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!

…

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.

…

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.

Related posts:

1. Living Morally Without Universal Morality A lot of the discussion on Swadharma focuses on how...
2. What are we waiting for? We Hindus are not waiting for anything. Abrahamic traditions have...
3. The task that faces us Hinduism has always been a geographic faith, tied to South...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Jainism constitutes one of India’s three classical religions, the others being Buddhism and Hinduism. Though older than Buddhism by a generation, Jainism has much in common with it. Both arose and were first spread in northeastern India. Both aim to lead their followers away from the painful cycle of endless rebirths (samsara) and toward the liberation from all suffering (nirvana). Both also rejected many of the practices and ideas of early Hinduism, particularly the religion’s ritual sacrifice of animals, preaching instead a doctrine of non-violence. Today the commitment to an ethic that regards all life—animal and human—as inviolate continues to be the heart of Jain practice and belief.

The exhibition Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection is centered on images of the founding figures of Jainism, the Jinas, also known as the “Conquerors” or Tirthankaras. These important religious figures, despite their having achieved liberation from the world in which we live, are believed to be accessible to humans as objects of devotion. Thus many Jains worship images of the Jinas and believe that they can be found in different sacred spaces throughout the universe. In addition to fine examples of painting and sculpture depicting the Jinas, Victorious Ones will also present these spaces that the Jinas sanctify, including painted maps of the Jain universe, depictions of famous pilgrimage sites, beautiful domestic shrines, and ritual diagrams (yantras) that were made of both durable and ephemeral materials.

The full press release (PDF) and this essay (DOC) on Jain art and architecture may provide some useful background. (As a side note, the cover of Swadharma shows a Jain temple in Shankeshwar, Gujarat.)

The exhibition will last from September 18, 2009 to February 15, 2010. The Rubin Museum is located at the intersection of 17th St. and 7th Ave (directions).

Related posts:

1. Outcry against considering B.R. Ambedkar as a Hindu leader An incredible life story is that of B.R. Ambedkar, a...
2. Explanations As Saketh mentioned yesterday, there seems to be an almost...
3. Different approaches to “Overcoming Greed” Today in his lecture at the Vedanta Society, Swami Tyagananda...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics,” Santayana wrote. What makes music and math so special? Math is unique among the sciences in that it describes itself. If we want to draw conclusions (theorems) about objects in some set S, then we must start off with statements (axioms, definitions, or more fundamental theorems) about objects in some superset of S. In other words, because mathematical proofs must be based on deductive reasoning, math is a closed system.

Similarly, music is different from all other art forms since it is also a closed system: the form and the medium are the same. When we create (i.e. either compose or perform) a piece of music, which, following Edgard Varèse, we loosely define as “organized sound”, we necessarily start off with smaller, constituent blocks of sound that we ourselves have produced for the explicit purpose of creating music. On the other hand, when we create a sculpture, which we can loosely define as “organized mass”, we do not necessarily start off which smaller, constituent blocks of form that we ourselves have produced for the explicit purpose of creating sculpture. The marble or bronze that might serve as our medium need not have been created specifically for our sculptures. Therefore, music is also a closed system; more precisely, music is closed under artistic purpose.

So why does music seem to draw out the spiritual in people, more so than other art forms? Eduard Hanslick, a conservative 19th century Austrian music critic, might argue that it is because music does not have to represent anything:

[T]he beautiful is not contingent upon nor in need of any subject introduced from without, but that it consists wholly of sounds artistically combined. The ingenious co-ordination of intrinsically pleasing sounds, their consonance and contrast, their flight and reapproach, their increasing and diminishing strength-this it is which, in free and unimpeded forms, presents itself to our mental vision. (Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Chapter 3)

Stravinsky also subscribed to this school, claiming that “the form is everything. [The composer] can say nothing whatever about meanings” (Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments [quoted from Wikipedia]). On the other hand, a composer like Wagner would argue exactly the opposite:

“[The language of music] expresses altogether, and in full measure, the emotional content of the elemental human language, independently of our word-language, which has become purely an informational tool. (Wagner, Drei Operndichtungen nebst einer Mittheilung an seine Freunde [quoted in Weiss and Taruskin, Music in the Western World]).

On the one hand we have critics arguing that music is not representative at all; on the other we have critics arguing that music is hyper-representative of the deepest experiences of human emotion.

But perhaps these two sides are not so different after all. In both cases, music is transcending something, allowing us to go beyond the specificity of our daily routines. People have a habit of incessantly characterizing objects, categorizing them and thereby dividing and subdividing the world into some kind of overgrown, blinding taxonomy. Perhaps the thinking is that the more dimensions along which we can characterize an object, the better we can understand it. In both Hanslick’s and Wagner’s formulations, music allows us breaks free of our taxonomies.

Music is uniquely suited to this purpose precisely because it is a closed system. A closed (or complete) system generates itself while an open (or incomplete) system does not. I suspect that the temptation to try to complete an incomplete system is so strong that we run outward, away from the fundamental, generative principles at the heart of the system, and let our taxonomic tendencies run rampant. On the other hand, if we are given a complete system, we might try to run outward, but we are more likely to eventually return to the system’s core, if only for a brief moment of epiphany.

Related posts:

1. Music and spirituality For Soundscapes, a music anthropology class I am taking, I...
2. The Three Gunas in Music In Chapter Fourteen of the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna talks to Arjuna...
3. Who/What is God? In a post Saketh wrote a while ago, he asked...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The second article, “What Is Yoga and the Purpose of Yoga?” by Meena Modi is based in part on a combined lecture and yoga session the author offered at Harvard in April 2007 as part of Harvard Dharma’s Hinduism Awareness Week. To me, the most interesting part of the article consisted of the following two paragraphs:

The second aphorism of the Yoga Sutra defines yoga from the mental perspective yogaschitta vritti nirodha: yoga is the elimination of mental fluctuations. Patanjali then goes on to explain what this means, why it is important, and how to achieve this state. The late Mircea Eliade, who headed the department of religion at the University of Chicago, wrote in his classic book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom: ‘Instead of knowing through forms and mental states, as formerly, the yogin now contemplates the essence of all objects directly.’ Yogic techniques of pranayama, pratyahara, and dharana are developed to give a direct experience of Consciousness, the true nature of the individual self…

When the mental fluctuations are removed from the mind, they no longer cloud the mind. The mind becomes completely still and clear. It sees its true Self. This state of the mind is exceptionally aware and perceptive. It is incredibly focused, relaxed, balanced, and capable of great achievements [emphasis added]. Research being done here at Harvard, MIT, and various other universities on many different meditation techniques is showing a clear effect on the human brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex. That area of the brain is more developed in advanced meditation practitioners…

In a comment, I had mentioned that the best advice I ever received was to 1) define your goals and ensure that all action is consistent with the goal, and 2) “let the universe manifest itself”. The first part of this path is what the above two paragraphs are talking about: from one perspective, yoga is focused action. In fact, the article goes on to note: “Anything done with mindfulness, engaging the body and the mind as the portals to be in communion with the Self, is yoga.”

I found these ideas particularly interesting since I had essentially just seen them in school, through from a very different perspective. Last fall, I took a course in information theory, not so much for the math but more for the “way of thinking” I thought it might offer. While the course focused on coding theory (as expected), the course did in fact raise some interesting philosophical points. The one that relates most directly to this post comes from complexity theory. Loosely defined, one way to measure the complexity of an object is by the length of a computer program needed to generate that object.

Suppose our object is a binary string; i.e. a string of 0s and 1s. A gambler is given the opportunity to guess what the bits are. It turns out that if he follows the optimal betting strategy, the lower bound on the (base 2) logarithm of his wealth is the length of the string minus the Kolmogorov complexity of the string. In other words, the lower the complexity of the string, the higher your potential wealth.

How does this relate to yoga? Recall one definition of yoga the article noted: ”Anything done with mindfulness, engaging the body and the mind as the portals to be in communion with the Self, is yoga.” When we do things with mindfulness, we are decreasing the complexity of the situations we face, thereby increasing the potential gains from our actions. The only way to decrease the complexity of a situation is to define your goals clearly and ensure that everything you do is consistent with those goals — exactly what the first part of that advice I received is saying.

Related posts:

1. Question of the Week: What is one of your objects of devotion? This week, we will think about your objects of devotion,...
2. Psychology and Maya Yesterday in my psychology class, we learned about the nature...
3. Emotions Ruling the Intellect The first thought that crossed my mind was of...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

NextGen Essay Contest: The Importance Of A Hindu American Identity

HAF invites you to participate in its first ever essay contest.   The topic of this year’s contest is: Why is it important to have a Hindu American identity? How can you advocate for this identity in your public and private lives? How can Hindu American advocacy be beneficial to American society?

All essays must be submitted by the end of Tuesday, June 30.  Winning entries will be notified on Friday, August 14.

Related posts:

1. Celebrating Thanksgiving as a Hindu This week, Americans will be celebrating a tradition that is...
2. Reason and Faith at Harvard At Harvard, there is a clear emphasis on the importance...
3. Question of the Week: Is Hinduism a religion? At one of our weekly discussions a while back, we...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.