Eremitism in Hindu India: The Asrama System
H
induism is strongly associated with the asrama system (asrama means "path" and is the same root word used for ashram). To the modern observer, the asrama system consists of the four chronological stages of life, namely,
- student (brahmacarya)
- householder (grihasthya)
- forest dweller or hermit (vanaprasthya)
- renouncer (samnyasa)
The modern system is, strictly speaking, intended to be prescriptive, with periods of twenty-five years assigned to each stage: student to age 25, householder from 25 to 50, hermit from 50 to 75, and wandering mendicant from 75 years up.
However, based on the extensive research of Patrick Olivelle and others, we now know that the asrama system conceived of as stages is not the original asrama system but came into existence around the first century CE or later, epitomized by the Law of Manu.
The true or original asrama system reveals a different motivation, reflecting not social institutions but theological and spiritual goals. It was a system of options, not prescriptions.
A brief review of the highlights of the development of religion and culture throughout this period will be helpful to an understanding of both the original and the subsequent (so-called "classical") asrama system. This will also shed light on the phenomena of hermits and sadhus so prevalent in ancient India.
The Vedic period
Two great eras of antiquity affecting the world from Greece to India are: 1) the era of Indo-European conquest, 2000 or 1500-800 BCE), and 2) the response, 800-400 BCE.
During the era of conquests, the Indo-Europeans are Achaeans in Greece, "sea-peoples" in the Middle East, and Aryans in India. They create fierce authoritarian kingdoms dominated by kings and warriors. Priests oversee characteristic religions of sacrifice and ritual, of sky gods and multiple deities entangled in jealousies, rivalries, and wars. Epic literature emerges to dramatize this world: Homer's Iliad among the Achaeans, the scriptural histories and law codes of the Davidic monarchy that overcomes its neighbors with a single sky god, and the Vedas representative of the social and cultural system transposed atop a remnant Indus culture that was to retain suggestions of later yogic belief.
These peoples share a religion of holocausts and animal sacrifices. The Achaeans and the Aryans shared the practice of horse sacrifice, while the Israelites, derived from Semitic peoples distrustful of the horse as a symbol of rival conquerors, nevertheless vigorously pursued the sacrifice of bullocks and lambs: the "burning of flesh is a sweet savor unto Yahweh" (Numbers 15, 13).
But disaffection with the ethos of these martial cultures arose from within. In Greece, Hesiod doubts the wisdom of the gods and by extrapolation the legitimacy of the priestly class. From the collapse of the kingdoms of Judaism and the exile of the populace, prophets arise such as Isaiah, proclaiming a sacrifice of the heart, not of animals. By the sixth century in Greece, a succession of philosophers appears: Thales, Parmenides, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, all emphasizing reason and ethics over conformity and ritual. In China the emergence of Confucianism in this period similarly affirms an ethical view over power and privilege.
Finally, in India, Buddha and Mahavira (founder of Jainism) reject violence and the existence of the caste system and its anthropomorphic gods. The Hindu Upanishads question the value of religious ritual, too, culminating in the Bhagavad Gita, with its concept of transcendence and equanimity.
Knowledge is better than practice, meditation is better than knowledge, and renunciation of action is better than meditation, for from renunciation comes tranquility (Bhagavad Gita, 12.12).
The Aryan class system reflecting the Vedic social values was unambiguous.
- Priests (Brahmin)
- Kings, nobility, warriors (Kshatriya)
- Merchants, craft workers, small farmers (Vaishya)
- Peasants and manual laborers (Shudra)
But as with the common features of Indo-European conquests, this class structure was by no means unusual in world history even centuries later. The purported origins in divine decree also has its modern echoes. The Rig Veda (10.19.12) refers obliquely to the classes as an organic hierarchy: the Brahmin as mouth, the Rajanya or Kshatriya as arms, the Vaishya as thighs, and the Shudra as feet.
Other Vedic sources suggested a class order based on intelligence: the Brahmin were noble, the Kshatriya noble but of mixed passion and dullness, the Vaishya were essentially dull with an admixture of passion, while the lowly Shudra were nothing but dull.
This system eventually became the caste (jati) system, with its subdivisions into classes (varna). But the caste and class have no relation to the asrama system. Nor did the concept of dharma which, defined as a moral and social law or rightness, was the object of codification as dharmasutra by several Vedic writers: Apastamba, Vasistha, Baudhayana, and Gautama (not to be confused with the Buddha). None of these writers refers to an asrama system. Later non-Hindu ascetics such as Buddhistsand Jains, plus Hindu non-Brahmanical holy men, are never considered or considered themselves part of an asrama system.
So where did the notion of an asrama system through the BCE centuries arise? Olivell points to the earliers European scholars of Hinduism such as Max Muller, who did not have access to all of the relevant sources and who romanticized the Hindu evolution of thought into a single Brahmanical compartment.
Emergence of new thought
The Vedic ideal was the Brahmin student who became the married adult householder. The adult householder's duties were to offer sacrifice and to procreate. Ancient sources celebrated the completeness of marriage with the raising of a son. Thus Narada writes (already aware of an eremitic alternative):
What is the use of dirt and deer skin?
What profit in beard and austerity?
Seek a son, O Brahmin:
He is the world free of blame.
But with the 6th to 4th centuries BCE comes significant socio-economic change in the Indus Valley. The Aryan stronghold was the agrarian village, but kings in emerging cities began to augment their administrative territories, with the need for administrators in law and mercantile affairs. This required a loosening of social structure. With increasing centralization and efficiencies, with food production increases benefiting cities and with probable migrations to cities, an increasing divergence of thought arose in urban areas.
Divergent perspectives and lifestyles questioned the dominance of ritual and sacrifice over self-discovery. As Oliville puts it:
These new religious ideologies and the increasing widespread ascetic life styles stood in sharp contrast to the vedic religious world centered around the householder and his duties of sacrifice and procreation. ... The challenges to the vedic world came not just from those outside the Brahmanical tradition such as the Buddha, but also from people within that tradition.
The new thinking revolved around the nobility: both the Buddha and Mahavira were of the Kshatriya class, and presentations of Rama and of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita present them as warriors. As society's intelligentsia, clearly Brahmins composed the Upanishads.
The anti-ritual thought emphasizes samsara (suffering and rebirth), karma (actions as determinants of suffering and rebirth), and moksha (liberation as the ultimate goal). The old belief was an obstacle to liberation and a cause of rebirth, for ritual and sacrifice did not account for individual ethical actions and represented "ignorance," as the Mundaka Upanishad puts it (1.2.6-10). The Buddhist Digha Nikaya (1:63) may well refer to Vedic Hinduism as well:
The household life is a dusty path full of hindrances, while the ascetic life is like the open sky. It is not easy for a man who lives at home to practice the holy life in all its fullness, in all its purity, in all its bright perfection.
While the new thought was largely centered in urban areas, the life style of the new ascetics suggested a new appreciation of wilderness (aranya), distinct from villages (grama), viewed as vulgar and unsophisticated. As Oliville notes,
The value system of the vedic world is inverted: wilderness over village, celibacy over marriage, economic inactivity over economic productivity, ritual inactivity over ritual performance, instability over stable residence, inner virtue and experience over outward observance, Both in ideology and in life style these reversals represented a radical challenge to the vedic world.
From these circumstances emerges the original asrama system. But such a system was not created, says Oliville,
by the conservative mainstream in order to encompass in a stifling embrace new ideas and institutions that it had failed to suppress, but by Brahmins who shared these ideas and ideals and who sought exegetical loopholes to introduce them into the Brahmanical mainstream.
The system was intended to offer Brahmanical students the direct option of becoming married householders or celibate renouncers and ascetics. The notion of celibacy required justification given the Brahmanical householder as ideal, but the voluntary and individualistic nature of the choice won quick and widespread support.
In the epic Ramayana, numerous forest hermits are described, and no formal asrama system is identified, although the Ramayana may date to before the sixth century BCE. Forest hermits also occur in the Mahabarata (5.3.5, for example). The Bhagavad Gita sees renunciation in an abstract rather than institutional sense. The most relevant early literary source for the new thought is the early Upanishads, which delineate the student-householder-hermit options, with specific duties to each. But even here there is no suggestion of a formal institutional view.
The original asrama system would not likely distinguish hermit and mendicant except that the number four has a recurring magical function in legal and institutional configurations of the era, and so a distinction emerged. Oliville, using Apastamba (ca. 450-350 BCE), notes:
Hermits did not have a uniform life style. A man who becomes a hermit immediately after completing his studies, according to Apastamba, remains celibate, does not live in a house (2.21,21) and wanders about (2.22.2), whereas a man who becomes a hermit after marriage lives initially in a house. Another feature that distinguishes hermits, both the celibate and the married, are that they undertake increasingly difficult austerities. With reference to a celibate hermit, Apastamba says: "Then he shall wander about, subsisting on roots, fruits, and leaves, and finally on what has fallen down. Thereafter he shall live on water, on air, and finally on ether." Of these, each succeeding mode is more excellent in its reward. The same prescriptions are given later also with regard to a married hermit (2.23.2)
Hence, there is no formal asrama at this time, only a timing from studentship and rituals. Perhaps there is an "ordered sequence" but old age is not relevant to becoming a hermit or, less, a mendicant.
Rather, this passage from Apastamba alludes to an anthropological treatment of the aged by Indo-Europeans: exile in lieu of death, here anticipated by voluntary retirement as a form of exile, a practice derived from economic necessity or benefit to society. Living off of water or air or ether is a sequence for suicide in old age. The passage does not limit itself to voluntary hermits.
Retirement facilitated transfer or partition of an estate, especially relevant to the Kshatriya in maintaining orderly inheritance. Thus royal abdication is a theme in the Mahabarata (the exiles of Rama and of Pandavas to forest dwelling) and in Buddhist stories. Many of the Upanishads also debate the proper timing for renunciation, taking asceticism as a given but without presuming or referring to the strictures of an asrama system. Thus the Jabala Upanishad states:
Let him renounce on the very day that he becomes detached, regardless of whether he has taken the vow or not, whether he has graduated or not, and whether he has kindled the sacred fire or is without fire (64).
Thus all the sources of this era perceive the new thought as based upon renunciation: renunciation of Brahmanical ritual, sacred fire, the sacred string, the householder life, marriage, children, property -- in short, renunciation (samnyas) as "sacramental."
Conclusion
The original asrama system was not a codified system at all but a series of elected paths fostered and encouraged by spiritualized Brahmins themselves. The path represented a spiritual experiment with enormous repercussions that eclipse the classical system that succeeded it. The later system, codified in the Law of Manu, as mentioned above, was nevertheless a radical social institution in world history, but lost the elective characteristic that attracted so many to Buddhism, Jainism, and the ascetic Hindu spirituality that would blossom into Advaita Vedanta, Yoga, and the eremitism of hermits and wandering sadhus.
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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
Patrick Olivelle: The Asrama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.