z:\ ambedkar\vol 04\vol4 05.indd MK SJ DK YS 23 9 2013/YS 8 11 2013 177
APPENDIX IV
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Punishments and Penances occupy very prominent place in Pauranik Dharma. In the Srauta Dharma Yama has nothing to do with the future punishment of the wicked. The idea of penal retribution after death for sins committed during life is unknown. But the Puranas have considerably enlarged the Powers of Yama in this respect.
“Yama fulfils the office of judge of the dead, as well as sovereign of the damned; all that die appearing before him, and being confronted with Chitragupta, the recorder, by whom their actions have been registered. The virtuous are thence conveyed to Swarga, or Elysium, whilst the wicked are driven to the different regions of Naraka, or Tartarus”.
“ The dreadful Chitragupta with a voice like that issuing from the clouds at the mundane dissolution, gleaming like a mountain of collyrium, terrible with lightning like weapons, having thirty-two arms, as big as three yojans, red-eyed, long-nosed, his face furnished with grinders and projecting teeth, his eyes resembling oblong ponds, bearing death and diseases.”
Sin will be punished after death. So also there is expiation for sin if the- sinner wishes by performing certain penances for removing sin.
But what is sin? According to the Pauranik Dharma it does not mean the commission of a moral wrong. It means the non-performance of the observances prescribed by the Puranas. Such is Pauranik Dharma.
III TANTRIK DHARMA
What is known as the Tantrik Dharma centres round the worship of Shakti. Shakti literally means power or energy. But in Tantrism it means the female partner of a male God. The literature of the Tantrik Dharma is quite vast and forms quite a separate branch of the Hindu Religious literature. It is necessary to observe that the Shakta form of Hinduism is equipped with a vast mythological personnel of its own, an immense array of female personalities, constituting a distinct division of the Hindu Pantheon.
In its origin the Tantrik Dharma is only an extension of the Pauranik Dharma. It is the Puranas which first began with the recognition of the female unmarried goddesses or as objects of worship. This was followed by the recognition of married females who were the wives of the Gods. It is in support of their recognition of the right of the wives of the Gods to be worshipped as goddesses that the Puranas set out the principle of Shaktism. According to the Puranas