A Study of How the Tradition's Core Principles Apply Across Every Context, Including the Present One
Abstract: The question
of how to live a life grounded in the principles of Sanatana Dharma in the
specific conditions of the contemporary world is one that every sincere
practitioner in the tradition must eventually face. The world of ancient India,
in which most of the tradition's scriptural texts were composed and in which
most of its practical guidelines were originally articulated, differs so
dramatically from the contemporary world in its social structure, its economic
organisation, its technological environment, and its cultural assumptions that
the attempt to apply scriptural guidance directly and literally produces, at
best, confusion and, at worst, the kind of fundamentalism that the tradition's
own philosophical sophistication should make impossible. This article explores
what it genuinely means to live a scriptural life in modern times, which
aspects of the tradition's guidance are genuinely universal and do not require
adaptation, which aspects were always culturally specific and require
thoughtful translation into contemporary circumstances, and what the
tradition's own philosophical resources for exactly this kind of contextual
application reveal about how it expects to be lived.
Keywords: Scriptural
life, modern times, Sanatana Dharma, dharma, adaptation, universal principles,
daily practice, Bhagavad Gita, viveka, contemporary application
Introduction
There is a tendency in
any tradition with a long history and a venerable body of scripture to treat
the past as the standard against which the present is measured and found
wanting. The golden age is always behind us; the present is always a degraded
form of what once was. This tendency is particularly strong in a tradition that
contains the explicit doctrine of the yugas, the four cosmic ages of which the
present Kali Yuga is the most contracted and most difficult. If the Satya Yuga
represents the tradition's fullest expression and the Kali Yuga is its most
diminished, the instruction to live a scriptural life can sound like an
instruction to try to live as if one were in a time and a social world that no
longer exist.
But this reading
misunderstands what the tradition means by living scripturally. The tradition's
scriptural wisdom is not primarily a set of culturally specific instructions
that made sense in ancient India and need to be preserved in amber. It is a set
of principles whose application in any specific cultural context requires the
exercise of exactly the kind of discriminative wisdom, viveka, that the
tradition identifies as the highest spiritual faculty. The scriptures provide
the principles. Living scripturally means applying those principles with
genuine wisdom to one's actual circumstances. And the circumstances of the
contemporary world, however different from ancient India, are the actual
circumstances in which the tradition's living practitioners exist.
What Is Universal:
The Unchanging Core
The first question in
approaching scriptural life in modern times is identifying what in the
tradition is genuinely universal, applying across all cultural contexts and all
historical periods, and what is culturally specific, representing the
application of universal principles to a specific set of historical
circumstances that no longer obtain. The tradition's philosophical work on
dharma provides some help here: the tradition distinguishes between Sanatana
Dharma, the eternal principles, and yuga-dharma or kala-dharma, the specific
dharmic requirements of a particular age or period.
त्यागेनैके अमृतत्वमानशुः।
Tyagenaike
amritatvam anashuh.
(Through
renunciation alone, some have attained immortality.)
Kaivalya
Upanishad, 2
Tyaga, renunciation, is
among the universal principles: not renunciation in the literal sense of
abandoning possessions and relationships, which is a specific cultural practice
suited to specific temperaments, but renunciation in the philosophical sense of
the inner release of the ego's grip on outcomes, the genuine dispassion that allows
full engagement without bondage. This inner quality of renunciation applies
equally in ancient India and in the contemporary world. A person managing a
business in a modern city can practice tyaga in exactly the sense the tradition
intends: acting with full engagement and full care for the quality of their
work, without making the business's outcomes the condition of their inner
peace. The form of the activity has changed; the quality of inner orientation
that constitutes genuine dharmic engagement has not.
The Bhagavad Gita as
the Perennial Manual
Among all the
tradition's scriptural texts, the Bhagavad Gita has proved the most
consistently applicable across the broadest range of historical and cultural
contexts, and this is not an accident. The Gita was delivered on a battlefield,
in the most urgent and most consequential possible circumstances, to a person
who was not a professional renunciant or a philosopher but a warrior with
specific duties, relationships, and responsibilities. Its teaching is therefore
not addressed to those who have removed themselves from the demands of ordinary
life. It is addressed to those who are in the middle of exactly those demands,
who need guidance not on how to withdraw but on how to engage with full wisdom
and full integrity.
Every major theme of the
Gita is directly applicable in the contemporary world. The teaching of Nishkama
Karma applies as directly to the contemporary professional, parent, or citizen
as it does to the ancient warrior: act with full engagement, without making the
ego's claim on outcomes the condition of the action's quality. The teaching of
samatvam applies as directly to the contemporary person navigating success,
failure, praise, and criticism in the connected and competitive world of the
twenty-first century as it does to any warrior. The teaching of svadharma, of
identifying and living one's own specific dharmic role rather than trying to
perform another's, is not less relevant in an age of career choices and
identity questions. It is more relevant.
श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुणः परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात्। स्वधर्मे निधनं श्रेयः परधर्मो भयावहः॥
Shreyaan
sva-dharmo vigunah para-dharmat svanushthitat, Sva-dharme nidhanam shreyah
para-dharmo bhayavahah.
(It
is far better to perform one's own dharma imperfectly than to perform another's
dharma perfectly. Even death in one's own dharma is better; another's dharma is
full of danger.)
Bhagavad
Gita, Chapter 3, Verse 35
Svadharme nidhanam
shreyah: even death in one's own dharma is better. The principle of svadharma,
of living in alignment with one's own specific nature and responsibilities
rather than imitating the dharma of someone else, is as applicable to a person
navigating career choices in the contemporary world as to any ancient warrior
choosing whether to fight. The specific form of the dharma has changed. The
principle that genuine dharmic life requires living in alignment with one's own
specific nature and situation rather than performing a role that is not
genuinely one's own has not changed at all.
Daily Practice: The
Scriptural Life in Concrete Form
A scriptural life in
modern times is lived not primarily in its grand decisions but in its daily
quality of engagement with the ordinary. The tradition's prescription for daily
life includes several elements whose modern application requires thought rather
than literal adherence. The sandhya, the practice of meditation at the
transitions of the day, dawn and dusk, does not require the specific Vedic
ritual forms to be genuinely practiced. What it requires is the genuine
cultivation of the quality of awareness that the sandhya is designed to
produce: a regular, disciplined returning of the attention to the ground of
consciousness that underlies the day's activity. This can take many forms in
the modern world. The form matters less than the genuine quality of practice.
The tradition's
prescription for the quality of daily relationships, for honesty in speech,
generosity in action, and genuine care for the welfare of those in one's sphere
of influence, applies in the modern context with exactly the same force it
always did. Perhaps more force, because the contemporary world's tendency
toward the instrumentalisation of relationships and the commodification of
every form of value makes the tradition's insistence on genuine relational
dharma a more urgent counter-cultural statement than it was in a world where
relational obligations were enforced by social structure. In the contemporary
world, the choice to live relationally rightly must be made against more
resistance. The choice is therefore more genuinely a choice, and its practice
is therefore more genuinely a practice.
Conclusion
Living a scriptural life
in modern times is not the attempt to recreate the social world of ancient
India in the present. It is the application of principles that were always
genuinely universal to the specific circumstances of the present, using the
discriminative wisdom that the tradition identifies as its most essential
spiritual faculty. The principles are given by the tradition. The application
requires the practitioner's genuine engagement with their actual circumstances
and the honest, humble, sustained exercise of the viveka that allows them to
see what dharmic life requires in those specific circumstances.
What the tradition asks
of the contemporary practitioner is not a different kind of engagement than it
asked of any other. It asks for the same qualities it has always asked for: the
discrimination to see clearly, the dispassion to act rightly without being
captured by outcomes, the devotion to maintain the orientation toward what
matters most, and the courage to live by what one understands even when the
world around one is organised on different principles. These qualities are not
the product of any specific historical period. They are the product of genuine
practice, wherever and whenever that practice is undertaken. The tradition
offers its practitioners both the principles and the practices. The living is
always up to the practitioner.
मनुष्याणां सहस्रेषु कश्चिद्यतति सिद्धये। यततामपि सिद्धानां कश्चिन्मां वेत्ति तत्त्वतः॥
Manushyanam
sahasreshu kashcid yatati siddhaye, Yatatam api siddhanam kashcin mam vetti
tattvatah.
(Out
of many thousands of human beings, one may endeavour for spiritual perfection,
and of those who have achieved perfection, hardly one truly knows Me.)
Bhagavad
Gita, Chapter 7, Verse 3
The rarity of genuine
spiritual understanding, acknowledged honestly by the tradition itself, is not
a counsel of despair. It is an acknowledgment of the genuine difficulty of the
path and the genuine importance of the aspiration. Most people in most periods
do not live scripturally in the fullest sense. But some do, in every period and
in every circumstance. And those who do, who bring the full force of the
tradition's wisdom to the full actuality of their specific lives, are in every
generation the proof that the living of a scriptural life is possible, that the
ancient principles are genuinely applicable in modern ground, and that the
roots are deep enough to nourish even the most contemporary flowering of the
tradition's life.
References and
Suggested Reading
Bhagavad Gita, Chapters
3 and 7
Kaivalya Upanishad
Swami Vivekananda, The
Complete Works, Volume 1
S. Radhakrishnan, The
Hindu View of Life (1927)
Devdutt Pattanaik, My
Gita (2015)
David Frawley (Pandit
Vamadeva Shastri), Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations (2001)
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