Varnashramadharma and Hindu virtues

Overview

Recall questions on varnashramadharma, the four varnas and the Purusha Sukta, the four stages of life, links to the purusharthas and karma, the virtues of ahimsa, detachment and self-restraint, varna and jati, caste in Hindu life, and whether the ideal is workable today.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does the term varnashramadharma mean?

   Model answer

   It is a compound of three ideas. Varna is the fourfold classification of society; ashrama is the stage of life a person has reached; and dharma is duty. Put together, the term names the principle that what a person ought to do is determined jointly by their social position and by where they stand in the course of a life. It is the classical Hindu answer to the question of how an abstract idea of duty becomes a concrete instruction to a particular individual on a particular day.

2. 2

   Name the four varnas and explain their traditional functions.

   Model answer

   Brahmins are associated with learning, teaching and priesthood; kshatriyas with rule, administration and defence; vaishyas with agriculture, herding, trade and commerce; and shudras with service and labour. The first three are called twice-born because their males were entitled to initiation and to Vedic study, which shudras were not. Beyond the fourfold scheme entirely stood groups regarded as outside it, whose occupations were treated as polluting and who were subjected to untouchability. The scheme is textual and idealised, and it never mapped neatly onto how people actually lived.

3. 3

   What does the Purusha Sukta establish about varna?

   Model answer

   The hymn describes the creation of the world through the sacrifice of a cosmic person, and it derives the parts of society from the parts of his body: the brahmin from the mouth, the ruling class from the arms, the producing class from the thighs and the serving class from the feet. It is the earliest textual account of the fourfold order and it is used in two opposite directions. Traditionalists take it as showing that the arrangement is woven into the structure of reality and is therefore not a human invention that humans may repeal. Reformers take it as showing that all four are limbs of one living body, mutually dependent and equally necessary, so that ranking them by worth misreads the image. It is also worth noting that the hymn describes function, not the thousands of birth-groups that later structured Hindu society.

4. 4

   What are the four stages of a Hindu life?

   Model answer

   The student, who lives with a teacher, studies and practises celibacy; the householder, who marries, raises a family, earns, gives hospitality and maintains the domestic rites, and who supports everyone in the other three stages; the forest dweller, who hands over responsibilities and withdraws to a simpler life of study and austerity, traditionally after seeing grandchildren; and the renouncer, who breaks with society altogether to seek liberation. The scheme is best understood as a graded release from obligation, in which a person meets their debts to teachers, ancestors and society first, and is only then free to pursue moksha. In practice most Hindus live the first two, and many who renounce do so without passing through the others.

5. 5

   Explain how varnashramadharma connects with the purusharthas.

   Model answer

   The two schemes are designed to interlock. The householder stage is where artha and kama are legitimately pursued, and the varna determines the manner in which artha may be sought, since the proper means of livelihood differ by class. Dharma governs the whole arrangement, and moksha is the aim of the last stage, when the duties belonging to varna and household life have been discharged. The result is a system in which prosperity, pleasure, duty and liberation are not competing options but successive priorities within one ordered life.

6. 6

   How does varnashramadharma connect with karma and samsara?

   Model answer

   The link is that fulfilling one's own duty is treated as the appropriate way to act within the position that past karma has produced. On the classical account a person's birth, and hence their varna, is explained as the working out of what has already ripened, so duty is what that situation calls for rather than an arbitrary imposition. Not all Hindus accept the premise: the Gita's description of varna as arising from quality and action has long been read as detaching it from birth, and reform movements argued from that reading against hereditary caste. Discharging it faithfully generates merit and improves future conditions; abandoning it for someone else's duty generates the opposite. Performing that duty without craving its results is the point at which the system opens onto liberation rather than merely onto a better rebirth. The obvious objection is that this reasoning makes disadvantage look deserved, which is precisely what Hindu critics of caste have attacked.

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