The "Law Books" (Dharma shastras) and The Path Of Action

 

Around the time that the final Upanishads were being written, we see a new type of literature, the Dharmashastras, or "books on dharma. Dharma is a fundamental Hindu concept, which in different contexts can mean "religion," "duty," "law," or "social order," as well as many others. The word dharma is derived from a verb meaning "to support" or "to uphold," and this is the function that dharma plays in society (which shows why all those translations could make sense in context).


The texts on Dharma (dharmashastras), often referred to as the "Law Books," are most concerned with laying down guidelines for an organized and orderly society, in which each person has a well-defined status and role, based on social status, age, and gender. The dharmashastra writers presupposed an unequal society, in which birth into high or low status groups was determined by the quality of one's karma (good, bad, or mixed). Although various groups had unequal status, they were all necessary for society to function harmoniously, and true virtue lay in meticulously fulfilling one's prescribed social role.


In their idealized society, the dharmashastra writers are particularly famous for three groups of four:

 

        The Four Major Social Groups:

 

As mentioned in the General Introduction, these four groups are further divided into thousands of sub-groups, with varying status and social position. So here, we see that this idealized social order was often not as fixed as the texts would claim.

 

        The Four Stages of Life:

 

These four stages applied only to males from the first three social groups, since both Shudras and women were forbidden to study the Veda. Furthermore, it is a real question how many of these men went through all four stages, since today the overwhelming majority remain householders until death. This idealized pattern sanctions a variety of lifestyles--although each in their proper order, since becoming a wandering ascetic would be inappropriate for a man who still had family obligations to fulfill--but it seems that very few exercised the option to become homeless wanderers in search of spiritual liberation.

 

The Four Goals of Human Life:

 

All of these were legitimate goals for human life--and one of the interesting notes is that each of these has a technical literature connected with it, to let people know how to best gain these ends.  For Artha, there was Kautilya's Arthashastra, which was a political manual on the methods for running a state.  For Kama, there is the Kama Sutra, whose contents go far beyond the generally held notions of being a sex manual to talk about the aesthetic dimensions that bring pleasure into life.  For dharma, there were the dharmashastras, which are the focus for this section.  Lastly, final liberation was the ultimate goal for just about all the serious Hindu philosophical literature.


Although all of these were legitimate human goals, the first three are more clearly appropriate for a householder living a conventional family life, whereas the fourth is very different. Both wealth and pleasure were seen as legitimate human goals, and in themselves these are not necessarily bad--people in every society are concerned with making enough to live comfortably, and enjoying themselves along the way. The real problem comes when one's pursuit of these goals is out of proportion--when wealth or pleasure becomes the most important concern in one's life, eclipsing all other goals. In the Hindu conception of life, now as well as then, pursuing these goals was ideally supposed to be tempered and regulated by a commitment to dharma--living a righteous life.


We must be careful in assuming that Hindu society was EVER organized according to the categories found in these texts. The texts are prescriptive (telling how things "should" be) rather than descriptive (telling how things actually are). These texts also reflect the assumptions and worldview of their authors--who were just about always brahmin men (hence the continual exaltation of brahmins over other groups, and men over women). So we know a great deal about how brahmin men thought things should be, what is less certain is what other people thought of this (certainly the Buddhists and other "protest" movements have plenty of arguments on why the brahmins are not as great as they think). Perhaps the best way to think of these patterns is as ideals toward which (many) Hindu people strove, and as ideals they remain important even now.