Indian Ethics I: Puruṣārtha, Dharma, Duty and the Ethics of the Gītā and Mīmāṃsā

Dharma, from the root dhṛ (to hold, sustain), is what upholds the individual and society. The dharmaśāstras name its sources: the Veda (śruti), the tradition (smṛti), the conduct of the virtuous (sadācāra) and what is pleasing to one's own conscience (ātmatuṣṭi), as in Manusmṛti 2.12. Classical theory distinguishes two levels. Viśeṣa dharma, specific duty, depends on one's varṇa (social order) and āśrama (stage of life), and together these make up varṇāśrama-dharma. Sādhāraṇa dharma, common duty, binds every person whatever their varṇa or āśrama.

Sādhāraṇa dharma is listed in several forms. Manusmṛti 10.63 gives a short list for all four varṇas: non-injury (ahiṃsā), truthfulness (satya), non-stealing (asteya), purity (śauca) and control of the senses (indriya-nigraha). Manusmṛti 6.92 gives ten marks of dharma: fortitude, forgiveness, self-restraint, non-stealing, purity, control of the senses, wisdom, learning, truthfulness and absence of anger. Where specific and common duty seem to conflict, the tradition debates which prevails; the Gītā's answer for Arjuna is that his svadharma as a warrior binds him, while others, including Gandhi, read its message as one of universal duty.

The idea of ṛṇa (debt) presents duty as something owed. Vedic texts say a person is born with three debts: to the sages (ṛṣi-ṛṇa), repaid by study of the Veda; to the gods (deva-ṛṇa), repaid by sacrifice; and to the ancestors (pitṛ-ṛṇa), repaid by begetting and raising offspring. Later texts add a debt to fellow humans. The debts are repaid through yajña in a broad sense, the five great daily sacrifices (pañca-mahāyajña) of the householder listed in Manusmṛti 3.70: brahma-yajña (teaching and study), pitṛ-yajña (offerings to ancestors), deva-yajña (offerings into the fire), bhūta-yajña (offerings to all creatures) and manuṣya-yajña (hospitality to guests).

The concept of duty in Indian ethics is therefore relational and role-based: one owes duties to teachers, gods, ancestors, creatures and guests, and the content of duty depends on station and stage. It differs from the Kantian concept, which derives duty from the universal form of reason, though both separate duty from the pursuit of the agent's own pleasure. The Mīmāṃsā treats Vedic injunctions as the source of duty, and Prabhākara's view that the injunction itself moves the agent is the closest Indian parallel to "duty for duty's sake".

• Karma-yoga: "your right is to action alone, never to its fruits; let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction" (2.47). Action cannot be avoided, since even the body's maintenance requires it (3.8); what binds is desire for the result. Action done without attachment, as an offering, is niṣkāma karma and does not bind.
• Sthitaprajña, the person of steady wisdom (2.54–72): one who has cast off all desires of the mind and is content in the self alone; unshaken in sorrow, free of longing in pleasure, without attachment, fear or anger; who withdraws the senses from their objects as a tortoise draws in its limbs (2.58). The chain from dwelling on objects to ruin, attachment, desire, anger, delusion, loss of memory, loss of reason, is traced in 2.62–63.
• Svadharma: "better one's own dharma, though imperfectly done, than another's dharma well performed; death in one's own dharma is better, another's dharma is fraught with danger" (3.35, echoed at 18.47). Arjuna, a kṣatriya, should fight a righteous war rather than take up the renunciant's path.
• Lokasaṃgraha, the holding together or welfare of the world: even one who has nothing to gain should act "with a view to lokasaṃgraha" (3.20), as Janaka did; the wise should act without attachment just as the ignorant act with it, "desiring the welfare of the world" (3.25), so as not to unsettle others by setting an example of inaction.

How can a sacrifice performed today yield heaven after death, when the act itself perishes at once? Mīmāṃsā answers with apūrva ("the unprecedented"): the ritual act generates in the agent an unseen potency, not known by any other pramāṇa, which persists and produces the fruit in due time. Apūrva is postulated by arthāpatti, since without it the Vedic injunction promising a result would be unintelligible. Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika uses adṛṣṭa ("the unseen") for a related idea: merit and demerit (dharma and adharma) as qualities of the self, generated by action, which determine a person's future experiences and, under God's will, even set the atoms moving at creation. Both concepts give the moral order a mechanism that does not depend on the act being remembered or observed.

Sādhya-sādhana and itikartavyatā come from the Mīmāṃsā analysis of bhāvanā (Chapter 4): every prescribed act answers three questions, what is to be achieved (sādhya), by what means (sādhana) and in what manner (itikartavyatā, the procedure of subsidiary acts). In the injunction "one desiring heaven should perform the jyotiṣṭoma", heaven is the sādhya, the sacrifice the sādhana and the ritual details the itikartavyatā. As ethical categories they raise the question whether dharma is itself an end or a means: for Kumārila, the Vedic act is a means to a desired good; for Prabhākara, the injunction binds as duty (kārya) whatever the fruit, a debate that parallels the Western contrast between teleological and deontological ethics.