A Study In Paradoxes And Subtleties

By the author’s own admission, this study rests on four pivotal issues concerning the concept of dharma: law, religion, narrative literature and ethics. It also claims for itself, quite justly I think, an interdisciplinary approach. There is, for instance, a consistent engagement with historicity and this, if I read Hiltebeitel correctly, also serves to bring out more clearly the concept of dharma as a temporally mutating principle and an intertextual puzzle. The historical time frame that the author adopts for this work ranges between 300 bce ad 500 ce i.e., the period separating the Mauryan and Kushan periods in early Indian history. Though the earliest Indic texts like the Rig Veda do reveal use of the term, their treatment is by no means discursive or didactic—qualities that are progressively revealed over time especially in the post Vedic age. In this work, Hiltebeitel also brings out the recurrent and dialogic process of conceptualizing dharma as between the Buddhist and brahmanical traditions. Thus, when it comes to formulating an authoritarian and centralizing tendency, brahmanical dharma texts are clearly anticipated by Ashokan edicts which use royal power and prerogative to subdue or render ineffective, pre-existing popular assemblies (samaj). However, the brahmanical dharmasutras, as Hiltebeitel convincingly argues, in itself represent a reactive appropriation and re-working of pro-Buddhist formulations. There are, of course, some common ground that these traditions share as for instance, the attempt at universalizing the concept of dharma, to treat it increasingly as a transcendental category and assign it a value that is believed to quintessentially define Indic civilization.
Hiltebeitel’s study is based on a rich corpus of texts but again belonging to multiple genres. While the author groups them chronologically as indeed should be the case, purely for the sake of understanding we may also classify them into broadly two types: the Buddhist and the brahmanical. In the first are included the Ashokan edicts, Buddhist literature :Vinaya and Abhidhamma Pitakas, the Nikaya and the classic biography of the Buddha (Buddhacharita) by Asvaghosha. The brahmanical group includes the earliest dharmasutras ( Apastamba, Baudhayana and Gautama), a relatively late work, the Vasisthadharmasutra, the epics, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and occasionally, the Harivamsa. The two minor (and again relatively later works) examined are the Yuga Purana (the only text of this class to be examined) and what for the lack of its original title is called ‘The Prophecy of Katyayana’. Here the author also takes care to assert that his focus in the present work is on texts for which dharma as a theoethical category is a central concern, not tangential. Arguably, this separates the dharmasutras from a work like the Arthashasastra which looks at dharma from the perspective of acquiring wealth and power or the Kamasutra focused on the erotic.
Other than the Introduction, this book has 12 chapters covering a wide assortment of themes, sometimes dealing with certain social groups as for instance women, well-known texts like the Bhagavad Gita or important themes like bhakti. Although the arrangement of chapters is again broadly chronological, we may re-group these by their overarching agendas. Chapters 2, 4 and 13 are on the Buddhist understanding of the term dharma. Chapters 6 and 7 may be coupled since they both deal with changes occurring in brahmanical understanding of the term over mythical and historical time.Two of these chapters (8 and 10) are devoted to the study of female characters (in their rescriptive dharmic setting) from the Hindu epics but as women playing socially diverse roles of the mother and wife. The treatment of the woman per se is palpably weaker even when the term stridharma would cover both the woman and wife. Also of considerable interest are the chapters examining the interrelationship between dharma and bhakti (chapters 11 and 12). There are interesting and important overlaps between chapters 5 and 9 in as much as they both address the issue of rajdharma. Additionally, chapter 5 also includes a discussion on complexities embedded in the category varna, especially as emerging from an interpenetration of sutra and (subsequently), smriti literature.
The ways of dharma, as commonly acknowledged, are subtle (sukshma, if I recall correctly) but so is Hiltebeitel’s scholarship. If anything, this work is an intensive study of paradoxes and subtleties occurring in a vast terrain of classical Buddhist and brahmanical literature. The Mahabharata itself is shown to handle this concept in at least three ways: through didacticism, the main narrative and that narrative interspersed with numerous sub-narratives. And even though the overarching engagement of this text is with defining dharma, ultimately it only upholds the view that dharma as ‘righteousness’ is at best an ambiguous term. The main story line of the Mahabharata reveals clearly a-dharmic acts are committed in the name of dharma by both the warring parties. The Ramayana, by comparison, seems a text that adopts a more linear and simpler approach to moral and philosophical problems. For one, it seems to have included a lesser number of tangential, sub-stories and foists dharmic conduct largely upon the personal life and conduct of Rama. However, dharmic conduct, as our author persuasively argues, cannot be always axiological since there may arise situations when available prescriptions are far from clear. There is, then, something pragmatic and contingent about dharma: it is a concept that has to keep flowing like a perennial river, regardless of the intrinsic difficulties over moral choices to be made (p. 25).
Happily, the maze of contrariness and contradictions that Hiltebeitel’s detailed and richly textured narrative leads us to is at least partly cleared by the insightful comments that he also produces alongside. Two of these that appealed to me in particular were first, how it was easier to frame prescriptive rules for wives than for mothers and second, to understand the hardening orthodoxy in Manu as a reaction to the emergence of the independent religiously unorthodox women: the Buddhist nun (pp. 337, 340). Also insightful and instructive is the observation on the perceptive differences that Manu and the Gita adopt over the concept of Karmayoga. Manu, as it would appear from Hiltebeitel’s analysis, is (at least initially) the greater realist, more reluctant to be drawn to the conclusion that actions may be quite easily performed without tying these to human desire. Hence, whereas the Gita advocates selflessness(nishkama) for all work, Manu recommends this only with respect to Vedic ritual performances (pp. 536–38).
If the ways of dharma are so muddled and complex so is Hilltbeitel’s narrative at places. What compounds matters occasionally is the author’s tendency to digress somewhat wantonly into dense textual histories (see pages 203–05), into confounding lists of who said what and when and his recurring differences with members of the western academia (as for instance with Doniger and Biardeau on pages 15–16). However, as he himself concedes (p. 20) scholarly orthodoxies centred on the understanding of dharma are more difficult to shake off than differences of opinion in classical India itself, which in retrospect, appear more flexible.
For a book of this proportion, it might have been useful to include an epilogue where mutations occurring within the concept of dharma over a longer period could have been handled, however, briefly. For an author who pays much attention to history, handling the transition from dharmasutra literature to dharmasastras would have been additionally rewarding. In the present work, we are sufficiently apprised of Yudhishtira as the embodiment of dharma but what of Yama himself? As a reviewer whose knowledge of early India is far from adequate, I have also pondered over the question of whether or not dharma as an active paradigm entered contemporary Jain literature.
I would be greatly remiss if in passing I failed to mention the excellent quality of production even if the price would seem to be somewhat prohibitive. The copy editor has done a commendable job—even in a book of this size I could locate only two typos (p. 10, line 12 from above, p. 570, last line of the main text). This is a book from which the author may justly draw personal happiness and professional satisfaction. It is also a book that will endure, inviting and actively inspiring interested scholars and readers for some years to come.

Amiya P. Sen is currently Heinrich Zimmer Chair at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg.