Recently, Santosh generated an interesting email thread by asking “What is ‘Hinduism’s official stance’ on premarital sex?” I saw this as an opportunity to explore how Hinduism approaches moral issues, what the consequences of Hinduism’s approach are, and why discussion of moral issues in Hinduism tends to be so clouded.
First, two points:
1) I think asking what Hinduism considers “moral” is a more interesting question than what it considers “legal”. I see every religion as providing an objective (some kind of divinity) and a decision rule to achieve that objective (some kind of moral code), so to really determine what a religion “means”, focusing on the moral rather than the legal is more useful. Furthermore, I think the answer to this particular question is quite different depending on whether you take “prohibition” to be a moral or legal one.
2) I’ve noticed that in interpreting Hindu texts to determine what Hinduism says about a moral issue, people often commit three logical fallacies:
- Divinity implies morality: We are used to assuming that if a divine being performs an act, that act must be moral, or at least acceptable. For example, if Krishna has premarital sex we assume that Hinduism cannot prohibit it. (Please note that what I mean by divinity here is “divinity as a position”, whereas I mean “divinity as a state of being” in my definition of religion above.)
- Morality must be fully expressed in a single individual: We are used to being able to find a single individual who is moral in every way and conversely, if we cannot find a single individual who follows a moral code in its entirety, we assume that a strict moral code, if it even exists, must be weak. For example, if we cannot find a single perfectly moral person in the Mahabharata or even the Ramayana, we immediately discount either epic’s ability to describe a moral code or fall into the usual comments about Hinduism’s “diversity” or “openness”.
- The outlining of a path to morality makes acts done along that path moral: This is a particularly prevalent logical fallacy since Hinduism adopts such a gradual approach to spiritual development – see the four stages of life outlined in the Manusmṛti. For example, we see sexually explicit sculptures on the exteriors of the temples at Khajuraho and assume that if Hinduism recognizes that at some stage in life we might feel sexual urges, Hinduism permits us to fulfill those sexual urges.
These logical fallacies are what I think make finding a clear moral code in Hinduism so difficult. We cannot just say something is moral “because God says so”, we cannot find any paragons of moral virtue in the epics (though Bhishma comes close enough for me), and many of those who do come close to moral perfection were not always so (Prabhasa must be born as the mortal Bhishma precisely because of his sin of stealing Nandini). By contrast, in the Abrahamic faiths, divinity does imply morality since God is the source of morality, morality is embodied in individuals like the prophets, and many of these prophets do not show any sort of moral development because they had always been perfect.
This has even stronger implications when you consider formulating a response to our favorite question: “What is Hinduism?”. If you accept my definition of a religion, a philosophy that offers some kind of divine state of being as its objective and some kind of moral code as the decision rule for achieving that objective, then defining Hinduism reduces to explaining how Hinduism defines that divine state of mind and associated moral code. Therefore, if we are unable to articulate what Hinduism’s moral code is, we find ourselves unable to define Hinduism.
One approach to determining Hinduism’s moral code is to approach the question from an Abrahamic perspective. However, the three logical fallacies I outlined above are not just valid logical inferences for the most part in Abrahamic faiths: they permeate discussions of Abrahamic morality. In other words, the Abrahamic approach is the wrong set of logical tools to apply in interpreting Hinduism. Nonetheless, there is still value to be gained from comparing the Abrahamic faiths with Hinduism, so long as we take care to use the interpretive techniques uniquely appropriate to each belief system.
Another approach, the one that is far more pernicious in my view, is to completely sidestep these logical fallacies and take refuge under the intellectually flimsy scaffolding of “new age” thought. This sort of thinking typically presents Hinduism as “open”, “diverse”, and “spiritual” rather than “religious”. These people recognize the three logical fallacies as fallacies and often take great pains to emphasize Hinduism’s differences with the Abrahamic faiths – but then instead of searching for a source of morality other than divine beings, instead of putting together a moral code by examining the moral actions of several partially immoral people, instead of recognizing that all stages in a path of moral development are not themselves moral, they talk about the “humanity” or “realism” of characters in Hindu mythology, use this as grounds to justify an extraordinary level of permissiveness, and in the very worst cases take an “anything goes” attitude. I call this pernicious because the inevitable result of this sort of thinking is the dilution of the religion. Not only do these people abandon all rigor, but they elevate theological lassitude to a virtue!
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If this sounds harsh, please note that I am not criticizing what I do think are valid claims of Hinduism’s tolerance and its rich history of internal debate. Hinduism is a tolerant religion and does have remarkable internal dialogue. However, there is a difference in how Hindu scriptures answer the questions: what do people do (descriptive), what can people do (legal), and what should people do (moral). Too often the answers to these questions are confused.
The reason Hindu texts bother to include the descriptive or legal at all is a reflection of Hinduism’s true strength: Hinduism holds that a moral code must be internalized. Internalization is the process by which you transforms the authority of a moral code from an external source (e.g. “God says so” or “Hinduism says so”) to an internal one, your own conviction that the moral code you have chosen is the decision rule best suited to fulfilling your objective. The descriptive and the legal exist in Hindu texts not as a moral endorsement of any descriptive norms or legal principles but as a means of presenting several possible paths of action and then repeatedly testing your conviction by illustrating how characters might falter along the particular paths they have chosen. Internalization occurs as stories and philosophical debates (and Swadharma discussions) and 1) force you first to first refine your beliefs and articulate them clearly to yourself and then 2) deepen your resolve once you have convinced yourself that your actions are 100% consistent with your goal.
In other words: the burden is yours and yours alone. Because everything is governed by karma, the mechanical, unbreakable law of causality, a supreme moral judge or final moral judgment do not exist – the only things that matter are that we choose our actions, every action has a consequence, and we are solely responsible for those consequences. Some interesting conclusions come from this recognition. First, even if intent aggravates karmic consequences, it is not a necessary condition for those consequences. Even if you unknowingly cause harm to someone, you are still responsible for that harm. Second, repentance is completely meaningless in Hinduism because there is nobody to whom you can repent. Asking for repentance is asking someone to absolve you of the consequences of your actions. This is not just “weak” – it is impossible because repentance is a request for a logical contradiction, a denial of the law of causality. Third, self-punishment is also completely meaningless because it is really nothing more than a form of repentance. You might punish yourself, irrationally hoping that in doing so you might absolve yourself of your perceived sins, but again, you are asking for a logical contradiction, praying that someone will magically suspend the law of causality for you. You might try to convince yourself that you are only trying to understand the pain of those you have harmed, but 1) this so-called understanding is worthless if you already understand the consequences of your harmful act, and 2) if you truly do understand those consequences, you understand that no amount of self-punishment will ever counterbalance what you have done. Self-punishment is one of the clearest acts of weakness, made more dangerous by the irony that so many of its practitioners trick themselves into believing: that it is in fact an act of supreme self-control.
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So what does Hinduism have to say about premarital sex? Briefly, I think Hinduism is unambiguously negative in a moral sense and weakly permissive from a legal sense. First, none of the arguments involving Krishna and the gopis are acceptable as they fall into the “divinity implies morality” fallacy. (I also question how sexual Krishna’s relationship with the gopis really was – I always read the story as an allegory of bhakti. Of course, hypersexualized interpretations of Hinduism are popular with academics like Wendy Doniger. Second, none of the arguments about Khajuraho and similar depictions of sexuality are valid because they fall into the “moral development” fallacy. Note that the explicit sculptures are on the outsides of the temples: the point is that you have to transcend lust in order to enter. Any reference I have found to sex in Hindu texts falls into this category as well. For example, the Manusmṛti mentions the “Gandharva marriage” as those that “has sexual intercourse for its purpose” (3.32), a reference that is sometimes taken as a permission of premarital sex, but 1) the context is clearly within marriage, 2) the Manusmṛti itself says that the sages do not permit this form of marriage for the members of any caste (3.24), and 3) within the same text, celibacy is described as a precondition for the acquisition of higher knowledge (e.g. 2.96-99). In other words, the texts describe and may even permit premarital sex (though I can’t find anything explicitly permitting it), but the moral ideal of celibacy is quite clear. Note that this ideal is not just premarital but throughout life. Perhaps nobody exemplifies this ideal better than Bhishma, on whom the Devas shower flowers when he takes his vow of celibacy. Notably, Bhishma is the closest we come to complete moral perfection in the Mahabharata.
While we might have to search a little harder for the answer, Hinduism does offer well-defined moral guidelines. Hinduism might recognize more obviously than other religions do that our world is not morally perfect, that we alone choose our actions, and that true moral codes cannot be handed down but must be internalized. All of these are strengths. But none of these mean that Hinduism does not take clear stands. Denial of this conviction is what makes Hinduism weak; affirmation of it is what makes Hinduism strong.
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