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). Butmoksha 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.

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, orartha 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 withsattva, 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).

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 regardmoksha 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; andartha 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.¹⁵When 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 mustcarpe 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 Hindu 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.