Yamaयम

Yama (यम) rules the dead by right of precedence: in Vedic understanding he was the first mortal to die, and thereby the discoverer of the path that all the departed must afterwards follow. The Ṛgveda's tenth maṇḍala pictures him gathered with the fathers in the highest heaven, drinking beneath a fair-leafed tree, and its funeral hymns commend the dead to the road he found, past his two four-eyed brindled dogs, the watchers of the way. His twin sister Yamī survives in the river-goddess Yamunā; a celebrated and unsettling Vedic dialogue between the twins turns on her plea, and his refusal, to continue the human race together.

Judge of the dead

In epic and Purāṇic religion Yama hardens from host of the fathers into magistrate. As Dharmarāja, king of righteousness, he judges the dead in his southern city, assisted by the recorder Citragupta, who keeps the ledger of every life; the soul is led before him and dispatched to heaven, to the hells, or back into birth according to its deeds. He rides a black buffalo and carries the noose that draws out the soul and the daṇḍa, the staff of punishment. He is the pattern of impartiality rather than of terror: dharma personified, which is why the Mahābhārata makes him, by proxy, the father of Yudhiṣṭhira, the epic's embodiment of righteousness.

The god who teaches

Yama is also, remarkably, a teacher. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad is framed as his instruction of the boy Naciketas, who waits unfed at death's door until Yama, in recompense, grants him three boons; pressed for the secret of what survives death, the god yields the Upaniṣad's teaching of the imperishable self. Tradition's other great Yama story runs the opposite way: Sāvitrī, following the god as he carries off her husband's soul, argues him boon by boon into returning it, the exemplary tale of devotion outlasting death. In the Mārkaṇḍeya legend, Śiva himself kicks Yama back from a devotee's throat, earning the name Kālāntaka, ender of death.

Guardian of the south

Among the Aṣṭa-Dikpālas Yama holds the south, which is accordingly the direction of the ancestors and of inauspicious approach; the dead are cremated facing his quarter. His observances thread the Hindu year, from Yama Dvitīyā, when sisters honour brothers in memory of Yama and Yamī, to the lamps lit for him at Dīpāvalī. Feared he may be, but the tradition's settled view is the one his title carries: not death as malice, but death as justice.