Dharma, Artha, Kāma, Mokṣa – XII

Dr. Bibek Debroy

Let me begin with two shlokas from the Bhagavad Gita again.  2.28 states, अव्यक्तादीनि भूतानि व्यक्तमध्यानि भारत​। अव्यक्तनिधनान्येव तत्र का परिदेवना॥ “O descendant of the Bharata lineage!  A being is not manifest at the beginning and is manifest in the middle.  After death, the being is not manifest again.  What is there to sorrow about?” That’s the आत्मन्, which is not destroyed.  For the sake of completeness, let me mention the concept of लिङगशरीरम्, the subtle body.  Depending on the school of belief, this subtle body is a vehicle of consciousness, from one life to another, and is attached to the atman.  But for the moment, let us not complicate matters unnecessarily.  Here is the second shloka from Bhagavad Gita, 4.5. बहूनि मे व्यतीतानि जन्मानि तव चार्जुन। तान्य्हं वेद सर्वाणि न त्वं वेत्थ परंतप​॥  “O Arjuna!  Both you and I have passed through several lives.  O scorcher of enemies!  I know all of them, but you do not.”  That’s precisely the problem.  We don’t know.  We don’t remember.  Hence, we don’t realize why we have been born.

There is a friend of mine who is a senior bureaucrat.  He lives in one of the Delhi localities that is a “bureaucrat colony”, meaning that there are houses for senior civil servants there.  Recently, he related to me a trivial incident that shook him up and changed his life.  Right outside his quarters, there is a taxi stand.  He was returning home after a day of meetings.  It was just before lunch and he was hungry.  It was one of those hot Delhi days.  As he was about to walk in, he was stopped by one of those taxi drivers, tall, hefty and burly.  The taxi driver said, “Get me some water to drink.”  He wasn’t polite and my bureaucrat friend was annoyed.  “Am I your servant?” he retorted.  The taxi driver smiled and replied, “Someone who gives water to drink is God, not a servant.”  This shook up my friend.  He went to his house and got a bottle of water.  But the taxi driver said, “I don’t want it now.”  According to my friend, this changed his attitude towards life, forever. 

This was a relatively trivial incident.  My attitude changed because of an incident that was relatively less trivial.  So that you relate better, I am going to reveal an aspect of my life that is extremely personal.  Beyond the intimate, few people know about this.  In January 2004, I had a heart attack and am lucky to be alive today.  As I lay down on the operating table in Escorts, to use the clichéd expression, my entire life seemed to flash past me.  There were huge glass windows and I could see the sun shining on the green leaves outside.  Despite the searing pain inside, I could hear (or thought I could hear) the birds chirping outside.  “What have I done with my life?” I wondered.  If I survive and get out alive, no more of what I have been doing.  What’s this rat race?  Why am I in it?  What’s the purpose of publishing like mad?  Why and for whom?  “If I survive, in this calendar year, 2004, I will publish 12 books.  That’s it.  After that, I will only do what I wish to do.”  

That grueling publication schedule included both authored and edited books.  For the record, I actually did 15.  You will find them listed in my resume.  And you will also find, since 2005, publication has dried up, deliberately, unless I want to actually write something, not because someone else is asking me to.  Once I was back home, other than writing those books, I decided to paint the house.  Not get it painted mind you, paint it myself.  That gave me the opportunity to think and to reflect.  I am not going to bore you with further personal details.  The point is a simple one.  Why should one wait for shocks, trivial or non-trivial?  This is a question one should ask regardless.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) needs no introduction.  He was deeply religious and attributed all his inspiration to the family goddess Namagiri or Namakkal.  Ramanujan was no exception.  Many other geniuses have believed in the existence of a supreme force.  Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013) was a philosopher and law academic.  His last book, “Religion without God” will be published posthumously.  Here is a quote from that book. “The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted…But Einstein meant much more than that the universe is organized around fundamental physical laws; indeed his view I quoted is, in one important sense, an endorsement of the supernatural. The beauty and sublimity he said we could reach only as a feeble reflection are not part of nature; they are something beyond nature that cannot be grasped even by finally understanding the most fundamental of physical laws. It was Einstein’s faith that some transcendental and objective value permeates the universe, value that is neither a natural phenomenon nor a subjective reaction to natural phenomena. That is what led him to insist on his own religiosity. No other description, he thought, could better capture the character of his faith.” 

A Hindu may use slightly different words.  But will agree with the general thrust.  I have earlier said that words like देव, देवी, देवत, देवता mean “shining”.  By the way, देव and देवत are masculine and देवी and देवता are feminine.  If “god” is interpreted as these terms, how can I not believe in “god”?  There is “god” in you and in me.  There is divinity in each of us.  There is the brahman in each of us.  The purpose of life is to uplift the atman and realize this.  That’s the reason we are born.  That’s also the purpose of yoga, something I will leave for the next blog.

Dharma, Artha, Kāma, Mokṣa – XI

Dr. Bibek Debroy

There is something that has tangentially cropped up and needs to be explicitly mentioned now.  This is a critical element in Hinduism and thousands of shlokas, from thousands of texts, can be cited.  Here, for example, is 2.12-13 of the Bhagavad Gita.  न त्वेवाहं जातु नासं न् त्वं नेमे जनाधिपाः। न चैव न भविष्यामः सर्वे वयमतः परम्॥देहिनोऽस्मिन् यथा देहे कौमारं यौवनं जरा। तथा देहान्तरप्राप्तिर्धीरस्तत्र न मुह्यति॥ “It is not the case that I, or you, or these kings, did not exist before this.  Nor is it the case that we won’t exist in the future, all of us will be there. The soul passes through childhood, youth and age in this body, and like that, attains another body. The wise don’t get bewildered by this.”  

How will you translate the word संसार​?  If you say world or life, that’s not quite wrong.  But it doesn’t capture the entire nuance.  It’s a cycle and the passage of the atman through that cycle of existence.  Birth is not a beginning.  Nor is death the end.  The cycle goes on, from one life to another.  As long as one is tied down in that cycle, one is not freed.  One has not attained emancipation or liberation, मोक्ष.  Dharma, artha and kama, described as the three objectives (trivarga) of life, don’t get you that moksha.  That’s the reason something like the Mahabharata has an entire section on moksha dharma, as opposed to ordinary dharma.

I am somewhat bemused when I hear expressions like स्वर्ग, नरक, heaven and hell respectively, and descriptions about these.  Apsaras (actually the plural should be apsarases) will dance around you and gandharvas will sing to you in heaven.  You will ride on celestial vehicles, vimanas.  In hell, Yama’s messengers will boil you in red-hot oil and impale you with stakes.  For a start, even in the sacred texts, there isn’t a single heaven, or a single hell. There are layers.  For instance, even in the worlds above (heaven say), there are supposed to be seven lokas or worlds – bhurloka, kharloka, svarloka (svarga), mahaloka, janarloka, taparloka and satyaloka (or brahmaloka).  Similarly, even in the worlds below (hell say), there are supposed to be seven – atala, vitala, sutala, rasatala, talatala, mahatala and patala.  

The more important point is the following.  We cannot comprehend the atman through the standard senses and physical experiences.  How can we comprehend what the atman goes through, beyond death, through these physical analogies?  There is no Chitragupta who sits there with a ledger and determines where the atman will go.  Those are all simplifications.  Yes, the atman goes through karma in this life.  This leads to the balance sheet I mentioned earlier. Ideally, the debits and the credits should be settled in this life itself.  


I think that is the original idea behind प्रायश्चित्त, atonement or expiation.  This doesn’t mean that I have visited a temple and have sacrificed a goat and thereby, all my sins have been cleansed.  The cleansing and the purification is entirely internal.​  The net balance that remains, after death, carries forward to whatever the atman experiences after death.  However, unless one has attained moksha, those experiences are temporary and transitory.  One has to be reborn again, into this cycle of life.  Beyond death, there are thus multiple exit options for the atman, not a single one.  The rare person obtains moksha.  Most of us have to be born again.

Dharma, Artha, Kāma, Mokṣa – X

Dr. Bibek Debroy

A few years ago, I addressed a group of young people – students.  I said, “When you are 20, you want to take on the world.  When you are 40, you find that the world has taken you on.  When you are 60, you realize that it doesn’t matter one way or the other.  And when you are 80, if you survive that long, you realize that you and the world are both illusions.”  It was a clever thing to say.  I don’t know if it struck a chord, but it got me some applause.  

There is a profound truth in that, though not quite in the way I said it.  I think most of our miseries are because we want to change the world and because we want to change other people.  We are actually insignificant and irrelevant.  The world is impervious to whatever change we might want to bring.  It has existed before we were born and it will exist after we are dead.  We matter nothing to the world.  As for other people, it’s not that they don’t change.  But they change because of their own internal reasons and compulsions, not because we want them to change.  Realizing my insignificance, at least in the sense I understand myself, is one of the first steps towards finding peace.  अहंकार​ is ego, egotism, a sense of one’s importance.  It’s a false sense of importance.  As I said, I can’t change other people either.  The only person I can change is myself.

I have mentioned Adi Shankaracharya earlier. He wrote a stotram called चर्पटपञ्जरिकास्तोत्रम्, often known as the bhaja govindam stotram.  चर्पट means tattered pieces of cloth and पञ्जरिका is a cage.  This stotram is thus about the tattered pieces of cloth this cage of a body is covered in.  There are many shlokas in this stotram that are worth quoting, but I will only focus on 1 and a ½.  Here is the ½ bit first. कस्त्वं कोऽहं कुत आयातः का मे जननी को मे तातः  “Who are you? Who am I?  Where have I come from?  Who is my mother?  Who is my father?”  Here is the full shloka now. यावद्वित्तोपार्जनशक्तस्तावन्न्निजपरिवारो रक्तः। पश्चाद्धावति जर्जरदेहे वार्तां पृच्छति कोऽपि न गेहे॥  For our purposes, a word for word translation isn’t necessary.  The broad translation is as follows.  “As long as one is capable of earning riches, till then, one’s family is devoted.  Thereafter, when one is advancing (towards death) with a decayed body, no one at home asks about one’s welfare.”

We have two categories of other people – friends (or acquaintances) and relatives.  There is the clichéd statement that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives.  You are stuck with your relatives.  In Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata, there is an image of logs floating around on the ocean, coming together for a while, and then drifting apart.  In the Shanti Parva, the immediate context is of family and relatives, who come together in one life and drift apart in a subsequent one.  Let’s ignore subsequent lives for the moment.  In the same life, you come close to someone as a friend.  You remain close for some time and then you drift apart.  It’s not necessarily the case that you have had a fight or quarrel.  You just drift apart.  It’s not that you have lost the quality of becoming friends with someone.  Instead, friendship with someone terminates, last for a certain period, and then you become friends with someone else instead.  Something, destiny for want of a better word, brought you together and made you drift apart. 

Why are you suddenly attracted to someone, the male-female relationship being the most obvious one?  Love, infatuation, good vibes are just words.  What do they mean?  Destiny is just as good a word and we will probe this later.  Relatives are not quite the same, since there is no choice involved there, at least seemingly.  We have clichéd expressions like blood being thicker than water and a big deal is made of family ties.  But think about it.  As in the Adi Shankaracharya stotram, filial relationships are about quid pro quo.  We shouldn’t unnecessarily be sentimental about them, as in films.  Family members fight, quarrel, kill each other and drift apart.  It’s just that the drifting and severance can never be as neat as friends or acquaintances.

Like dharma, there is another use that is heavily over-used and that is कर्म​.  On the face of it, the word means nothing more than work or action.  But in the context of Hinduism, it has a deeper meaning.  Yes, there are problems in absolutely defining “good” and “bad”.  But nevertheless, in a given context, there are good deeds and bad deeds.  It’s like my bank balance.  Good deeds are credit accounts.  Bad deeds are debit accounts.  I repeat, I am not yet using the word कर्म​ in the sense of a next life, parodied for instance, in characterizations of bad people being born as cockroaches or insects or whatever.  My experience is that there is something like a law of conservation of कर्म​.  If you do good deeds, good deeds will be done to you.  

Don’t get me wrong.  If you do a good deed to someone, there is no necessary quid pro quo with that person. The quid pro quo will instead come from someone else, unexpectedly.  You bestow affection. Affection will come to you from somewhere else.  You are generous. Generosity will flow back to you.  Sounds a bit like Dale Carnegie. You don’t have to wait to become a cockroach or whatever in your next life. The balance sheet of life pays you back in this life itself.  Not entirely, but very substantially.  What brings us close to friends/acquaintances seems to be a bit like a debt to be paid to someone, or a debt to be paid back by someone.  That takes us to karma in the next life.  We will save that for later.