6. The Attainments of Dharma

In general, there are four possible final attainments, sādhya, for which the means are knowable from the Veda, and they are all “worlds” or spheres, loka: the world of men, manuṣya-loka; the world of the forefathers, pitṛ-loka; the world of the gods, deva-loka; and the world that is the Self, ātma-loka. I use the qualification “final” on purpose and in a specific sense: these are attainments that are not means to some other goal—they are at the top of a causal structure—although only the last is really the ultimate. There are a few other items that are also attainable through knowledge provided by the Veda or otherwise scripturally regulated, although they are part of the natural world, which are sādhya but also sādhana for these final attainments. The first three final attainments are all primarily in the domain of dharma that is characterized by engagement, pravṛtti, and their corresponding means are all forms of action or something immediately related to action. The fourth is in the domain of dharma that is characterized by disengagement, nivṛtti, and its respective means is solely knowledge. There are some details that muddle this neat classification, but let us first focus on the contours.

I belabored above Śaṅkara’s claim that knowledge qua knowledge is something that is not humanly contingent and not in the domain of human choice or preference. We may say in the Cartesian spirit that matters of knowledge are such that, when seen clearly and distinctly, the human mind cannot but assent to them. This for our purposes meant that if one had a choice regarding anything presented in the Veda as a means of some attainment, then insofar as one had such a choice, that was not a matter of knowledge, but of action.

Whereas in pre-Śaṅkara Vedic theology action or karma referred strictly to ritual, bodily action, and vidyā/upāsana was its mental counterpart, unique in nature and procedure but diversified per the desired object and the relation of the meditational counterparts, Śaṅkara reclassified everything over which man had a choice as a form of action:

Action is bodily, vocal, and mental, laid down in the śruti and smṛti literature and called dharma.^[1]

–But hold on, isn’t knowledge, to define it, a mental action?–No, they are different. Action is that where something is enjoined without regard to the nature of the thing, and it is contingent on the operation of the human mind. … Although meditation, which is but mentation, is mental, man has the option to do it, not do it or do it otherwise, and so it is dependent on man. Knowledge, on the other hand, is produced by a valid cognition, and a valid cognition concerns a thing just as it is. Therefore, knowledge cannot be done, not done or done otherwise: it is fully dependent on the thing, not on an injunction or on man. Thus, although knowledge is mental, it is vastly different. It is like this: The notion about man and woman as fire that is expressed in the text “A man is surely fire, Gautama. A woman is surely fire, Gautama” is mental, but being produced solely by an injunction, it is nothing but action, and it is dependent on man. However, the notion of fire regarding a known fire is not dependent on an injunction or on man, but solely on the thing that is an object to perception, and so it is but knowledge, not action.^[2]

Śaṅkara clearly takes the quoted passage as an instance of meditation, where man and woman can be seen as fire intentionally, although the meditator knows that no actual relation exists between the two: s/he has made the deliberate choice to see the one as the other. The enormous significance of Śaṅkara’s distinction between knowledge and action was that the doctrine of brahma-vidyā was no longer a straightforward matter: the notion of a standard Upaniṣadic brahma-vidyā in which the object, the attainment, the procedure and the path of ascension are the same but details vary could not hold good, because in some of these vidyās one had to make the choice of seeing oneself as Brahman in meditative absorption, whereas in others one had no choice but to know oneself as Brahman, so long as one was capable of rightly understanding what was being said. We will say a little more on this in a bit, but for now we should note that anything in the Veda that is expressed by an injunction and dependent on human effort, be it bodily, vocal, or mental, is a form of action.

The three action-related attainments were, of course, a commonplace in Vedic theology in general and in the Upaniṣads and Vedānta in particular, and two of them are already well-known to us from the accounts of liberation. The world of men is attained through giving birth to a son, but more specifically through the deathbed rite of entrusting, sampratti or sampradāna, in which the father transfers the performance of his ritual duties to his son when it becomes clear to him that death is imminent. In this way, he vicariously continues his existence in the world of men and, thus, “wins” manuṣya-loka. The rite consists in the father saying to his son: “You are Brahman, you are the sacrifice, you are the world,” and in the son replying: “I am Brahman, I am the sacrifice, I am the world.”^[3] The son thus becomes the means or sādhana for winning the world of men. More specifically, however, since the son is not karma the preferred Vedic means, the means is the son as related to the rite of entrusting or transference, which by Śaṅkara’s reckoning is action of the vocal type.^[4]

Getting a son is, of course, predicated on having a wife, jāyā, but marrying and obtaining a wife are much more than what the common categories might suggest. A wife becomes an essential part of the qualification, adhikāra, for the performance of ritual, which is the means or sādhana for the second final attainment, the world of the forefathers, pitṛ-loka. Marriage is, then, scripturally regulated not only in social terms, but as an essential element of Vedic ritual causality. After completing the course of studying the Vedas with a teacher and before commencing the life of daily ritual performance, a man must marry a wife. He must do that in imitation of a primordial mythic event, where the first man and sacrificer Prajāpati was overcome by desire and bored by being alone, grew double in size and split himself in two, a male and female, so that he could accept a wife and sacrifice to the Self-projected gods.^[5] A wife is, thus, a means that entitles one to perform ritual.^[6] The performance of ritual requires some wealth in the form of cattle and the like, and this wealth as an attainment or sādhya becomes the means, sādhana, for performing ritual.^[7] Ritual on its part is the means for attaining the world of the forefathers through the southern path that we have seen in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa account. Pitṛ-loka is the final attainment, in the sense that it is not a means to anything further. It is not, however, ultimate, since one falls back to the world of men once the good karma has been exhausted, hopefully to take up ritual performance again.

The rituals that bring one to the world of the forefathers are those that lead to heaven, such as the Darśa-pūrṇamāsa and the Agnihotra. We will remember at this point that these were rituals which Mīmāṃsakas claimed every member of the three upper classes had to perform, either through the desire for heaven (kāmya) or under the scriptural provision that they had to be performed as long as one lived (nitya). The other rituals, such as those for prosperity, virility, wealth, etc., were independent, and we saw that wealth was theorized as a form of final attainment insofar as it was directly conducive to human happiness, puruṣārtha. Śaṅkara seems to think that these other rituals, or at least some of them, are absorbed in the causal structure that is ultimately geared towards the world of the forefathers or the world of men. For instance, the wealth-rituals are necessary because wealth is the means for the heaven-rituals, not a thing desirable independently. Furthermore, this whole structure, including the Agnihotra, etc., is in an important sense optional, kāmya, because it is occasioned by the desire for the final attainment.^[8] To state this more emphatically: in the strict sense, there is no such thing as mandatory rituals that every member of Vedic society must perform.

This is a point which Śaṅkara discusses often and in depth, and his arguments are directly aimed against Kumārila’s presentation of the obligatory rituals as immediately efficacious in the pursuit of liberation. We will remember that Kumārila’s first account of liberation presupposed that desire and ignorance have already been eradicated when one had to take up the performance of ritual solely under scriptural provision, to prevent future bad karma and exhaust some of the present karmic stock. Śaṅkara’s critique of this amounted to claiming that it was putting the cart before the horse: no one, in fact, does anything without being prompted by some urge and motive. As we saw while discussing Śaṅkara’s psychology, karma was third in line among the factors of individuation of the Self, a resultant immediately of kāma/vāsanā and mediately of ignorance. Action was, in other words, predicated on desire just because any undertaking is prompted by a specific psychological setup, which consisted in forms of attachment and aversion.

This had to be the case because desire was based on ignorance, and ignorance just meant superimposing agency over the Self: so long as one acts, one affirms not knowing the Self, in which case some form of attachment and aversion are inevitable.

It is not possible that there will be exhaustion of all action, because it is impossible that desires, which are the causes of action, would cease in the absence of knowledge. For, he who does not know the Self has desires, since desires have as their results whatever is not the Self.^[9]

Furthermore, it did not follow that nitya-naimittika are all that different from the kāmya actions even on the Mīmāṃsā account. Kumārila, as I just mentioned, argued that nitya-naimittika had to be performed because otherwise bad karma would be created, pratyavāya, but this presupposed a desire to avoid bad karma and was, eo ipso, a striving after something desirable.

In a sense, desireless action was contradictio in adiecto, and action that was solely determined through scripture was an impossible notion.

–It is not right not to perform that which is laid down in scripture, because such acts are not prohibited [like the prohibited eating of the meat of an animal killed by a poisonous weapon].–Not so, because both are equally based on wrong ideas and produce bad results. Actions laid down in scripture are based on wrong notions and conducive to what is bad just as much as eating poisoned flesh is. Therefore, for the one who knows the real nature of the Supreme Self, it is but right not to perform actions laid down in scripture, since they are equally based on wrong notions and conducive to what is bad, when the false notion has been removed by knowledge of the Supreme Self.–It may be right in that case, but the obligatory rituals are solely based on scripture [that is, not on desire, which would have been removed by the removal of wrong notions] and are not conducive to what is bad, and so it is not proper that they be given up.–Not so, because they are enjoined for the one who has the faults of ignorance, attachment and aversion, etc. Just as the optional rituals such as Darśa-pūrṇamāsa are enjoined for the one who has the fault of desiring heaven, likewise the mandatory rituals are laid down for the one who has the fault of ignorance, the root of all evil, and the faults of attachment and aversion for attaining the desired and avoiding the undesired that are produced by this ignorance, and who seeks to attain the desirable and avoid the undesirable being equally impelled to act by the same ignorance. They are not based solely on scripture. Nor is there an intrinsic divide into optional and mandatory rituals of Agnihotra, Darśa-pūrṇamāsa, Paśubandha and Somayāga. They become optional owing to the fault of the agent who has the desire for heaven, etc. Likewise, the mandatory rituals are enjoined for the one who has the fault of ignorance and who by his very nature wants to get the desirable and avoid the undesirable.^[10]

Mīmāṃsakas, of course, meant that the kāmya rituals are not meant for attaining any of the desirable objects promised in the Veda, and I suggested that Kumārila clearly did not mean to say that nitya-naimittika are undertaken without any purpose or motive. But we should remember that svarga was defined as felicity pure and simple, and Śabara explicitly subsumed under it all goals of man.^[11] It would be difficult to argue, therefore, that avoiding bad karma is not what is desirable to man or somehow constitutive of that, in other words, kāmya. Thus, even if we disregard the psychological dimension of kāma, Śaṅkara’s critique is very much to the point.

This meant that all rituals were prompted by desire, and that the traditional kāmya rituals were tied to some specific desirable attainment—sons, wealth, heaven—whereas the nitya, when they were not for heaven, were driven by a general desire to get what is good and avoid what is bad. They were at their root both kāmya. Nevertheless, in virtue of the twofold meaning of kāma—as desirable object and as psychological desire—it was still possible to describe the so-called obligatory rituals as niṣkāma, not tied to any specific desirable object. This will have a massive soteriological and theological significance for Śaṅkara, one which was directly facilitated by Kumārila’s refashioning of the obligatory rituals as meant for exhausting the karmic stock, not just for preventing fresh bad karma.

We will deal with this in the next chapter, however, and for the present purposes we should just note that ritual was normally directed towards winning the world of the forefathers through the southern course. It was dependent on wealth as a means, which in its turn was dependent on marrying a wife as a qualification. These two, as well as a son as the means for the world of men, were desirable objects of the mixed sādhya-sādhana type, and were tied to respective rituals as well, or otherwise scripturally qualified.

Together with the two final attainments, they constituted a causal ritual chain and formed the scope of kāma as desirable objects of the Vedic kind.

These two hankerings after the ends and means are what desire is, prompted by which an ignorant man helplessly enmeshes himself like a silkworm, and through absorption in the path of rituals becomes externally directed and does not know his own world, the Self. As the Taittiriya Brāhmaṇa says, “Infatuated with rites performed with the help of fire, and choked by smoke, they do not know their own world, the Self.”–But, how come you say that is the extent of desires? They are endless.–It does not matter if one wishes or not, one cannot get more than this, which consists of results and means. There is nothing in the world besides these results and means, visible or invisible, to be acquired. Desire is concerning things to be acquired, and since these extend no farther than the above, it is but proper to say, “That is the extent of desire.” That is, desire consists of the two hankerings after the ends and means, visible or invisible, which are the specific sphere of qualification of the ignorant man. Hence the wise man should renounce them.^[12]

The two worlds, of course, contain an assortment of enjoyable objects which are eo ipso won and enjoyed by winning the worlds, and that prompts us to consider the nature of the third world, that of the gods.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

śārīraṃ vācikaṃ mānasaṃ ca karma śruti-smṛti-siddhaṃ dharmākhyam. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 1.1.4, I.19.

[2]:

nanu jñānaṃ nāma mānasī kriyā, na; vailakṣaṇyāt. kriyā hi nāma sā, yatra vastu-svarūpa-nirapekṣaiva codyate, puruṣa-citta-vyāpārādhīnā ca... dhyānaṃ cintanaṃ yady api mānasam, tathāpi puruṣeṇa kartum akartum anyathā vā kartuṃ śakyam, puruṣa-tantratvāt. jñānaṃ tu pramāṇa-janyam. pramāṇaṃ ca yathā-bhūta-vastu-viṣayam. ato jñānaṃ kartum akartum anyathā vā kartum na śakyam. kevalaṃ vastu-tantram eva tat; na codanā-tantram, nāpi puruṣa-tantram; tasmān mānasatve’pi jñānasya mahad vailakṣaṇyam. yathā ca puruṣo vāva gautamāgniḥ yoṣā vāva gautamāgniḥ [Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.7,8.1] ity atra yoṣit-puruṣayor agni-buddhir mānasī bhavati; kevala-codanā-janyatvāt tu kriyaiva sā puruṣa-tantrā ca; yā tu prasiddhe’gnāv agni-buddhiḥ, na sā codanā-tantrā, nāpi puruṣa-tantrā; kiṃ tarhi? pratyakṣa-viṣaya-vastu-tantraiveti jñānam evaitat, na kriyā. Ibid, I.26.

[3]:

yadā praiṣan manyate ‘tha putram āha tvaṃ brahma tvaṃ yajñas tvaṃ loka iti. sa putraḥ pratyāhāhaṃ brahmāhaṃ yajño ‘haṃ loka iti. Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.5.17. Another important place for this idea is the second adhyāya of the Aitareya Upaniṣad, where the birth of a child is described as the second birth of one’s Self “for the continuance of the worlds.”

[4]:

See the avataraṇa to the comment on the Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.5.17, VIII.192: putrasya tv akriyātmakatvāt kena prakāreṇa loka-jaya-hetutvam iti na jñāyate. atas tad vaktavyam ity athānantaram ārabhyate.

[5]:

This is narrated in the fourth brāhmaṇa of the first adhyāya of the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad

[6]:

jāyā karmādhikāra-hetu-bhūtā me mama kartuḥ syāt; tayā vinā aham anadhikṛta eva karmaṇi; ataḥ karmādhikāra-sampattaye bhavej jāyā. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.17, VIII.159.

[7]:

atha vittaṃ me syāt karma-sādhanaṃ gavādi-lakṣaṇam. Ibid.

[8]:

This seems clear from Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.17.

[9]:

na ca karma-hetūnāṃ kāmānāṃ jñānābhāve nivṛtty-asambhavād aśeṣa-karma-kṣayopapattiḥ. anātma-vido hi kāmaḥ, anātma-phala-viṣayatvāt. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad Introduction, VI.9.

[10]:

apratiṣedha-viṣayatvāc chāstra-vihita-pravṛtty-abhāvo na yukta iti cet, na; viparīta-jñāna-nimittatvānarthārthatvābhyāṃ tulyatvāt. kalañja-bhakṣaṇādi-pravṛtter mithyā-jñāna-nimittatvam anarthārthatvaṃ ca yathā, tathā śāstra-vihita-pravṛttīnām api. tasmāt paramātma-yāthātmya-vijñānavataḥ śāstra-vihita-pravṛttīnām api, mithyā-jñāna-nimittatvena anarthārthatvena ca tulyatvāt, paramātma-jñānena viparīta-jñāne nivartite, yukta evābhāvaḥ. nanu tatra yuktaḥ; nityānāṃ tu kevala-śāstra-nimittatvāt, anarthārthatvābhāvāc ca abhāvo na yukta iti cet, na; avidyā-rāga-dveṣādi-doṣa-vato vihitatvāt. yathā svarga-kāmādi-doṣavato darśa-pūrṇamāsādīni kāmyāni karmāṇi vihitāni, tathā sarvānartha-bījāvidyādi-doṣavatas taj-janiteṣṭāniṣṭa-prāpti-parihāra-rāga-dveṣādi-doṣavataś ca tat-preritāviśeṣa-pravṛtter iṣṭāniṣṭa-prāpti-parihārārthino nityāni karmāṇi vidhīyante; na kevalaṃ śāstra-nimittāny eva. na cāgnihotra-darśa-pūrṇamāsa-cāturmāsya-paśubandha-somānāṃ karmaṇāṃ svataḥ kāmya-nityatva-viveko ‘sti. kartṛ-gatena hi svargādikāma-doṣeṇa kāmārthatā; tathā avidyādi-doṣavataḥ svabhāva-prāpteṣṭāniṣṭa-prāpti-parihārārthinaḥ tad-arthāny eva nityāni—iti yuktam; taṃ prati vihitatvāt. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.3.1, VIII.42.

[11]:

“It is the generic word, denotative of the ends of all men, not restricted to any particular end”; sarva-puruṣārthābhidhāyī sāmānya-vacanaḥ śabdaḥ na viśeṣe avasthāpito bhavati. Śabara’s Bhāṣya on the Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra 4.3.20, IV.1258.

[12]:

te ete eṣaṇe sādhya-sādhana-lakṣaṇe kāmaḥ, yena prayuktaḥ avidvān avaśa eva kośa-kāra-vad ātmānaṃ veṣṭayati–karma-mārga evātmānaṃ praṇidadhad bahirmukhī-bhūto na svaṃ lokaṃ pratijānāti; tathā ca taittirīyake–agni-mugdho haiva dhūmatāntaḥ svaṃ lokaṃ na pratijānāti [3.10.2.1] iti. kathaṃ punar etāvattvam avadhāryate kāmānām, anantatvāt; anantā hi kāmāḥ—ity etad āśaṅkya hetum āha—yasmād na icchan ca na icchann api, ato 'smāt-phala-sādhana-lakṣaṇād bhūyo 'dhikāraṃ na vinden na labheta. na hi loke phala-sādhana-vyatiriktaṃ dṛṣṭam adṛṣṭaṃ vā labdhavyam asti; labdhavya-viṣayo hi kāmaḥ; tasya caitad-vyatirekeṇābhāvāt yuktaṃ vaktum—etāvān vai kāmaḥ iti. etad uktaṃ bhavati—dṛṣṭārtham adṛṣṭārthaṃ vā sādhya-sādhana-lakṣaṇam avidyāvat-puruṣādhikāra-viṣayam eṣaṇā-dvayaṃ kāmaḥ. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.17, VIII.130-1.