IB World Religions 4.1.3. Dharma, Varna and the Shape of Hindu Society Notes

4.1.3. Dharma, Varna and the Shape of Hindu Society

Dharma and its senses

1. Dharma comes from a root meaning to uphold, and Hindus use it for whatever holds things in their proper order, from the working of the cosmos down to the duties of one person.
2. Its Vedic ancestor is rita, the order that keeps seasons and sacrifices in place, and dharma inherits that sense of a pattern people fit into rather than invent.
3. The word covers several things English keeps apart: law, duty, religion, righteousness, and the nature a thing has.
4. Hindus call their own tradition sanatana dharma, the eternal teaching, which treats the religion itself as part of the order of things.
5. Dharma is not one rule for everybody. What a person owes depends on varna, on stage of life, on gender and on circumstance, and the texts add apad-dharma, the dharma of times of distress, when ordinary duties bend.
6. Because it is plural in this way, dharma can conflict with itself, and the tradition's greatest texts are largely arguments about what to do when it does.

Sva-dharma and varnashramadharma

1. Sva-dharma is a person's own dharma, the duty that belongs to them rather than to somebody else.
2. It is fixed by several things at once: varna, jati or birth group, the stage of life reached, gender and family.
3. The stages, or ashramas, are the student, the householder, the retired forest dweller and the renouncer, and each carries obligations of its own.
4. Put together the scheme is called the varnashramadharma, the dharma of varna and stage, and Hindus describe society as sustained when every part performs what is its own.
5. The Gita states the rule that follows: better one's own dharma imperfectly performed than another's dharma performed well.
6. That rule cuts two ways. It gives dignity to ordinary work, and reformers have long objected that it also holds people where they were born.

The four varnas

1. Varna means colour or kind, and names the four principal divisions of Hindu society: Brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas and shudras.
2. The classical charter is the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda, which describes the four as issuing from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of a cosmic person.
3. The functions attached to them are learning and sacrifice, rule and protection, trade and farming, and service to the other three.
4. Brahmins are the first varna, charged with studying and teaching the Vedas and with performing sacrifice, and religious authority in Hinduism has long rested partly with them.
5. Varna is not the same thing as jati. Varna is a fourfold ideal scheme, while jati names the thousands of birth groups in which people actually live, marry and work.
6. The Laws of Manu set the scheme out in detail, and modern Hindus disagree sharply over how much authority that text should carry.

Ahimsa and sadharana dharma

1. Beside sva-dharma the tradition sets sadharana dharma, the duties held to fall on everyone whatever their varna or stage of life.
2. The lists vary, but they usually include truthfulness, patience, self-control, purity, freedom from anger, and above all ahimsa.
3. Ahimsa means non-injury, doing no harm to living beings in act, word or thought. The Mahabharata repeats that ahimsa is the highest dharma.
4. It stands first among the yamas, the restraints listed in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and Hindus share the value with Jains and Buddhists, who each press it in their own directions.
5. Ahimsa lies behind the vegetarianism many Hindus practise and behind the special status given to the cow, though dietary rules differ widely by region and community.
6. Gandhi turned ahimsa into a political method in satyagraha, reading the Gita as an allegory of inner struggle, a reading some Hindus accept and others reject.

Shakti and the Goddess

1. Shakti is power or energy, and Hindus use it for the creative force by which anything is done. The word is feminine, and Hindus treat that power as the divine feminine.
2. On this account a deity acts through his shakti, so Vishnu is paired with Lakshmi, Shiva with Parvati and Brahma with Saraswati.
3. Shaktas go further and worship the Goddess, Devi, as supreme, treating Shakti as the ultimate reality rather than the consort of it.
4. The Devi Mahatmya tells how Durga was formed from the combined energies of the gods to kill a demon none of them could defeat alone.
5. Kali, fierce and unsettling in her iconography, is worshipped as a mother above all in Bengal, and her devotees describe terror and tenderness in the same figure.
6. Observers often note the contrast this creates, since goddesses may be worshipped as supreme in a tradition whose written rules restricted the women worshipping them.

Duty, order and disagreement

1. These concepts fit together as a picture of a world that holds when people do what is theirs to do.
2. The picture has been contested from inside for a very long time. The bhakti poets, among them Kabir and Ravidas, denied that birth had anything to do with reaching God.
3. Reform movements pressed the same point. The Arya Samaj and Vivekananda argued that varna described qualities and work rather than birth, and Gandhi campaigned against untouchability.
4. Others rejected the framework outright, and the arguments about caste in modern India and in the diaspora are a large subject in their own right.
5. Hindus therefore hold these concepts in very different strengths. Some treat varna as binding, some as historical description, and many Hindus abroad say it plays little part in their religious life.
6. What stays constant is the priority of dharma itself. Doing what is owed, in one's own situation, is what Hindus mean by living religiously.