Yātanā-śarīra
Yātanā-śarīra · yātanā-śarīra, “the body of torment”
Grammar: neuter noun; a compound of yātanā (torment, the suffering that repays a deed) and śarīra (body): “the body of torment”.
Meaning: the body the jīva takes after death, according to its karma, in which it experiences the fruit of its deeds on the road to Yamaloka and in the narakas.
In the scriptures: in the Brahma Purāṇa, Lomaharshaṇa, telling the munis of the narakas beginning with Raurava and of those who fall into each, says that there are hundreds and thousands of such narakas, and that those who do pāpa leave this body, take yātanā-śarīras and are tormented there (Brahma Purāṇa, Chapter 22).
Vyāsa, asked by the munis about the road to Yamaloka, tells what happens at death. Through some cause, water, fire, poison, weapons, hunger or a fall from a mountain, the embodied one leaves the prāṇas and leaves here the great body made of the five elements. According to the karma he has done, he takes another, firm body, the yātanā-śarīra, to experience happiness and sorrow: in that body the one who has done pāpa experiences his pāpa, and the man of puṇya his puṇya. When the Yama-kiṅkaras come and the jīva leaves the body full of pain, he obtains, for the experience of the torment of karma, a body that is not the one formed from father and mother, but of the very same form, exactly the same size, with limbs of the same stage of life, childhood or another. Then the Yama-dūta binds him fast with nooses (Brahma Purāṇa, Chapter 214).
Teaching the munis the sorrows of embodied life, Vyāsa says that after the pains of death the jīva enters a body made for torment, the yātanā-deha, and in naraka the servants of Yama bind it with nooses, beat it with sticks, burn, cut and boil it, according to the pāpa it has done (Brahma Purāṇa, Chapter 234).
Related terms: Naraka · Yamaloka · Karma · Pāpa · Puṇya
Sources
- Brahma Purāṇa, Chapters 22, 214, 234