Every religion believes in an afterlife; the concepts, however, differ. Death is a universal phenomenon, and all creatures who are born, are bound to die sometime or the other, only their lifespans differ. In the Bhagavadgita Lord Krishna says: jatasya hi dhruvo mrtyur dhruvam janma mrtasya cha. Buddhism also emphasises the point that everthing in the world is subject to decay, but it does not seem to speak much about future life except that, like the Hindu concept of moksha, it speaks of nirvana. Let us recapitulate the various concepts of jiva, the soul. According to the Hindu concept, the Vedanta conceives the organs of the soul to be as follows:

1. Manas and the indriyas (the organs of relation).
2. The five pranas - the organs of nutrition associated with the upadhis of the soul.
3. The Sukshma sharira (the subtle body).
4. A factor that changes from birth to birth based on karma, the actions of each of the many existences.

When the soul departs from the body the subtle body (sukshma sharira) accompanies it in its wanderings. It is also accompanied by the ethical substratum (karma-ashraya) which determines the character of the new body it will inherit. This ethical substratum is formed of actions done in the course of each of the several lives and is therefore different for each soul.

The three states of the soul are waking, dream and deep sleep, and the fourth state-the-turiya-in which the disappearance of the manifold universe and the union with Brahman, on which deep sleep depends, takes place not unconsciously but with continued and perfect consciousness. Then there are the 'envelopes' of the soul, the koshas, as they are called. These are, progressively, the anandamaya, vijnanamaya, manomaya, pranamaya and fifth the gross or sthula sharira.

The Upanishads believe in the doctrine of rebirth. Rebirth is determined by one's deeds in various existences. But the idea of God's grace also exists in them. Whoever God wishes to raise, he makes him perform good deeds, and whomever he wishes to cast down, he makes him perform evil deeds. Moksha means, according to the Vedanta, release of the soul from worldly existence. The soul becomes one with Brahman:

'When every passion vanishes
That finds a home in the human heart
Then he who is mortal becomes immortal,
Here already he had attained to Brahman.'

Of course, there are minor differences in the various schools of Hinduism, but fundamentally the soul suffers the consequence of its deeds, the power of wiping out karma resting with God, and on attaining moksha the soul does not return to worldly existence. It casts off its subtle body then and becomes merged with Brahman.

The Buddhist and the Jain views may be briefly mentioned, although Dayananda rejects them outright. The Buddhists do not believe in an eternal changeless soul. According to them the human being is formed of five khandas or skandhas. These are forms, i.e. the body; sensation (vedana) i.e. mental and physical feelings; perception (sanna), man's cogent medium with the outside world, mental tendencies and conditions (sankhara), and consciousness (vinnana) i.e. mental cognition or thought. Buddhism's doctrine is an-atta or 'non-self', i.e. nothing material, but only the abstract character is reborn. Hence there is no eternal soul. 'Void is the world' says the Buddhist of self, or of thought of that nature. God cannot set aside the natural law of justice that men are judged according to their deeds. Even the gods are governed by karma. There is therefore no scope for God's grace in Buddhism. He, too, cannot suspend the law of karma. Moksha, called Nibbana by Buddhists, means literally ' blowing or going out of fire'. But it is not emptiness. The Anguttara-nikaya says of it: 'This is good, this is excellent, to wit, the calming of all knowledge, of all karma-activities, the renunciation of all the bases (of rebirth), the destruction of craving, passionlessness, ceasing, nibbana.'

Coming to the Jain view, it is quite different and radical. There are two divisions of all things-jiva (living) and ajiva (non-living). The pure soul has infinite perception, knowledge, bliss and power, but other souls (samsarin) have their purity covered by a veil. They are infinite in number (not limited) but their size is limited. They are not all pervasive, nor are they atomic. The soul occupies the body as a lamp illuminating the whole room, though remaining in a corner. When 'karma matter' is once produced it is 'discharged' from the soul. This purging process is called nirjara. After death the soul along with the karmic body goes to find a new body. Even elements like earth, water, air and fire are believed to have souls. Also all around are minute soul-clusters packing the whole space like powder in a box. These replace souls, which attain moksha. The actual connections of karmas with the soul are like the sticking of dust on the body of a person smeared all over with oil. Moksha implies infinite knowledge, infinite perception and omniscience. It is a state of pure happiness.

Dayananda regarded the soul as eternal [along with prakriti and God]. The jiva had no beginning or end and moksha too was endless. To start with, Dayananda believed the soul to be of God's creation. Later he found it difficult to define the relationship between the soul and God. He had already rejected the Vedantic theory that the soul was of the same nature as Brahman. If the jiva was not Brahman, then how did it stand in relation to Brahman? To this question Dayananda had no answer. If he denied the jiva's divinity, it would be reduced to a position as low as that of the gross body. And that would be almost the position of the Charvakas, whom he reviled. If he held the soul to be divine it would be admitting that it was of the nature of God, the theory expounded by Shankara and the advaitas. Though he believed this initially, he had already discarded it, and couldn't possibly go back to it now.

Dayananda wriggled out of this dilemma by saying that the soul was eternal in its own right, even as God and primordial nature. Thus discarding the concept of Shankaracharya, as well as the bhedabheda concept of difference in non-difference i.e. God is the material cause of the universe, but at the same time the two are different; Dayananda formulated the traitavada - theory of three eternal entities - God, prakriti and the soul. He thought he had thereby solved the problem. God was not the 'creator' either of the material world or of the soul. Creation was the coming together in an orderly manner, of various substances. God was only the shaper or organiser. But if the soul is eternal it must eternally take rebirth, and if that happens there cannot be anything like moksha.

Dayananda did not choose to revise his theory about the soul. So he had to fit in the concept of moksha with it. That led him to the rather outlandish theory that the soul can never achieve emancipation in the sense of freedom from rebirth. Thus, taking an unconventional stand about the jiva, Dayananda was forced to take an even more startling view of moksha. One might call it 'limited moksha'. Thus the jiva, which had been emancipated, was freed from human existence for the duration of a cosmic cycle. At the end of the cycle (mahakalpa) it returned to the world of life and death again. The argument he advanced was that man is finite in his works and powers, and therefore cannot have infinite bliss. The problem that he leaves unsolved is the relation of the soul to man. The entire human personality consists of the spirit inside acting on matter. In other words the spiritual soul is enmeshed in the body. If one did not believe in a spiritual entity as part of man, death could not be explained.

The Vedantists explained the relationship as a temporary material imposition on the spiritual. A piece of transparent glass assumes the colour of the cloth on which it is placed. If placed on a red cloth it seems red. But it does not thereby lose its transparency. When lifted from the cloth it is again transparent - as indeed it ever was. Thus Dayananda's argument, ' how can man who is finite in actions and powers, ever have eternal bliss?' is not really a cogent one. It is the spiritual soul, which is entitled to bliss, not the gross body that encloses it. The body only helps the soul towards right works, which constitutes dharma. Once a man reaches the roof, the ladder by which he did it loses its importance in so far as the ascending is concerned. So too, the body is the ladder to emancipation. And to carry on the metaphor, one might say that, as to reach the very top of a multi-storied building, one has to climb not one, but many flights of steps, so too one has to undergo many existences to achieve moksha. Dayananda does not seem to have adequately distinguished between the spiritual soul and the material body, and so fell into the error of holding that 'man is finite in his works and powers'.

As regards works (karma), Dayananda is on firmer grounds. He avoids the great pitfall of Hinduism by which reward and punishment may not remain the final judgement. Hinduism makes a mockery of the law of karma by introducing grace. The wind bloweth where it listeth. Even so God can, out of his mercy, condone the evil deeds of man. Dayananda saw the absurdity of this, and his final view was that works (karmas) alone determine human destiny. He is yet uncertain about works in the first Satyarthaprakasha in which he wrote that those sannyasis who have full knowledge [purna jnana] are not bound by works. Knowledge destroys karma and makes the knowledge omniscient. In the second edition of the book, however, he makes it clear that all - even sanyasis - are bound by works.