The Hindus (35 page)

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

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 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.

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 author 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.

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).