Yama in Hindu mythology is usually known as the God of Death. He is also supposed to conduct a Last Tribunal where the good are rewarded and the evildoers get their lumps. This does not in any way increase his stature in the popular imagination where he has, frankly, no place at all. At best it is resignedly accepted that that is better the process of death and punishment for sins be regulated. His realm is supposed to be dank and gloomy, filled with assistants who are visual variants on his own form, colossal, green skinned, red-robed and of terrible appearance, accentuated by the fact that he rides on a buffalo and carries a fearsome mace and the deadly noose with which the soul is snared and removed from the body. None of this does any justice to Yama as he used to be, a great moral and ethical exemplar of the Vedic and Upanishadic times. He was also the first great Hero amongst Men, ascending to divine status because he was not afraid to learn the riddle of death by dying.

All the Vedic gods have lost stature, but Yama is a really sad example of decline in a culture. The name Yama itself means 'The Restrainer' and further refining it we get 'The Restrained One'. Yama is in full control of his sense organs; he is the first man to have triumphed over them. This is not surprising considering his origin. In a magnificent dramatic irony, Yama is supposed to be the son of Surya, the Sun God and Giver of Life. Life cannot proceed without intimate acquaintance with death. Indeed death clears the old out of the way of Life. The Veda is clear that Yama's great achievement on behalf of the race of men was to find "the way home which cannot be taken away." It is by dying that man achieves immortality and Yama was the first to discover this secret.

Not without trouble, however. For Yama and Yami were the first humans to be born, the Primordial Twins so beloved of mythic structure. Yami was in no hurry to learn the Eternal Secret, she would much rather that Yama learnt with her what it was to be fruitful and multiply. This was acceptable by the standards of myth and all Genesis tales - the first couple usually populated the earth through incest. Yama is having none of it and rejects Yami's specious argument that even in the womb, which they shared, they were designed to be husband and wife. She also urges upon him his duty to the world, if they are all that live, they owe it to life to procreate and trust that posterity will be indulgent with the moral implications of what they had to do. The verses where she urges him on in this expedient course of action are some of the most erotic and blatantly sexual ever written in any human language.

Yama's answers are a standing monument to ethical imperatives, a blanket repudiation of expediency and comfort zones. He simply refuses to lower his standards, no matter what the emergency. Evil has no extenuating circumstances.
"Shall we do now what has been diligently spurned hitherto?
Shall we who speak truth now countenance wrong?"
For him all actions are to be judged in the light of Ritha, Cosmic Law, and it is better the earth remain unpopulated than be filled with the fruits of sin. He has greater, and more justified confidence in the universe than Yami does, for life does not snuff out, contrary to her dire predictions. This refusal to procreate sinfully is Yama's true victory over death, for Men reproduce hoping to cheat death with every new generation. He passes over with his ethical sphere intact and death holds no terrors for him. For immortality is gained not in using one's children to cheat death, but by experiencing Death itself as a door to Immortality.