A. Srinivas Rao
20th July 2011
This article has been written for a dear friend of mine with whom I had spent many hours during my graduation years at engineering college discussing various ideas and whom I admire much (who recently got in touch). He is now a Swamiji at a well known ashram and editing a Gujarati magazine on spirituality. He was lamenting the loss of the institution of the vanaprastha in modern times where retired couples spent time in quiet contemplation and in preparation for the next ashrama the sannyasa, not to mention the mahaprasthaana or final journey. He suggested that I write something about it. I am not sure I sufficiently understand or appreciate the idea but thought I shall write this for him. I believe that institutions evolve with the nature of society but we often hearken to ideas of antiquity with nostalgia and possibly saddle them with ill fitting modern demands.
There are three ideas of Indian antiquity that seem inextricably intertwined in our thinking and form a troublesome formulation. The idea of varna or caste, ashrama or stage of life and purushartha or goals of human striving. The three ideas did not spring forth full blown like the four castes out of the Purusha or Supreme Being as the poem Purusha Sukta of the Rik Veda suggests. But like the Purusha Sukta itself which was a later interpolation into the Rik Veda, these ideas had evolved as a response to a challenge to the Brahmin orthodoxy by the Shramanic thinking like Buddhism, Jainism and also Sankhya. We shall not get into the caste or varna system which is complex and controversial but bear in mind that the ashrama system and the purusharthas were considered appropriate only for those elect of the dvijas or twice born (regardless of the allegorical veneer modern apologists have sought to apply). In other words those who were not twice born were not expected to seriously reflect on the aims or stages of life. Let us therefore set aside the varna system and look at the other two in some detail to place the “vanaprastha” in context.
The seemingly monolithic and elegant constructions of both these ideas of purushartha and ashrama need to be examined closely before we can comment about Vanaprastha. There are according to Hindu thought four goals whose pursuit occupy our lives viz. Dharma or the pursuit of the ‘Good’ in terms of a just ‘order’’, Artha or pursuit of prosperity and power, Kama or the pursuit of desire and their objects, and finally Moksha or the pursuit of liberation. While seemingly an elegant and innocuous formulation it must be remembered that originally there were only two such goals, Kama and Artha. This seemed like a descriptive order of kama desire being the prime mover of human action and artha or the instrumentality for fulfillment, providing the resources. In its formulation, Kama also encompassed desire for apart from sensory objects the “good”, for knowledge, virtue and also liberation; artha encompassed wealth and power as well as effort and capabilities. It seems that the other two non material goals that are added at the beginning and the end to bracket the first two were added in response to Buddhism in particular and Shramana traditions in general. With such a bracketing the descriptive order (what is) becomes normative (what should). Thus the purusharthas became from what are to what ought to be the aims of human endeavor.
