the most minute detail are laid down in the Hindu Shastras for regulating the procedure at these customary annual oblations, and these rules form the basis of the Hindu law of inheritance. The spot where the ceremony is to be performed must be sequestered and scrupulously clean. It should face south, the direction in which the Hindu abodes of the dead are supposed to lie. The ceremony is to be performed by the eldest son, or in cases of his un¬avoidable inability, by the youngest, to whom how¬ever the right must be expressly delegated. Even a minor son has preference over an elderly brother or even an uncle. Female relations have no right to perform Sraddha, though childless widows are sometimes given this privilege as a concession.

These strict rules furnish the Hindu with the well-known argument for the necessity of marriage and the procreation of male issue. The annual cere¬monies of Sraddha and Tarpana are to be continued until the departed spirit, in whose honor these are performed, attains beatification, which usually takes place after three generations, and then the soul passes into a state of blessedness and ceases to influence the descendants for good or evil. The sacred grains used in the Sraddha and the Tarpana are barley and sesamum seed. Shaving or cutting the hair, or even paring the nails, is forbidden on the day of Sraddha, but some people abstain from these during the whole of the Pitri Paksha, deriving this practice from one popularly attributed to a legend¬ary king, named Kama. The story goes that Raja Karna made a vow that he would not break his fast daily until he had given a maund and a quarter of gold to Brahmans. After his death he went to hea¬ven, where he was lodged in a palace of gold, and was given nothing but gold for his food and drink,— for in his life his only gift in charity had been gold. In his distress he asked as a boon to be allowed to go back to earth for fifteen days. The boon was granted, and he occupied himself during his time of grace in giving away large quantities of food to the hungry, and was so busy all this time that he neglected to bathe, shave or wash his clothes.

The place which is held to be specially sacred for purposes of Sraddha is Gaya, a town about sixty miles south-west of Patna. The object of the annual Sraddha is to hasten the progress of the soul through the various stages of spiritual existence ; and if the ceremony is performed at Gaya it is be¬lieved that the length of these “ intervital “ periods is cut short considerably, and the soul passes at a bound into Vaikuntha, or the paradise of Vishnu. The Phalgu river at Gaya is a stream sacred to the spirits of departed ancestors. It is on the banks of this river, or at the Vishnupada Temple, that the Sraddha at Gaya must be performed, and it is said that at the conclusion of the ceremony, when the cakes are reverently deposited in the river, the spirits of the ancestors are actually beheld in bodily form, receiving the pious offering with a smile of satisfaction. The sacred portion of the same river is said occasionally to flow with milk, but the milk never appears to the eye of unbelievers or those who are wanting in the necessary degree of rever¬ence. Even when the Sraddha is performed else¬where, the offered cakes are, at the end of the cere¬mony, “ directed towards Gaya” by appropriate holy texts.

Illusions like the above may not be mere illusions after all: it depends upon the spirit of the age and upon the faith of the individual how these statements are interpreted. If all the visible and invi¬sible phenomena of the universe be reduced to mere manifestations of Matter and Motion, ancestor-worship is indeed futile ; but if Mind be an agent working unseen behind the scenes, then probably ancestor-worship may be taken as a powerful source of divine inspiration in moments of difficulty/dark¬ness, and doubt, and as one of the most potent factors in bringing about peace, and purity, and holiness in human life :—

“ How pure at heart and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold
Should be the man whose thought would hold
An hour’s communion with the dead.

In vain shalt thou, or any, call
The spirits from their golden day,
Except, like them, thou too canst say,
My spirit is at peace with all.

They haunt the silence of the breast,
Imaginations calm and fair,
The memory like a cloudless air,
The conscience as a sea at rest:

But when the heart is full of din,
And doubt beside the portal waits,
They can but listen at the gates,
And hear the household jar within.”

—Tennyson : In Menioriam.