PURUSHARTHA - DHARMA, ARTHA, KAMA, MOKSHA
Seers in the ancient Eastern tradition articulated the blueprint for the fulfillment of the objectives of human birth as was shown to them in the highest supreme levels of consciousness. The Supreme Self pervades and exists in all dimensions in all beings, sentient and insentient. It is that Supreme Self that exists inside each individual self, in each individual person. And therefore every individual person is none other than the Supreme Self, for how can the part be different from the whole.
In order for an individual to realize their supreme Self, they need to identify the reasons and objectives why they came into being on this earth plane and fulfill them. The ancient seers clearly articulated the objectives of humankind as "Purusharthas".
They articulated four Purusharthas as:
Dharma : Righteousness, Duty
Artha : Wealth
Kama : Desire
Moksha : Liberation
The four purusharthas are really the objectives of God, of the Supreme Self, the qualities of God. And since an individual person is a reflection of God, is a part of God, it is the rightful pursuit of a person to fulfill these four purusharthas. In fact, it is both your individual and soul purpose.
An individual can realize him or herself by balancing and fulfilling these four objectives. These four objectives are not independent of each other and should not be viewed in a stand-alone manner.
They define and refine the other objectives and allow the other objectives to define and refine itself. The activity of fulfilling one objective should also support the fulfillment of the other objectives. By maintaining a balance between the definition and fulfillment of the four purusharthas, a symbiotic evolution of the individual self takes place.
Exclusive pursuit of one purushartha creates an imbalance in a person's life and prevents the person from reaching the ultimate destination of their life. As a person progresses through the evolution of their soul, they find that some of the objectives eventually lose their place and importance to more predominant objectives. For example, the desire to earn wealth may diminish and disappear, or a person may come to the realization that there are no more material desires that they need to pursue and hence more room is created for the pursuit of the ultimate objective, Moksha.
ARTHA
The material needs of the body are a very important concern indeed.
Whatever be your spiritual aspiration, you cannot ignore that you have a body. As long as you feel that you have a body and cannot ignore its presence or forget that it is there, then you cannot also forget its requirements.
Everyone, even an advanced spiritual seeker, has certain needs concerning the physical body, like protection against heat and cold, hunger and thirst, sun and rain, etc. If you ignore these essentials, the body may perish, even though you may have an innocent spiritual aspiration.
There is what is known as a total of material requirement, material need. Its importance is well known, and is known as artha, the material unavoidable.
KAMA
Then, there is another thing: the aesthetic longings of the human personality.
One cannot be happy merely by eating, drinking, putting on clothes, and having a house in which to stay. Even such a person will not be a complete person; there are other requirements which are of a vital nature – the desire-filled nature of the individual.
There are other insistent desires called kama, or vital wishes to be fulfilled, which are other pressures exerted by the biological personality, which, too, cannot be ignored, as they are part of oneself.
MOKSHA
Then, together with all these, there is also the aspiration for moksha, attainment of God, which is a fulfilment, finally, of the whole complex of desires, physical as well as vital. That also is to be taken care of with great caution, as the one conditioning everything else. The method by which you can hook together these three types of impulse and the final aspiration harmoniously, that procedure of the cementing of all these sides of human nature is called dharma, or the law of harmonization of the aspects of the whole of life, with all its relations in human society.
DHARMA
Dharma is sometimes translated as religion: Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and others. Dharma is not denominational religion, necessarily.
Please forget the old definition of dharma as some religion. It is not any kind of ism. It is an ultimate law that keeps the universe in balance, keeps the body, the mind, your reasoning, society and everything in a state of perfect integration so that you feel that you are existing as a total individual and do not feel that you are a mix-up of several parts heaped together in a confused manner.
All these four facets of life have to be brought together into a focus of attention at the same time. These are known as the purusharthas, or aims of existence, the final objectives of life known popularly as dharma, artha, kama and moksha, i.e., moral value, economic value, vital value and eternal value.
For DHARMA and MOKSHA, a man should always constantly do Purushartha (efforts) and should never leave it to Prarabdha.
As for ARTHA and KAMA he should totally leave them to Prarabdha as he is going to get only that much of wealth (ARTHA) and enjoyment (KAMA) which is destined in his Prarabdha (luck, fate, fortune) and nothing more in spite of all his Purushartha (efforts).
But unfortunately due to the ignorance of this law of Karma he goes in the wrong direction and ultimately he has to lose everything at the end of his life.
Instead of making any Purushartha (efforts) for (1) Dharma and (4) Moksha, he totally neglects it or leaves it to Praradbha only.
While for (2) Artha (wealth) and (3) Kama (enjoyment), he strives all his nerves and makes strenuous efforts (Purushartha) all throughout his life day and night and crazily hankers after them even when he is not going to get anything more than that is destined in his Prarabdha. Thus he fails in both the ways in life by making efforts in opposite and wrong directions.
Human body is given to acquire all these four: (1) Dharma, (2) Artha, (3) Kama and (4) Moksha, in proper sequence.
Hindu religion and its scriptures are not against having Artha (wealth) and Kama (enjoyment of wealth). A man is supposed to be and should be wealthy enough but that wealth must be earned and accumulated only and only through the medium of Dharma-ethics, through pious deeds and not by unethical crooked means and sins. That is why
• DHARMA is given number 1 (one) in the sequence and wealth comes second.
• Wealth(ARTHA) earned through the medium of DHARMA (ethics and pious deeds) will lead you to worship and wisdom. While the wealth earned by unethical means and sins through crooked ways would lead you to wine and women.
• With the wealth acquired through the medium of Dharma he is permitted to enjoy all the amenities of life and satisfy his KAMA, of course. within the limits of Dharma. This permission is given not to fall into the pit of passion and to indulge and stoop into the enjoyment for sense gratification; but just to make him realize that it is insatiable and therefore he should try to overcome it.
• Ultimately when he will realize the fruitlessness of enjoyment for sense gratification which is insatiable, immediately he will realize the fruitfulness of Moksha. Consequently and subsequently he will renounce and will turn his face for self-realization and liberation from the cycle of birth and death i.e. MOKSHA which is the final target, the ultimate goal and also the main purpose for which he is gracefully given the human body by God.
This is how we have to consider the ways of bringing together the aspirations which are dharma, artha, kama and moksha in our practical life.
In a way this is, to put it differently, the bringing together of the aspirations of a brahmacharin, grihastha, vanaprastha and sanyasin into a single fold. You will be wondering how all the four can be together. It is because these four stages of life are four kinds of preparation for a single attainment of totality of the person. The sanyasin is not isolated from the brahmacharin, grihastha, or the vanaprastha.
BRAHMACHARI
The brahmacharin is the seed that develops into the practical experience of a grihastha in life, which again matures into the detached existence of a vanaprastha,which again matures into the total comprehension of the spirit in sanyasa.
HOUSE HOLDER
You have to keep good company always. Even if you are a householder looking like a bound person, you can be a good person, an ideal individual, by living in the midst of a good community in a village, or even a little township of friends and cooperative individuals. Keep good company, as far as it is possible. If you can live socially, it is wonderful for you to choose your company and be in the midst of those people only.
Gradually, bear in mind that your householder-life is a preparation for a retirement from the occupations of a householder. It is not a retirement from work, necessarily. The occupation is inclusive of certain mental entanglements. A householder actually is not a person doing many things, but thinking in many ways. The entanglement is not necessarily physical, but mostly psychological. The psychological detachment should mature gradually in a family. You do your duty to take care of your family, but don't be attached to the family.
You may be wondering how it is possible to take care of the family with detachment. This is the difference between duty and work with desire. A duty is a necessity, an obligation, that arises from your very being in the circumstance of your life; it has to be done for the welfare of the whole circumstance of your life, including the society outside.
Your obligation is not to be associated with a desire full action. Here it is that the Bhagavad Gita comes before you as a guideline. The gradual detachment, even in a householder, is a maturity of thought arising after the experience of the whole of life as an entangled individual in society. In the beginning it is all entanglement. Then, later on, it is only an apparent entanglement through social relations; mentally it is not so connected.
Slowly begin to feel that your mind is a little different from the body and social relations. Then afterwards you will find that you can live a life in the mind only, and let the social relations be anywhere. You are a mind, rather than a social unit. You are a mind thinking, rather than a physical individual associated with the mind. Thought is the human being, so let this thought be your final concern, and live in your ideas.
VANAPRASHTHA
Ideas rule the world. Every action is preceded by a thought. The world is not governed by the actions of people, but by the thoughts of people, by the ideas of the leaders of mankind. The ideas manifest themselves as activities or performances. The idea is the ultimate reality; thought is the final principle in the cosmos. Thus, you live in your mind, in your idea of total comprehension and satisfaction.
Then, gradually, you will find that you are capable of living independently without bodily associations. Such a life is called the vanaprastha stage, which does not mean running away from the family. It is a kind of family life only, without the agonies and the emotional pressures caused by relations with people.
Mostly, what people do is that they go away to some holy places for some time, though they have not left the family. For three months in a year, the family man goes out on a pilgrimage, lives in a holy place, and entrusts the enterprise of taking care of the family to his grown-up children. Whether you are a businessman, or whatever you are, this is the first step that you have to take to detach yourself.
For three months you are not in the house. After that, you come back to the house and stay there for nine months, so that you may feel no uneasiness that you are without any contact with your family members. Gradually, if this process continues for some years, you will find that you are in a position to live unconnected with family life, because the members of the family are taken care of by the children, who are well placed.
Then, you may increase your detached life into six months, nine months, then occasional visits to the family, only. Somewhere in a sacred place you live such a life; then your life and your idea that you have chosen takes possession of you completely. You become an ideal being, not a physical individual.
Your meditation is thought thinking itself, as they say, idea operating on idea, the Cosmic Mind dancing in the centre of your own idea, whereby your idea becomes a focusing point of the Cosmic Mind, and you are a sanyasin at that time.
SANYASI
A sanyasin is not necessarily someone who has put on any particular cloth. The cloth is just an indication that he has achieved that state. It is a social insignia to distinguish the person from other people. The essential thing is what you think in your mind, so live in your mind only, afterwards. Your ideas are the seeds of the universal idea of God. A person who lives such a kind of life in his ideas only is a sanyasin. He has renounced truly.
You have not thrown away anything in your renunciation through sanyasa. You have attained a perfect, total, developed maturity of spiritual comprehension. That kind of living of an ideal existence, free in every sense of the term, happy always, happy with anything and everything – such a person is a sanyasin.
These are some of the traditional features of a spiritual life – the methods of the harmonizing of the principles of dharma, artha, kama and moksha connected with the principles involved in the stages of the brahmacharin, grihastha, vanaprastha and sanyasin, all which commingle in a sea of comprehension which is the maintenance of God-consciousness. Such a person alone can be called a sanyasin.
In one of the discourses on Ugadi day, Swami said,
"Embodiment of love: You cannot find in the entire Cosmos any place or object in which God is not present. The divine is present on the mountains. The divine dwells in villages and cities. The Divine is Omnipresent. Only those who recognize this truth can redeem their lives; they alone can achieve the goal of human existence. The powers of the Divine are limitless. Every living being in the world is governed by some limitations. Birds, beasts and insects are all taken care of by the Divine in respect of their essential needs like food and drink.
People aspire for liberation (Mukti). They have no idea what constitutes liberation. Man seeks liberation from the ills of the body, the senses, the mind, the intellect and the Anthakarana (internal motivator). All these are no doubt necessary. But liberation in the ultimate sense consists in liberation from the cycle of birth and death.
This means that one should redeem one's present life so that one is free from rebirth. Men should pray to God for freedom from rebirth so that they will not have bodies which are bound to be afflicted with diseases. People have no clear idea of what Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha (the four goals) mean.
They think that Moksha (liberation) is something, which you attain after death. But, in fact, liberation can be attained here and now. Moksha means "Moha-Kshayam" the elimination of "Moha" (or attachment). People are not ready to give up attachment to wife, children, property etc., you have a duty to protect your family. But you must not be immersed in concerns about them. Realise that love is the most important quality in human life. It is not love for kith and kin that is precious. It is love for God that is more valuable".
(Extracts taken from Sanathana Sarathi, April 1998)
