The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Not surprisingly, the Kama-sutra in general gives very short shrift to moksha (1.2.4) and even applies the term, surely tongue in cheek, to the courtesan’s successful jettisoning (“setting free”) of an unwanted lover (6.4.44-5). On the other hand, other texts regard moksha as far superior to the other aims, or, rather, in a class apart. Some authors also attempted various unsatisfactory, overlapping correlations between the four aims and other quartets/triads, such as the three (twice born) classes, with moksha and dharma for Brahmins; all three of the original Trio for Kshatriyas; and artha for Vaishyas. It works better with the colors and qualities: white lucidity for Brahmins, red energy for Kshatriyas, and black torpor for the lower classes. But the matchmaking is generally a doomed attempt to put a square peg in a round hole.

  To this basic triad-become-quartet others were soon assimilated.13 The Vedas are usually regarded as a triad, and many Hindus to this day are named Trivedi (“Knower of Three Vedas”). But the Vedas are also regarded as a quartet, including the Atharva Veda, and other Hindus are named Chaturvedi (“Knower of Four Vedas”). (A foolish Brahmin in a seventh-century CE play naively brags that he will be honored even by Brahmins who are Panchavedi, Shadvedi—Knowers of Five Vedas, Six Vedas.14) Even the triad of qualities (gunas) was squared, when female prakriti (“matter, nature,” consisting of the three qualities) was contrasted with male purusha (“spirit, self, or person”), the transcendent fourth. Similarly, where once the Hindus had formulated a group of three passions—lust (kama), anger (krodha), and greed (lobha, or, in some formulation, fear [bhaya])—now a fourth metaphysical, epistemological emotion was added: delusion (moha). The new fourth often involved the concept of silence: To the three priests of the sacrifice was added a fourth priest (called the Brahmin) who was merely the silent witness; to the three Vedic modes of experience (waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep) was added a fourth stage, just called the fourth (turiya), a stage of merging completely into brahman.15 When keeping time in music too, Indians count three “heavy” beats and a fourth “empty” beat.16

  There are also some quartets that never seem to have been triads, such as the four Ages of time, or Yugas, named after the four throws of the dice. Yet the first three ages form one group (Eden, the way it was in illo tempore), while the last (the Kali Age) forms the other group (now, reality). The score, as usual, was not four, but three plus one.

  FIVE SOLUTIONS TO THE FOURTH ADDITION TO THE THREE AIMS

  Hinduism came up with various solutions to the potential conflicts between renunciation and the householder life resulting from the addition of the fourth aim, moksha.17

  First, it was said that the goals of sacrifice and renunciation were to be followed not simultaneously but seriatim, one at a time in sequence. When the aims are four and in sequence, they are sometimes grouped with what came to be known as the four stages of life (ashramas, also, confusingly, the word for a hermitage). But in the earliest texts that mention them (the early dharma-sutras), the four ashramas were not stages at all but four options for lifestyles that could be undertaken at any period in a man’s life: the chaste student (brahma-charin), the householder (grihastha), the forest dweller (vanaprastha), and the renouncer (samnyasin).18 The system was an attempt, on the part of Brahmins who inclined to renunciation, to integrate that way of life with the other major path, that of the householder. The first ashrama, that of the chaste student, always retained its primary meaning of a vow of chastity undertaken at any time of life.19 But by the time of Manu, the four ashramas had become serial (M 6.87-94), rather than choices that one could make at any time. From then on they were generally regarded as stages, and eventually the third stage in the quartet, that of the forest dweller, became highly problematic, especially when attempts were made to distinguish it from the fourth stage, that of the renouncer.20

  The fourth aim, moksha, clearly corresponds to the fourth stage of life, the renouncer’s stage, and because of that, scholars have often constructed a false chronology regarding the stages as yet another system of an original three plus a later one. But the first three aims do not correlate so easily with the first three stages. This is how the Kama-sutra attempts to put them together and to specify the age at which each should be undertaken:

  A man’s life span is said to be a full hundred years. By dividing his time, he cultivates the three aims in such a way that they enhance rather than interfere with each other. Childhood is the time to acquire knowledge and other kinds of artha, the prime of youth is for kama, and old age is for dharma and moksha. Or, because the life span is uncertain, a man pursues these aims as the opportunity arises, but he should remain celibate until he has acquired knowledge (1.2.1-6).

  The Kama-sutra hedges. It speaks of three aims but then sneaks moksha in on the coattails of dharma to include it after all. It does not actually mention the stages of life (ashramas) but speaks instead of childhood (brahma-charya, where, instead of Vedic learning, the boy presumably learns a trade), the prime of youth (the householder stage), and old age (which might be forest dwelling, renunciation, or neither, just staying home and getting old). And though the author assigns (three) ages for the (three, actually four) aims, he then unsays that division with his remark that one must carpe the diem at any time. The suggestion that you can indulge in kama at any stage of life (except childhood) reflects (or perhaps even satirizes?) widespread arguments about whether you can engage in renunciation (samnyasa) at any stage.21

  Most Hindus regarded renunciation as something that one did after having children and grandchildren, a decision often indefinitely postponed while theoretically extolled. Many Hindus prayed, with St. Augustine, “Make me chaste, O Lord, but not yet,” while for some, the ideal of renunciation, even of forest-dwelling, functioned as an imagined safety valve to keep them going in the householder stage: “I can always get out if and when I want to.” But making the fourth aim an optional fourth stage trivialized the claims of the full renunciant philosophy, which was fundamentally opposed to the householder life. Other resolutions were therefore proposed.

  Second was the argument from symbiosis, or plenitude: The two groups of people, worldly and transcendent, need each other, to compose society as a whole, the householder to feed the renouncer, the renouncer to bless the householder. There are two forms of immortality, one achieved through one’s own children and one through renunciation.22 Thus the renouncer’s holiness and knowledge are fed back into the society that supports him,23 and the paradox of the renunciant Brahmin is that he must remain outside society in order to be useful inside.24

  The third solution was compromise: Sometimes a householder would renounce for a while (following a particular vow) or in some ways (giving up meat or fasting at regular intervals). The forest-dweller life too, the third stage, was a compromise between the householder and renunciant stages, though, like all compromises, it was hedged with problems.25

  The fourth solution was identification. Thus it was said that the householder was a renouncer if he played his nonrenunciant role correctly, that fulfilling one’s worldly obligation was Release (as the god Krishna tells Prince Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: Do your work well, as a warrior, and you win the merit of renunciation). Thus Manu (5.53) promises that a person who gives up eating meat amasses the same good karma as one who performs a horse sacrifice. A person who understood things properly (yo evam veda) could win the merit of the goal he had not chosen, even while following the goal he had. It was also said that one must have sons, usually regarded as the goal of the worldly life, to achieve Release. Some Tantrics took this line of argument to the extreme and argued that there was no difference between the apparently opposed paths of Release (moksha) and the enjoyment of sensuality (bhoksha). So too, in the formulation of the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, the world of rebirth (samsara) was not, as most people thought, the opposite of the world of release from rebirth (nirvana), but the same place. This was a solution that many people gratefully accepted.

  The fifth and ultimate H
indu solution was hierarchy, but mutual hierarchy: For some, renunciation outranked family life, and for others, family life outranked renunciation. The drive to hierarchize, throughout classical Hindu thought, rides roughshod over the drive to present equal alternatives or even a serial plan for a well-rounded human life. The Mahabharata claims that the three other stages of life cannot surpass that of a good householder,26 while the reward that most of the shastras promise to the reader/hearer “who knows this” is moksha.27

  RENUNCIATION AND VIOLENCE IN PARTICULAR AND GENERAL DHARMA

  We have noted the preeminence of dharma among the three aims both in its status and in the number of texts devoted to it. Dharma is complex, in part because it is a site of contestation between renunciation and violence.

  Universal Hindu dharma was an overarching, unitary, nonhierarchical category of the religion for everyone, a shared human aim.28 This single dharma (sometimes called perpetual dharma [sanatana dharma] or dharma held in common [sadharana dharma]) involved general moral precepts for all four classes, though different texts had different ideas about what those precepts were. Even a single text, Manu’s dharma text, lists them differently in different places. In one verse, “Nonviolence, truth, not stealing, purification, and the suppression of the sensory powers are the dharma of the four classes, in a nutshell (10.63).” Nonviolence also comes first in another, related verse in Manu: “Nonviolence, the suppression of the sensory powers, the recitation of the Veda, inner heat, knowledge, and serving the guru bring about the supreme good (12.83-93; 10.63).” But Manu includes only one of these (suppression of the sensory powers, not nonviolence) in the ten commandments for the top three classes in all four stages of life: “Truth, not stealing, purification, suppression of the sensory powers, wisdom, learning, patience, forgiveness, self-control, and lack of anger (6.91-4).” Significantly, he does not include generosity, the primary Vedic virtue, in any of these lists. The general thought behind all the lists is a vague social ethic.

  Indeed, the code was so nebulous that one would not think that as an ideal it would pose a problem for anyone. At the same time, however, each individual was supposed to follow a unique path laid out for him at birth, a path determined primarily by the class and, eventually, the caste (jati) into which he was born. This was his own particular dharma, his sva-dharma, the job that every man in any particular family was supposed to do, further constrained by such factors as his stage of life and his gender. (I use the male pronoun advisedly; these rules were not meant to apply to women, whose only sva-dharma was to obey their husbands, and their only sacrament, marriage.) A person’s sva-dharma was sometimes called his innate activity (karma in its fifth meaning).

  Manu explains how this came about in terms of his own take on the theory of karma, which in his usage means something like assigned work:

  THE ORIGIN OF INDIVIDUAL KARMAS

  In the beginning the creator made the individual names and individual karmas and individual conditions of all things precisely in accordance with the words of the Veda. And to distinguish karmas, he distinguished right from wrong, and he yoked these creatures with the pairs such as happiness and unhappiness. And whatever karma the Lord yoked each creature to at first, that creature by itself engaged in that very karma as he was created again and again. Harmful or harmless, gentle or cruel, right or wrong, truthful or lying—the karma he gave to each creature in creation kept entering it by itself. Just as the seasons by themselves take on the distinctive signs of the seasons as they change, so embodied beings by themselves take on their karmas, each his own (1.21-30).

  The circularity of karma is explicitly set from the time of creation: You must be what you are; you cannot change your qualities. The re-creation of individual characteristics is inevitable, likened to the natural process of the seasons. An individual is born to be a king, or a servant, or, more precisely, in terms of the actuality of caste rather than the theory of class, a potter or a shoemaker. How are their karmas assigned to them? How does Manu know? It’s quite simple: He claims to have been an eyewitness, even a participant, in the creation of the world.

  The innate characteristics also include what we might regard as individual nature, for which there is another term in Sanskrit, sva-bhava. Thus it is the innate, particular nature (sva-bhava) of a tiger to be cruel and of a dove to be gentle, just as it is the karma of a tiger to kill and eat smaller animals and of a dove to coo. This too is sva-dharma, which is built into you, leaving you few choices in many realms of action, though you have free will in other realms, such as the amassing of karma.

  We therefore are trapped within a basic social paradox: If your sva-dharma was to be a warrior or a butcher, how were you to reconcile this with the universal dharma that gave pride of place to nonviolence, the stricture against taking life? Hinduism validated the plurality (and the hierarchy) of dharma by endorsing sva-dharma, but at the same time, it validated the unity of dharma by endorsing general dharma. As in parliamentary rules of order, the shastras state that the particular rule generally overrides the general rule; sva-dharma trumps general dharma. But the larger paradox of absolutism and relativism remained, and there are no easy answers.

  CHAPTER 9

  WOMEN AND OGRESSES IN THE RAMAYANA

  400 BCE to 200 CE

  CHRONOLOGY

  c. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composed

  c. 200 BCE-200 CE The Ramayana is composed

  327-25 BCE Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asia

  c. 324 BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynasty

  c. 265-232 BCE Ashoka reigns

  c. 250 BCE Third Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputra

  c. 185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty ends

  c. 185 BCE Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty

  73 BCE The Shunga dynasty ends

  c. 150 BCE The monuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are built

  c. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks, Scythians, Bactrians, and Parthians enter India

  THE POET, THE HUNTER, AND THE CRANE

  After the poet Valmiki learned the story of Rama, he went to bathe

  in a river. By the river a pair of mating cranes were sweetly singing.

  A Nishada hunter, hostile and plotting evil, shot down the male of

  the couple. When the hen saw her mate writhing on the ground, his

  limbs covered in blood, she cried out words of compassion. And

  when Valmiki saw that the Nishada had brought down the male

  crane, he was overcome with compassion, and out of his feeling of

  compassion he thought, “This was not dharma, to kill a sweetly singing

  crane for no reason.” When he heard the female crane crying, he

  said, “Nishada, you will never find peace, since you killed the male of

  this pair of cranes at the height of his desire.” Then Valmiki realized

  that he had instinctively spoken in verse, in a meter that he called the

  shloka, because it was uttered in sorrow (shoka).

  Ramayana (400 BCE to 200 CE) (1.2.81.1-17)

  This vignette that the Ramayana tells about itself weaves together the themes of dangerous sexuality, the violation of dharma, compassion toward animals, attitudes toward tribal peoples, and the transmutation of animal passions into human culture—all central to the concerns of this chapter. At the same time, the story of Rama and Sita raises new questions about deities who become human and women who are accused of being unchaste. Where the Brahmanas documented a period of new, though dispersed, political stability, and the Upanishads gave evidence of a reaction against that very stability, the Ramayana (Rdw) and the Mahabharata (MB), the two great Sanskrit poems (often called epics), were composed in this period (c. 300 BCE to 300 CE) that saw the rise and fall of the first great empire in India, followed by a period of chaos that rushed into the vacuum left by that fall.

  NORTH INDIA IN 400 BCE TO 200 CE

  This is the moment when we have the first writing that we know how to dec
ipher,dx engraved in stone in the form of the Ashokan edicts, as well as other historical sources—monuments, coins—to supplement our knowledge of the Sanskrit texts. Another major new source of our knowledge of this period comes from the reports of Greeks and other visitors. There is also a wealth of art history, ranging from terra-cotta figures, both human and animal, made in villages, to polished stone pillars with capitals, for the rich and powerful in the cities.

  We learn from these sources that the extension of agriculture into forested areas transformed the lives of forest dwellers; that craft specialists often emerged as distinct social groups; and that the unequal distribution of wealth sharpened social differences,1 though new access to economic resources raised the social position of slaves, landless agricultural laborers, hunters, fishermen and fisherwomen, pastoralists, peasants, village headmen, craftspeople, and merchants.2 In addition to the ongoing tension between Brahmins and Kshatriyas, new tensions arose as the lower classes gained economic and political power and began to challenge the status of the upper classes.dy

  Just as the doctrines of Buddhism and Hinduism have much in common at this period, so too the same snakes spread their hoods over the heads of the Buddha and Vishnu, the same buxom wood nymphs swing around trees in Hindu and Buddhist shrines, and both traditions carve images of the goddess of luck (Lakshmi).3 The design of some of the Hindu temples may have borrowed from the Buddhist precedent, for in some of the oldest temples the shrine, with the image in the center, was surrounded by an ambulatory path resembling the path around a stupa. Buddhism and Jainism remained friendly conversation partners, their rivalry with Hinduism often spurring both factions to borrow from each other in a positive way. But the non-Vedic religions also became more competitive, powerful rivals for political patronage as well as for the hearts of men and women, and a source of ideas that challenged the very core of emergent Hinduism. One of those ideas was a more insistent concern for the treatment of animals, leading to a great deal of soul-searching about the meaning of dharma. The attitude to animal sacrifice was also much affected by the rise of the two great male Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu in sectarian movements that had no use for Vedic ritual.