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Hinduism    
The Sword of Kali – 10
Reply to "A Philosophical Critique of Radical Universalism"

Universal Dharma – The Ethical Dimension

We have shown in the previous section how universalism is opposed to relativism, but there is still one question that remains to be answered, and the question is: How is it possible for different and contradictory moral codes to be equally valid at the same time? We shall now attempt to answer this crucial question.

The problem of morality is one of the most enigmatic problems of human existence. To most of us that have been fed on modern fare, it would seem absurd that there could be different and contradictory moral codes that are valid at the same time. Modern acculturation would have us believe that moral and ethical systems must everywhere be uniform, and it is this belief that leads Dr. Morales to equate universalism with ethical relativism.

When the assertion that "all religions are the same" is made, it is also automatically inferred that the moral systems of all religions are the same as well – even if many of the rules of these moral systems are diametrically opposed to one another. In supporting Radical Universalism, the ethically barren conclusions of Ethical Relativism are also naturally supported. The consequent results are that moral proscriptions and prescriptions that are otherwise contradictory and mutually exclusive are seen as equally valid – a position that cannot be logically asserted. To support Radical Universalism is to say that being violent and being non-violent, to be tolerant and to be intolerant, to have compassion and to have religiously inspired hate are all morally equivalent. The idea that there can be moral equivalency of diametrically opposed moral rules is not upheld by any religion on earth, Hinduism included.

Strange as it may sound to modern ears, the validity of contrary, and sometimes even opposite, moral rules is a part of the Eternal Dharma. Moral codes are not the same for everyone. The fundamental mistake that is often made while speaking about moral codes is to consider them as being uniformly applicable to all. But the moral code for a husband is different than the moral code for a wife, and the moral code for a hangman is different than the moral code for a priest. Moral codes vary with time, place and situation though ultimately all these variations are constituted in the One Eternal Dharma. In asking about morality, we are verily knocking on the doors of the Divine Order, and we must be ready to pause and open our eyes before we profess to answer them, for the workings of dharma are not easy to comprehend.

What is the meaning of Dharma? In Hinduism, Dharma is not an order that has been proclaimed by God; it is God Himself in the Natural Order of the Universe. The word dharma translates to nature, and therefore the dharma of a thing is the very nature of a thing. It is the dharma of a rose to be a rose, and the dharma of a tree to be a tree. Likewise, it is the dharma of a husband to be a husband, and the dharma of a wife to be a wife, and the dharma of a son to be a son, and the dharma of a father to be a father. According to the Vedas, Dharma is Rtam, the meaning that is in Brahman. This world is not other than the meaning in God that has blossomed into creation through the unfolding of vivarta. God creates through the sabda (word) that is in Him, and His creation is the artha within Himself brought forth into manifest form. Rtam is therefore this world as the artha unfolded in Brahman, and Brahman remains always the sat – the truth - of all things in the world. Therefore Rtam is always seated in Satyam, and the Heart of Dharma is Truth. Rtam is the eternal nature of the Kshetra in the Kshetrajna, it is the Lower Nature that is held in the Higher. The Higher is the province of Its Governance and the Lower is the field of Its Leela, but they are never two.

One who clings fast to Eternal Truth
Will attain Ultimate Truth Itself.
The strength of Rta, Eternal Order, is far reaching
It brings wisdom to those that pursue it.
Earth and Heaven owe their existence to Rta.
And the Supreme Powers yield their ambrosial milk,
their treasured contents,
In perfect obedience to the Lord of Eternal Existence.
(Rg Veda.IV.23.1):

Now there arises this question: If dharma is the nature of a thing, and all things in this world exist according to their own natures, then how indeed can there be adharma in this world? How is it possible that there may be something that is not in accordance with its own nature? In order to answer this question, we must recognize that adharma arises only in a conscious locus that is subject to avidya. It is only through avidya that a soul may see untruth and it is only due to the ahamkara wrought by avidya that a jiva may behold the illusion of the Self as an agent of action.

Actions are wrought in all cases by the gunas of Prakriti. He whose mind is deluded by ahamkara thinks ‘I am the doer.’ (Bh.Gita.III.27)

The locus of adharma is therefore the jiva that has chaitanya and will. A rose can never be anything but a rose because it has no will to be otherwise. It may appear to be other than what it is only in the vision of a jiva that is gifted with consciousness and will – and avidya. It is due to avidya that there arises the great mystery of this world - that untruth paradoxically comes to be, for it is indeed a paradox to say that there is in reality an untruth. For if it is, it is truth, and it can be untruth only by not being. In Advaita Vedanta, untruth is neither being nor non-being, but is the loss of genuineness of a thing’s being; it is adhyasa, one thing appearing as another. It is the paradoxical nature of Maya in which there is the loss of distinction between the real and unreal. The twin poles of truth and untruth arise in vyavaharika sathya, which is the Truth of Paramartha filtered through the lens of one’s avidya to present a paradoxical world whose truth can never be determined, for it is never possible to determine the true nature of something that partakes of falsity. It is therefore anirvacaniya, epistemologically indeterminable. The truth of a thing seen in samsara is not found by looking for it in the thing that is seen, but by removing one’s avidya so that its truth is seen naturally in the Light of the Sun. In Advaita Vedanta, avidya is not a thing to be removed; it is the sleep of looking at the world with unseeing eyes. Awakening is the opening of the eye – the Third Eye. In the sleep of samsara, the will wills in ways contrary to the truth. This defiant act of the will is adharma. The will cannot change the Truth, but it can present the Truth in Time as the balance of justice in the Dharma Chakra. It is the Wheel of Dharma that governs the actions of all beings and bestows upon them the results in accordance with their actions:

He who follows not here the Chakra thus set in motion, who is of sinful life, indulging in the senses, he lives in vain, O son of Pritha. (Bh.Gita.III.16)

The field of dharma is the field of human action. Human action arises only in samsara wherein a jiva is subject to avidya. The jiva’s agency for action cannot exist in the Light of Knowledge:

O Arjuna, as a blazing fire reduces pieces of wood to ashes, similarly the fire of Knowledge reduces all actions to ashes. (Bh.Gita.IV.37)

Samsara is the journey of the soul in the deep sleep of avidya. It is called the anadi bija nidra, the beginning-less sleep without end. It is Maharatri, the Great Night of Darkness. Its end is not an end in time, but is the opposite of sleep which is the Awakening into the Light of Eternity. In samsara, the Bliss of Self is masked by avidya and the soul is therefore always trying to attain the inner ecstasy that it has lost, and hence arises its first purushartha, kama, the pursuit of pleasure. Kama is essentially the pursuit of the erotic, and while its most common goal is sexual pleasure, it is also the pursuit of beauty and art because the absorption attained by the soul in aesthetics is the merging of subject and object, which is the essence of the erotic. The subject is the purusha in the body and the object is prakriti, and in absorption he enjoys union with her. This is the reason why aesthetics, or gandharva shastra, is the overarching paradigm of kama shastra.*X. 

Again, in samsara, the soul that is essentially one with the Infinite Brahman is ‘contracted’ into the limited self within the body, and it is always trying to make up for the loss of its innate infinitude and hence there arises the second purushartha, artha, which is the pursuit of wealth, objects, fame, etc. Avidya is beginningless – no one knows when it all began – and the unpaid debts due to other beings that it has accumulated in its journey have to be repaid and thus arises the third purushartha, the pursuit of dharma. And when the soul has tired of being tossed about in this ocean of samsara, it yearns for the freedom of eternity and the seeking that arises from this yearning is the fourth purushartha, the pursuit of moksha. Thus there arise in the field of human activity the four purusharthas – kama, artha, dharma and moksha.

Sanatana Dharma is divided two-fold in accordance with the two-fold directedness of human actions, the directedness to kama, artha and dharma, comprising and the path of works, and the directedness to moksha being the path of renunciation. It is this two-fold Eternal Dharma that holds the universe in place including both the stability of the created world and the preservation of the esoteric path for the soul to fly from the shadow of the ephemeral to the Light of the Eternal. Regarding this, Sri Shankaracharya writes:

The Lord created the universe, and wishing to secure order therein He first created the Prajapatis (Lords of the creatures) such as Marichi and caused them to adopt the Pravritti-Dharma, the Religion of Works. He then created others such as Sanaka and Sanandana and caused them to adopt the Nivritti-Dharma, the Religion of Renunciation, characterised by knowledge and indifference to works. It is the two-fold Vedic Dharma of Works and Renunciation that maintains order in the universe. (Shankara’s Gita bhashya, Introduction).

The Eternal Dharma seen through the lens of Time is the Wheel of Dharma. Under the governance of the Wheel of Dharma, the soul acquires various bodies as it journeys through time. But the various bodies that a soul acquires are eternally existent in Brahman. They exist as the artha in the Purushartha. The soul in samsara merely comes to reside in these bodies as given to it by its own past actions. The Yoga Sutra says:

"Good and bad deeds are not the direct causes in transformations, but they act as breakers of obstacles to nature, as a farmer breaks the obstacles to the course of water, which then runs down by its own nature." (YS,IV,3).

When a soul casts off one body and is yet to acquire another, it retains the impressions gained from its past births. These impressions are its sukshuma sharira, the subtle body. When a person dies, the soul merely disengages itself from the gross body; its gross eyes are gone, but its sense of sight is not gone; its gross ears are gone, but its sense of hearing is not gone; its hands and legs are gone, but its sense of grasping and locomotion are not gone. These are part of its sukshuma sharira – the subtle body - with which it wanders about from birth to birth. The sukshuma sharira is the body comprised of the inner four sheaths out of the five sheaths that an embodied being in this world possesses. The five sheaths of an embodied being are the annamayakosha, the pranamayakosha, the manomayakosha, the vijnanamayakosha, and the anandamayakosha. The inner four sheaths from the anandamayakosha to the pranamayakosha remain with the soul even when the soul disengages itself from the gross body. That is why a person is said to die when prana leaves the body. Prana presents itself as breath in the gross body, but it is in actuality the life-current that animates the gross body through the manifestation of breath. Now, all of nature is composed of the three gunas – rajas, sattva and tamas. The gradation of bodies in the world depends on the admixture of the gunas that are in them. The distribution of the gunas in the sukshuma sharira – the impressions from its actions in its previous lives - determines the body that the soul is given by the Lord’s Chakra when it is reborn into this world. Lord Krishna says in the Gita:

The four varnas have been created by Me according to the distribution of the gunas and the karmas; though I am the author thereof, know Me as non-agent and immutable. (IV.13)

The dharma of a soul is to follow the dharma of the body given to it by the Wheel of Justice. The dharma of a soul that is born as a man is to follow the dharma of a man, and the dharma of a soul that is born as a dog is to follow the dharma of a dog. Right and wrong actions of a soul depend on the body that it possesses at the time when it is performing those actions. That is why Shankara, the sannyasi, was not polluted by loss of celibacy even though he had sported with the queens of Amuraka when occupying the body of the king.*XI

To know what dharma is, it is necessary to know what swadharma is because it is a thing’s swadharma that is the reference against which actions are measured as right and wrong. Now, this world is name and form, and to know a thing is to know the name and the form that is true to the name. To know the true form of a thing is to know the intrinsic attributes of the thing. The intrinsic attributes of a thing – the attributes that are one with it - is its swadharma. It is the swadharma of fire to burn, and of water to flow. (Action is also an attribute of a thing, for we do not see mere action in this world, but see it as the attribute of something that is acting.) The swadharma of all things lies in the artha that is the Divine Rtam in Brahman. It is the name and the meaning – the form that is true to the name - as it exists eternally in Brahman. The body that a soul is identified with in a given birth has its own intrinsic nature – its swadharma - and it is the dharma of a jiva to act in accordance with the swadharma of the body and the station that it naturally comes to possess in the world. Men and women are not given their bodies and stations by accident. The Wheel of Dharma has given it to them due to their past-actions and the duties of the bodies and stations they now occupy are the actions required for balancing the actions of the past. By following dharma – by being true to the swadharma of the bodies and stations given to them - they would be repaying the debts accruing to them from their past actions. Thus, the injunctions of dharma regarding the duties of stations for men and women are not mere normative principles; they are the prescriptions derived from the workings of the Dharma Chakra. These duties, laid down in the Dharma Shastras, are the manners in which the debts accruing from past lives may be repaid. The actions required to repay these past debts are called nitya karma, the necessary duties of a man or woman. There is no choice but to perform them because there is no choice in the matter of repayment of debts. In performing them - by being true to the station that one is born in - one repays the debts of the past and becomes free to that extent from one’s past karma. One then lives lightly, for the flavor of a live lived according to dharma is sweet.

"madhu vAtA rtAyatE madhu ksharanthi
sindava: --- gaavO bhavanthu na: "

To follow dharma is to act in accordance with one’s swadharma. It is being true to the name one bears. In deviating from one’s swadharma, one is not true to the name that one bears. Being true to the name is to conform to Rtam, the meaning that is in Brahman. In the great Confucian Way of the Tao, this principle is called the Doctrine of Rectification of Names.*XII

Dharma is Rtam, the meaning that is in Brahman. In speaking truly about the world, it is the dharma of speaking the truth. In being true to oneself, it is the dharma of acting according to one’s swadharma. Men and women follow dharma by being true to their swadharmas, to those actions that are contained in the meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as they exist in Brahman. These are the duties that govern the dharma of men and women in the field of His Leela. But men and women are not merely men and women, they are also many other things that men and women may be such as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, kings and queens, priests, warriors, servants, maids, lords, ladies, physicians, nurses, drivers, prison-keepers, and many other things. They may be Hindus or Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or Zoroastrians or Pagans. It is not in the swadharma of a king to choose to be a thief or in the swadharma of a wife to choose to be a public woman. They would cease to be a king or wife in so far as they choose these occupations, and thus they would be violating their dharma. But if a king were to choose to slay the enemy in battle, he would be acting in accordance with his swadharma because it is in the nature of a king to slay his enemies in battle. He would not cease to be a king on account of slaying his enemies in battle. Likewise, if a wife were to choose to be a mother of her husband’s children, she would be acting in accordance with her swadharma because it in the nature of a wife to be a mother of her husband’s children. She would not cease to be a wife on account of being a mother of her husband’s children. Thus it is that the dharma of men and women is given by the swadharma of the bodies and stations that they possess. Now there are stations that are given to men and woman by birth, and there are stations that they come to occupy by the choices of their free will. But in using their free will, they would be following dharma only by choosing their occupations in accordance with the swadharma of the bodies and stations that they already possess by virtue of the Wheel of Dharma. Those who understand the natures of samanya and vishesha see that they would remain true to the sameness of the stations given to them by birth by choosing only those occupations and duties that are inherent in the swadharma of these stations. Their duty is to be true to the dharmic stations that the Dharma Chakra bestows them with in the taxonomy of the universe - for it is by performing the actions of the stations they naturally occupy that they would be true to what they are, and they would thereby be true to the Eternal Dharma. It does not therefore behove a man or woman to strive to be other than what his or her swadharma is because that would be a dereliction of his or her dharma. Lord Krishna sums up the gist of the Eternal Dharma in a single verse in the Gita:

Better one’s own duty, though devoid of merit, than the duty of another well discharged. Better is death in one’s own duty; the duty of another is productive of danger. (III.35)

This then is a brief overview of the basis of Hindu Dharma. Now, with this background, we shall attempt to provide a reply to the question: How is it that Hinduism sees the different moral codes of the different religions as being valid at the same time? I believe that the nature of Sanatana Dharma itself provides the answer to this question. Each religion is a vishesha religion (vishesha dharma) that is revealed by God to select peoples in this world in accordance with the swadharma of these people (the intrinsic natures of these specific people) and it is the dharma of each religion to follow its respective swadharma as revealed to it by God. The moral codes for different religions may be at variance with one another depending on the natures of the people to whom these religions have been revealed, but they are each the appropriate prescriptions of dharma for them considering their constitution. Just as it is the dharma of a king to slay his enemies whereas the dharma of a sannyasi does not permit him to kill even a worm, and both these are in accordance with dharma notwithstanding the contrary natures of their actions, similarly the moral codes (or governance of actions) of different religions may be different and even contrary to one another and yet they may all be in accordance with the One Eternal Dharma. This is the basis of the Hindu universal outlook regarding the validity of different moral codes that exist in different religions.    

– Continued

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