The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  In general, the followers of the path of Release attached no opprobrium to the path of rebirth. Time and again the road forks, but the two paths continue side by side, sometimes joining, then diverging again, and people can easily leap from one to the other at any moment. Vedic tapas, outward-directed heat, seems at first to conflict with Upanishadic tapas, inward-directed heat. But ultimately both forms of spiritual heat, as well as erotic heat (kama ),57 are aspects of the same human force, simply channeled along different paths. Asceticism ricochets against addiction and back again. Indian logic used as a standard example of inference one that we use too: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, smoke being the sign (linga, the same word as the “sign” for male gender) of fire. Which is to say, wherever there is the option of transmigration, the path of smoke (samsara), there is also the option of Release from transmigration, the path of fire (moksha). Less obvious but equally true: Wherever there is the option of Release from transmigration, fire, there is the option of transmigration, smoke.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE THREE (OR IS IT FOUR?) AIMS OF LIFE IN THE HINDU IMAGINARY

  CHRONOLOGY

  300-100 BCE The dharma-sutras are composed

  c. 100 CE Manu composes his Dharma-shastra

  c. 200 CE Kautilya composes the Artha-shastra

  c. 300 CE Vatsyayana Mallanaga composes the Kama-sutra

  THE THREE AIMS

  No one enjoyed pleasure just for sexual ecstasy; no one hoarded

  wealth for the sake of pleasure. No one performed acts of dharma for

  the sake of wealth; no one committed acts of violence for the sake of

  dharma.

  Ashvaghosha, Buddhacharita (first century CE)1

  In the ideal Hindu world that the poet Ashvaghosha described, none of the three aims is used in the service of the ones below it: Dharma is more important than wealth, which is more important than pleasure (which is more important than mere sexual thrills). The complex hierarchical relationship among the three aims of pleasure, wealth, and dharma is what this chapter is all about. It is an interlude, its subject neither any particular historical period nor any of the main actors in this book (women, low castes, dogs, horses), but certain basic ideas that undergird the practice of Hinduism as well as its historical development. Central among these is the tension between the paths of rebirth and renunciation and between a general dharma that includes renunciation and a specific dharma that often includes violence, both the violence of war and the violence of sacrifice.

  THE THREE QUALITIES OF MATTER—PLUS SPIRIT

  The Upanishads began to assimilate Release (moksha) within an overarching intellectual framework that was only later fully articulated but that had already laid out the basic taxonomies that moksha challenged. Alternating with the basic dualisms that we have seen at work, these taxonomies often linked key concepts together in triads, such as the triad of aims in Ashvaghosha’s poem, and, later, quartets. “Three” was a kind of shorthand for “lots and lots”; there are three numbers in Sanskrit grammar: one, two, and plural (consisting of all numbers three and above). “Three” also became a symbol for interpenetration, interconnectedness, a collectivity of things that go together, a representation of the multivalent, multifaceted, multiform, multi-whatever-you-like nature of the real phenomenal world.

  One basic triad is attested in brief references as early as the Atharva Veda and the Chandogya Upanishad: that of the three strands or qualities of matter (gunas),2 woven together like the three strands of a braid—lucidity or goodness or intelligibility (sattva), energy or activity or passion (rajas), and darkness or inertia or entropy (tamas).3 Classical Sankhya philosophy, which provides us with the earliest detailed discussion of the three strands,4 overlays the initial triad upon several others, such as the classes of gods, humans, and animals-plants, and the three primary colors, not red, blue, and yellow but white (lucidity), red (activity), and black (inertia). So too sattva is thought to predominate in cows and Brahmins, rajas in horses and Kshatriyas, and tamas in dogs and the lower classes.

  Enduring triads, besides the three qualities of matter, include the three times (past, present, and future); mind, body, and speech; the three humors of the body (doshas: phlegm, bile, and wind); and the three debts that every man owed (study to the sages, funeral offerings to the ancestors, and sacrifice to the gods).5 There are generally said to be three worlds, usually identified as heaven, earth, and hell in Indo-European texts,6 then sky, ether, and earth in the Rig Veda (which also uses the dual model of sky/heaven and earth), and then, in the Puranas, heaven, earth, and hell again, reverting to the Indo-European model. The expedient of simply adding both the ether and hell to the basic pair of sky and earth is not taken, perhaps because the idea of three worlds was already so firmly embedded in Hindu cosmology. The number of worlds remained stable forever—that is, they were never squared, as were other paradigmatic triads that we will soon encounter. Indeed their resistance to quadripartition is one of the props of the argument that triads, rather than quartets, are the basis of Hindu thinking.

  Yet other important clusters began as triads and then became quartets.

  THE THREE AIMS OF LIFE

  One of the most significant shifts from three to four took place within the paradigm of the aims of life (the purusha-arthas). Originally they were a triad, dharma, artha, and kama, known collectively as the Trio (trivarga). For assonance, one might call them piety, profit, and pleasure, or society, success, and sex, or duty, domination, and desire. More precisely, dharma includes duty, religion, religious merit, morality, social and ritual obligations, the law, and justice. The Rig Veda had spoken of rita, a cosmic order that came to mean “truth” and was absorbed by the later concept of ritual dharma in the legal codes. “Dharma” is derived from dhri, “to hold fast, to make secure,” just as “karma” is derived from kri, “to make or do.” Dharma holds the universe together; dharma, rather than love, is what makes the world go ’round. Dharma is both the way things are and the way they should be.7 Artha is money, political power, and success; it can also be translated as goal or aim (as in the three aims of human life), gain (versus loss), money, the meaning of a word, and the purpose of something. Kama represents pleasure and desire, not merely sexual but more broadly sensual—music, good food, perfume, paintings. Every human being was said to have a right, indeed a duty, to all these aims, in order to have a full life.

  Sanskrit texts were devoted to each of the three aims; the most famous of these are the dharma text of Manu, the Artha-shastra of Kautilya, and the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana. Significantly, there are many texts devoted to dharma, but only one Artha-shastra and one Kama-sutra survive from the earliest period. Clearly, dharma was both more important and more complex. The codification of dharma at this time is in a sense a reaction to moksha (more precisely, to the formulation of moksha as an alternative goal). But moksha must, of course, also be reacting to dharma (more precisely, to the still uncodified general concept of social order that underlay the Vedas and Brahmanas), for what is it that the renunciant renounces but the householder life, the heart of dharma? Here is another chicken-and-egg process, like Brahma and Vishnu creating each other. No one needed a text to justify the householder life in such detail until some people started saying they didn’t want to be householders.

  The earliest texts about dharma are the dharma-sutras,ds from between the third century BCE and the first century CE.8 Close on their heels came the more elaborate texts known as the dharma-shastras, of which the best known is Manu’s Dharma-shastra (in Sanskrit, the Manava-dharma-shastra or Manu-smriti, and informally known as Manu), probably composed sometime around 100 CE. The text consists of 2,685 verses and calls upon widely dispersed cultural assumptions about psychology, concepts of the body, sex, relationships between humans and animals, attitudes to money and material possessions, politics, law, caste, purification and pollution, ritual, social practice and ideals, world renunciation, and worldly aims. The claims made about the au
thor himself give us a hint of what to expect. Manu is the name of a king (an interesting attribution, given the priestly bias of Manu’s text) who is the mythological ancestor of the human race, the Indian Adam. “Manu” means “the wise one.” Thus manava (“descended from Manu”) is a common word for “human” (which, in terms of the lexical meaning of Manu as “wise,” might also be the Sanskrit equivalent of Homo sapiens). The title therefore conceals a pun: Manava, “of Manu,” also means “of the whole human race.”

  The Artha-shastra, or textbook on politics, is generally attributed to Kautilya (“Crooked”), the minister of the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta in the fourth century BCE. It may contain material from that period, though it was completed in the early centuries of the Common Era, perhaps by 200 CE. But since we cannot know which parts of it were actually composed in the Mauryan period and tell us what really happened then, and which portions are a later fantasy of what things might have been then, we can’t assume that any particular piece is Mauryan. The Artha-shastra is a compendium of advice for a king, and though it is often said to be Machiavellian, Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa. In addition to much technical information on the running of a kingdom, the Artha-shastra contains a good deal of thought on the subject of human psychology.

  Kautilya has a particularly low opinion of religious sensibilities. He advises the king to go out in public in the company of several friends dressed up as gods, so that his people will see him hobnobbing with them (13.1.3-8); to get a reputation for foreseeing the future by predicting that someone will die and then having him killed (1.11.17-18); to kill an enemy by arranging to have the image of a god fall on him (and then presumably proclaiming that the gods killed him) (12.5.1-5); to imitate, in water, the god Varuna or the king of the Cobra People (13.2.16); to play upon people’s faith in sacred texts by staging an elaborate charade with a holy man (13.2.1-9); to pretend to be an ogre (13.2.30-37); and to have his agents use the blood of animals to cause a hemorrhage to flow from images of deities in the territory of the enemy and then have other agents declare defeat in battle in consequence of the bleeding of the deity (3.2.27-8). Evidently, Kautilya shared the opinion often attributed to P. T. Barnum that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, but it isn’t necessary. Images of deities (of which we have absolutely no physical evidence in the Mauryan period) play a surprisingly prominent role in legal affairs in this text; there is a specific punishment for people who so forget themselves (anatmanah) that they have sex with animals or with images of gods (4.13.28-31) (lingas, perhaps?).dt

  The Kama-sutra was probably composed in the second or third century CE, and is attributed to a man named Vatsyayana Mallanaga, who was almost certainly a real human being (in contrast with the entirely mythical Manu), but about whom we know virtually nothing. Vatsyayana, as an author, is therefore more mythical than Kautilya but less mythical than Manu.

  DIVERSITY AMONG THE THREE MAIN TEXTS OF THE THREE AIMS

  In a pattern of mutual creation that should by now be familiar, Manu and the Artha-shastra quote each other;9 in particular, Manu borrowed from the Arthashastra the sections pertaining to the king, civil administration, criminal and civil law.10 The Artha-shastra, roughly contemporaneous with several Buddhist texts about kingship,11 may have contributed to, and taken from, such texts ideas about the importance of taxation and the endowing of stupas/temples. Clearly this is a shared corpus of ideas.du

  Yet there are significant differences in the attitudes of the three texts toward religion. Manu describes Vedic rituals in great detail but does not mention temples, while both the Kama-sutra and the Artha-shastra speak of temples and of festivals of the people but make no reference to any Vedic rituals; different texts apparently catered to people who engaged in different religious practices. Kautilya, like Vatsyayana, frequently advises the ruler (as Vatsyayana advises the lover) to make use of, as spies, precisely the people whom Manu specifically outlaws, such as wandering ascetics and wandering nuns (both Buddhist and Hindu).

  Renunciants, with no fixed address, are most useful to the Artha-shastra political machine, for holy men and women who beg for their living are, along with courtesans, uniquely able to move freely among all levels of society. (Actors too have such freedom, and all the shastras except for the textbook for actors, the Bharata Natya Shastra, agree that actors are not to be trusted and that sleeping with the wife of an actor does not count as adultery.) Like the Artha-shastra, but perhaps for the opposite reason, the Kama-sutra is wary of nuns; it advises a married woman not to hang out with “any woman who is a beggar, a religious mendicant, a Buddhist nun, promiscuous, a juggler, a fortune-teller, or a magician who uses love-sorcery worked with roots (4.1.9).” Manu spends page after page in praise of ascetics, but the Artha-shastra has political agents of the king pretend to be wandering ascetics and advises the king to employ genuine ascetics in espionage (1.11.1-20). This surely did further damage to the already poor reputation of many ascetics, whom the Artha-shastra further denigrates with tales of false prophets (1.13.15).

  The members of the Trio are often said to be separate but equal. Sometimes they work together; thus, for example, one can have sex for the sake of offspring (dharma), for the sake of gaining political power (artha), or for sheer pleasure (kama), or for some combination of the three (KS 1.5.1-12). Yet the Trio tended to be hierarchized.12 The Artha-shastra and Kama-sutra rank dharma first and kama last, but Manu, oddly enough, hedges: “Dharma and artha are said to be better, or kama and artha, or dharma alone, or artha alone, here on earth. But the fixed rule is that the Trio is best (2.224).” The three aims form a sort of rock-paper-scissors arrangement, in which one is constantly trumping the others in an eternal merry-go-round. Some people attempted to correlate the three aims with the triad of the qualities of matter in a kind of unified field theory, (dharma with sattva, kama with rajas, and artha with tamas). The members of the Trio are, like the strands of matter, dynamic, inescapably interrelated, and in constantly shifting relationships to one another.

  The poet Ashvaghosha was born a Brahmin but converted to Buddhism. He lists the aims in what was generally agreed to be their ascending order of importance: One should not use artha for kama, since artha is more important than kama, nor dharma for artha, since dharma is more important than artha. To supply the first element, kama, with a precedent, he invokes an exaggerated, hence less desirable form of the element itself (ecstasy in contrast with mere pleasure), and when he reaches the last aim, dharma, which, to continue the pattern, should not be allowed to compromise a subsequent element higher than itself, he invokes as that subsequent element violence (himsa). One might have expected ahimsa here, but himsa, in its place, evokes the specter of Vedic sacrifice, which makes a very different point: In an ideal (pre-Buddhist) world, no one should perform Vedic sacrifices (involving violence to animals) for the sake of dharma.

  Yet even dharma must not be honored at the expense of the other aims. The thirteenth-century commentator on the Kama-sutra (1.1.2) tells this story of the interdependence of the three aims, here regarded as divinities:

  KING PURURAVAS AND THE THREE AIMS

  When King Pururavas went from earth to heaven to see Indra, the king of the gods, he saw Dharma and the others [Artha and Kama] embodied. As he approached them, he ignored the other two but paid homage to Dharma, walking around him in a circle to the right. The other two, unable to put up with this slight, cursed him. Because Kama had cursed him, he was separated from his wife and longed for her in her absence. When he had managed to put that right, then, because Artha had cursed him, he became so excessively greedy that he stole from all four social classes. The Brahmins, who were upset because they could no longer perform the sacrifice or other rituals without the money he had stolen from them, took blades of sharp sacrificial grass in their hands and killed him.

  Pururavas, a mortal king, is married to the celestial nymph and courtesan Urvashi. Artha makes Pururavas so greedy that he violates one of the basic
principles of dharma—never, ever, steal from Brahmins—and that is his undoing.dv

  SQUARING THE CIRCLE

  The texts we have considered above, and many others, regard the Trio as triple. But sometimes the aims of life are listed not as a Trio but as a quartet (chatur-varga), in which the fourth aim is moksha. The texts on each of the aims of life do not, by and large, deal with moksha when they deal with the other three aims, either because they did not take it seriously or, more likely, because they felt it operated in a world beyond the range of their concerns. The three worldly aims of life generally resisted the arriviste renunciant fourth; significantly, Ashvaghosha uses the Trio rather than the quartet in the verse we have cited. To use the Indian metaphor of the Yugas, the dice are loaded three to one in favor of worldliness; kama, artha, and dharma (as defined in the dharma-shastra s) are all for householders. Yet moksha was far too important to be ignored, and that is where the problems arise. From the time of the Upanishads, the interloping fourth was usually transcendent, the banner of a shift away from worldliness (the path of rebirth) to a life of renunciation and asceticism (the path of Release).