IB World Religions 4.6.1. Duty as Ethics: the Varnashramadharma, the Three Objectives and the Three Debts Notes

4.6.1. Duty as Ethics: The Varnashramadharma, the Three Objectives and the Three Debts

Dharma as moral vocabulary

1. Hindu ethics is built around dharma rather than around a set of commands. The word comes from a root meaning to hold up, so dharma names whatever keeps a person, a family and the world in working order.
2. This makes right action a question of position rather than of consent. A Hindu asks what this person, in this role and at this stage of life, must uphold, and the answer differs from one person to the next.
3. Its opposite, adharma, is not primarily disobedience. It is whatever loosens the order dharma holds together, which is why neglect of duty is treated as seriously as active wrongdoing.
4. Consequence is built in by karma, the law that actions produce results, so moral rules describe how the universe works rather than penalties imposed from outside.
5. The Manusmriti names four sources for knowing dharma: the Veda, the remembered texts, the conduct of good people, and what satisfies one's own conscience. The last leaves a door open that later Hindu thinkers have used freely.
6. Because dharma is stated for cases rather than as principles, Hindu moral teaching comes largely through narrative. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana work as casebooks in which characters face competing duties.

Sva-dharma and sadharana dharma

1. Hindu ethics works on two levels at once. Sadharana dharma is the set of duties binding on everyone, while sva-dharma is what a particular person owes because of who and where they are.
2. The universal level is a short list of virtues. The Manusmriti gives ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (not stealing), shaucha (purity) and indriya-nigraha (control of the senses), and later texts add generosity and compassion.
3. These are stated without qualification by birth. They bind Brahmin and labourer, man and woman, householder and renouncer alike, and no particular duty is supposed to cancel them.
4. Particular duty is where the differences appear. A soldier's sva-dharma requires him to fight and a priest's requires him to keep ritual purity, so the same act is obligatory for one and forbidden for another.
5. The Bhagavad Gita states the priority twice. Better one's own duty done imperfectly, it says, than another's done well, and a person who abandons their own dharma for a finer looking one takes on danger.
6. The two levels can pull against each other, and Hindu schools disagree over what happens then. Some hold that sva-dharma governs because it is concrete, while Gandhi argued that ahimsa outranks any role-specific claim.

The varnashramadharma as ethics

1. The varnashramadharma is duty worked out by varna and ashrama together. It turns a general commitment to dharma into specific obligations a person can actually perform.
2. Each of the four ashramas (stages of life) carries its own moral demands. The brahmacharya student owes study and celibacy, and the grihastha householder owes honest earning, hospitality, ritual and the raising of a family.
3. The last two stages reverse direction. The vanaprastha withdraws from ownership and public duty, and the sannyasi gives up fire, property and social identity, taking on an absolute non-violence no earlier stage required.
4. The householder stage carries the ethical weight. Classical texts call it the support of the other three, since students and renouncers depend on households for food, and here wealth and family life count as duties rather than distractions.
5. The system is explicitly graded, and that is its most criticised feature. Duties and penalties differ by varna in the Manusmriti, which some Hindus defend as a historical record and others reject as authority.
6. Failure has a remedy built in. Prayashchitta, expiation through fasting, pilgrimage or giving, restores a person who has transgressed, so moral failure is treated as repairable rather than final.

The three objectives

1. Hindu teaching sets out legitimate aims for a human life, called the purusharthas. Three of them, dharma, artha and kama, are grouped as the trivarga, and moksha (liberation) is added as the fourth.
2. Artha covers wealth, property, security and political power. Pursuing these is a duty for the householder rather than a temptation, and Kautilya's Arthashastra teaches it as a technical skill.
3. Kama covers pleasure, desire and love, including sexual life and the enjoyment of art and food. Vatsyayana's Kamasutra treats it as a subject with its own expertise.
4. The three are ranked rather than balanced. Artha and kama are approved only within dharma, so a profit got by cheating or a pleasure taken by coercion fails because it breaks duty, not because it is enjoyable.
5. That ordering is where Hindu sexual ethics sits. Desire is affirmed inside marriage at the householder stage, while adultery and coercion are condemned and celibacy is required of students and renouncers.
6. The fourth aim reframes the other three. Moksha is release from samsara altogether, and traditions differ over whether it completes a life spent on the trivarga or requires leaving all three behind.

The three debts

1. Hindu texts state that a person is born already owing. The Taittiriya Samhita describes three debts, the rna-traya, inherited at birth rather than incurred by choice.
2. The first is rishi-rna, the debt to the sages who preserved the Vedas. It is discharged by learning and reciting them, which makes the student stage an obligation rather than an option.
3. The second is deva-rna, the debt to the gods who sustain the world. It is discharged by yajna (sacrifice) and by daily puja, so worship is repayment rather than a request for favours.
4. The third is pitri-rna, the debt to the ancestors. It is discharged by raising a son who will perform the shraddha offerings for the dead, which ties family life directly to religious obligation.
5. The scheme explains the shape of a classical Hindu life. Renunciation comes only after the debts are paid, which is why the dharma texts resist young men taking sannyasa before they have studied and raised a family.
6. The third debt is now the most contested. Hindu and secular critics alike name its link to sons as one religious support for son preference, and many families today have daughters perform shraddha instead.

Conflicts of duty

1. Duties collide, and Hindu texts do not hide it. The situation has its own name, dharma-sankata, and the epics return to it rather than resolving it with a single rule.
2. Arjuna's refusal to fight at the opening of the Bhagavad Gita is the standard case. His duty as a kshatriya requires the battle and his duty to kin forbids it, and Krishna's answer runs to eighteen chapters.
3. The Mahabharata supplies harder cases still. Yudhishthira, whose whole character is truthfulness, is persuaded to speak a misleading truth to bring down Drona, and the text records what it costs him.
4. The tradition allows for emergency. Apad-dharma, dharma in distress, permits what is otherwise forbidden when survival is at stake, such as a Brahmin taking up trade, and it is explicitly temporary.
5. Deciding who arbitrates matters as much as the rules. Where texts fall silent the Manusmriti points to the practice of shishtas, people recognised as learned and good, and then to atmatushti, an informed conscience.
6. Modern Hindus apply the same machinery to questions the texts never faced. Debates over medical technology and environmental duty are argued through sva-dharma, the universal virtues and the objectives rather than through new commandments.