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RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND OPINIONS
inserted. These are always modern. The great authority for Bengal is a Pandit, who lived less than a century ago, named Raghunandana. Ile composed eighteen works of this kind, denominated Tattwas. One treats of daily rites; one of weekly or monthly rites; one of marriage; one of obsequies, and the like. These are the sources, not always exempt from suspicion of unfaithfulness or interpolation, and always objectionable as confounding authorities, and attaching weight to works of various eras, and of very opposite tendency, by which the practices of the Hindus are regulated.
The Hindus, as is well known, burn their dead; a usage recommended by the peculiarities of climate, and the habits of the people, as much as by authority. The custom of carrying the dying to the banks of the Ganges, or some river considered sacred, has no warrant from antiquity, any more than it has from reason or humanity. The final commitment of the corpse to the funeral pile is decorously conducted. The tone of the ceremony, though not open to much exception, is cold and selfish. It offers no consolation from the future condition of the dead, although it rebukes the natural emotions of the living: it represses affliction by expatiating upon its inutility; it seeks not to soothe sorrow by inspiring hope.
The practice of the Sati", the burning of the widow
* [L. v. Orlich, "Indien”, 1861, II, 2, 234 – 40.]
