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Yama does not begin as a god, he earns that distinction. He is merely a man to begin
with but he is not afraid to grow into his full potential, he is not afraid to travel
beyond the veil, he is not afraid, period. He is the first man to die and the first
man to learn about death without any fear of it. That makes him the Lord of Death,
indeed so great is his power over death that he is even called Mrityu, Death itself.
Since he was the first sinless man to cross over, he becomes the Lord of that Realm,
and is also entrusted with a new responsibility, guarding the Dharma. Hence his
title 'Dharma Raja', the Lord of Dharma. It is a remarkable concept. Death alone
can reveal the true ethical and moral stature of a human life; while that life is
being lived the issue always hangs in balance. The judgment seat of Yama
thus evolved in later myth, helped by his assistant, Chitragupta, India's Recording
Angel who has every deed of a life stored away in his infinite ledgers. This is
the classic weighing of the scales, a great and momentous decision that only the
first man, The Forerunner, who showed the race of man the path to salvation, is
entitled to take. It is a dramatic representation of Shaw's famous phrase, "Life
levels all men but Death reveals the eminent."
Yama's death had another interesting consequence. For Yami went into a great inconsolable
gloom that rapidly threatened the Universe. The gods urged her to let it go, to
forget the death of Yama and get on with living. To all their remonstrance she had
only one answer, "Yama has died but today and you want me to forget so soon?" Since
the First Days had been created without any nights, this was indeed an insurmountable
difficulty! To help put some distance between Yami's distress and the event causing
it, the gods invented Night. Thus came into being the morrow, the passage of time
and the dimming of memory, which assuages grief. "Night and day together
let sorrow be forgotten", says the Veda about this. Also, Yama seems to have traveled
to the south to learn about the great transition of Death, so that he has been deemed
the guardian of the South quadrant and it is also the direction of death. To sleep
with your feet pointed south is regarded as an invitation to travel on the long
journey and avoided in Indian culture.
Yama becomes somewhat static in the mythological imagination thereafter, even declining
to the position of a stickler for rules who implements them blindly without any
thought for compassion. This is perhaps exemplified in the myth of Markandeya, a
boy-rishi who was fated to die an early death. The worship of Shiva was his delight
and when Death came for him the boy was busy in worship. Since death waits for nothing,
he was dragged along with the Shiva lingam to his inevitable doom when a furious
Shiva, the Deathless One, erupted from the lingam and kicked the God of Death away,
and granted immortality to the boy to boot! Yama has a great role left to play in
the Katha Upanishad, where the boy-rishi Nachiketas travels to his realm, seeking
instruction from the only god who really knows the secret and mystery of death.
This text is one of the glories of Indian literature as well as philosophy and it
is worth perusing in its own right. Yama tries to dissuade the boy from asking to
learn about matters even the gods prefer to avoid in ignorant bliss, but seeing
that his resolution would not be shaken, he fires from both barrels in a tremendous
opening statement of truths. "The Good is one thing. The Pleasant is another." He
then takes the boy through ever ascending realms of Awareness and ends up with a
blunt statement of reality about the Path.
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