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Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation: The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of Ancient India

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What is the purpose of human life? In tradition Hindu society, there are four answers - the right one depends on your stage in life. These four goals are: (1) *dharma* -- virtue, duty; (2) *artha* -- success, wealth, family life; (3) *kama* -- pleasure, sexuality, sensual enjoyment; and (4) *moksha* -- total spiritual liberation. Alain Danielou, one of the greatest scholars of ancient India, discusses the implications of a society based on these four goals. Danielou argues persuasively that this four-thousand year old system of the Four Aims of Life gives us deep insight into human nature, a level of insight sadly lacking in many modern conceptions. This small book is brief and clear, an accessible introduction for someone not familiar with Hinduism or traditional Indian society. I highly recommend it for anyone considering question of life purpose.

This book is an explanation of the Hindu value system. Danielou is a very well-known musicologist and linguist who has published many important works explaining Indian music to Western audiences. In this book, he takes up the basic tenets of the Hindu religion and how they are played out in the culture of India. The book is organized into two parts. The first part consists of only two chapters, covering the early history of Hinduism and the development of Sanskrit, and the justification for the caste system. The second part begins with a brief description of Hindu cosmology, and then turns to the four aims of life: duty, success, pleasure, and liberation, and relates these to the four stages of life: study, family, retreat, and renunciation. The book contains two appendices: an enumeration of the thirty-two sciences and the sixty-four arts, a one-page description of sources, and an index.

I found this book quite easy to understand. Danielou's description of the four aims of life and corresponding four stages of life is very clear. Danielou points out how very different Hindu assumptions about the world, its organization and social structure are from Western assumptions. He notes that the enormity of the differences can make it practically impossible for members of one culture ever to understand the other culture completely, since their worldview is so different. He says "It is difficult to explain Hindu moral attitudes using a Western vocabulary fashioned by Christian scholasticism; it is not even easy to establish parallels between terms, postulates, and classifications. The very values are so contradictory that in passing from one of these worlds to the other, it is necessary to think on another plane and in another idiom..."

As Danelou writes, it can be hard to tell whether he is giving his own personal opinions, some of which might be objectionable if judged by Western ethical standards, or simply stating commonly-held Hindu beliefs. He supports his statements with numerous quotations from sacred Hindu texts. As a Western reader, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of his explanations, but logically, they make sense and shed light on many aspects of Hindu culture that appear incomprehensible to Westerners unfamiliar with Hindu beliefs.

It embarrasses me to admit that before I encountered the works of Alain Danielou I had no real conception of the nature of traditional Indian culture. I like to think that I had I certain instinctual understanding of the Upanishads but I no real grounding in the underlying roots of the mother of civilizations. Then again, how could I? I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the egalitarian prejudices of modern Western thought. As the book points out, the modern Europeanized society of New Delhi is not truly Hindu- they are a society apart composed of pariahs with a deep seated hostility towards traditional institutions. Of course these traditional institutions have endured for millennia and will long outlast the current aberration in governance.

The purpose of this book is to reveal the interpenetrating underlying nature of the structure of traditional society. The interrelation of the four aims life, the four stages of biological maturation, the four castes, the four historical ages, the four human types, and so many other fundamental quaternaries are all spelled out. Traditional society is based upon these principles for they represent the metaphysical basis of greater reality- they represent the will of the Creator. Nothing lasting can oppose the will of god. Nothing can be further from the anthropological relativism of the West.

How unnatural and disruptive does Western "civilization" appear when compared with a civilization carefully built upon spiritual physics and the Creators will.

This book also has one of the best explanations of the purpose of life that I have encountered. All beings exist to act as witnesses to the cosmos and thereby to give it a degree of reality. The reality of a particular universe resides solely in the limits given it by the perception of conscious individuals. Our deliberately limited perceptions are what give all things the illusion of substance. Yet, our consciousness is not separate from the Universal Consciousness. The final goal of life is to come to Know this truth.

To sum up, traditional Hindu life is based on a study of the rules that are natural to man and take account the different aspects of his physical, psychic, transmigrant, and physical nature, as well as his collective functions, role, destiny, and purpose in the cosmic order.