Friday, January 28, 2011

Objectives of Life - Purusharthas

Human Beings are said to desire four objectives in life - Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha.  Indians/Western students of Hinduism have tried to translate these very subtle terms severally.  One such translation I found in Wikipedia is:

Unhappy with most of these translation, especially as they dont convey the meaning of these objective as they should be understood, I propose the following description:

Dharma - Dharma indicates the fundamental rights to equality, justice, freedom, and a level playing field to compete and live life according to an individual's own terms, while agreeing with and adhereing to social norms.  This includes the right to practice one's own religion, including atheism.  When an individual has been provided this level playing field, he/she goes on to use it for acquiring the next objective - Artha.

Artha - Artha indicates material wealth.  At the basic minimum this might include food, clothing and shelter.  However, there is no end to the material wealth one might desire to acquire.

Kama - Kama essentially indicates "desire" and not "sex" as most people translate it.  True the Kamasutra does deal about sexual poses for increased physical pleasure, but that does not mean Nish-Kamya_Karma should be translated to Karma that is not driven by Sex!  Nish-Kamya-Karma indicates karma without desires (for the fruits of the action).  As a human-life objective, Kama indicates fulfilment of desires.  It primarily acknowledges that desire is different from greed for material wealth.  Kama could indicate, in its simplistic form, desire for happiness.

When the individual has achieved these three, then he/she turns attention to the final and the most desired objective of Moksha.  Most of the human beings, especially ones belonging to other faiths get lost at this point.  Moksha is liberation from Samsara - the continuous cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth, driven by karma accumulated during a life-period.  As karma grows, so does chances of being born in a lower life-form - like animal, plant etc.  When one exhausts the karma baggage - no positive and no negative karma left, then at that point the individual achieves moksha/liberation/nirvana.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Life is Knowledge

The purpose of human life is acquisition of knowledge (gnyan vikas).  There are three primary sources of knowledge - two are scientific, the third is extra-scientific.  The scientific sources of knowledge are practical experience (pratyaksha), and inference (anumana).  Practical experience is realized through the 5 sense organs. Logical extrapolation is achieved through thinking and extending what we already know.  It however needs a starting point fixed in what we know through practical experience.  For example, we know that wet-log+fire causes smoke.  When we see smoke at a distance, we can infer that there is fire and wet-log. If the same is happening in a forest, we might conclude from that inference that it may be unsafe to venture into that area because there could be potentially dry wood nearby that could result in a a bigger forest fire.  The third source is extra-sensory experience that which some call as divine-intervention.