The Dharmaśāstras: The Reordering of the World, One More Time

Post last updated on February 17, 2025

 Image credit:  Brooklyn Museum

The idea of dharma found renewed consideration in a series of texts now regarded as Dharmaśāstra. These began to appear in parts of what is now India in the first half of the third century BC, but their occurrences subside sometime in the second half of the first millennium BC. The tracing of this lineage takes one from the four surviving Dharmasūtras, through the Manusmṛiti, into the commentaries that later reflect upon what precedes them. What results is a body of literature possessing particular literary and polemic qualities that invite—and even require—their assessment within the larger collection of an Indian religious tradition.

Some might, in their appraisal, wish to describe the Dharmaśāstric literature as a development in Indian thought. This inclination, though not unfounded, nevertheless deserves a kind and degree of scrutiny—a qualification, understood in Donald Davis’ summary of the history of Dharmaśāstric literature: The texts, he writes, display innovations that are rarely admitted by their authors.¹Jr. Davis, Donald R., “Introduction,” in Hindu Law: A New History of DharmaśāStra (Oxford, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 5. Ludo Rocher has noted a different but related point, that the Dharmaśāstras’ “commentators do not hesitate to impose interpretations of their own on the ancient texts, in order to make all of them fit harmoniously within coherent systems.”²Ludo Rocher, “The Dharmaśāstras,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 111-112. Hereby, the Dharmaśāstra texts and their subsequent interpretive history receive their ironic place in Indian literature: Innovations are made in recognition and defense of past assumptions, to return religious confidence to its former and formal object, the Vedas.

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The tension of past and present, to which the Dharmaśāstras receive their canonical context, is actually predicted in the Brahmanical view of religious orthodoxy. That orthodoxy has been generally (but not universally) understood by Hindus to minimally require the affirmation of the Vedas as śruti—eternally existing, inviolable, authoritative revelation. As such, even into the early 20th century, Surendranath Dasgupta was able to still note the connection between assumed Vedic authority and what was eventually expressed in the Dharmaśāstras: “The laws which regulate the social, legal, domestic and religious customs and rites of the Hindus even to the present day are said to be but mere systematized memories of the old Vedic teachings, and are held to be obligatory on their authority.”³Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, vol. I (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2018), 11. This question and confirmation of authority is unsurprising, and its significance is evidenced in the very structure of the Dharmaśāstras, beginning as they do with the announcement of their aim to consider the source of customs in a society of people who know dharma. To say, as the Dharmaśāstras do, that some people know dharma is to also say that others do not. There is, then, not only a stated purpose to the Dharmaśāstras, but one that is set in a telling awareness of disagreement and debate.⁴Patrick Olivelle, “Epistomology of Law: Dharmapramāṇa,” in Hindu Law: A New History of DharmaśāStra (Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 49.

That debate, like many other developments in Indian religion and philosophy, possessed an apparent and efficient cause in the rise of Buddhism. “One cannot hope to understand the theoretical developments that have occurred within the various Hindu schools without examining the impact of Buddhist philosophical ideas upon the debates and histories of these traditions.”⁵Richard King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought (New Delhi: ANE Books/Maya Publishers under license from Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 75. What is dharmapramāṇa? The Dharmaśāstras would so much as answer, not Buddhavacana.⁶Or, “What is the authority for dharma? The Dharmaśāstras would so much as answer, not the words of the Buddha.” Even so, the sectarian disagreements of the Brahmans and Buddhists did not, by themselves, effect the writing of the Dharmaśāstras; that additional impetus belongs to a force that moved debate from the streets to the kings’ court. When Aśoka, emperor of the Maurya Empire (reign, 268-232 BC), attempted to reform the pluralistic society under his charge into one that, nevertheless, possessed a uniform morality, dharma received new definition; but, thereby, also made to include practices and participants that the Brahmans, evidently, could neither ignore nor abide. After all, several ingredients required mutual part in Aśoka’s vision of empire: religious practice that promoted righteousness must also proceed with communal harmony. Aśoka sought this by organizing a minimalistic social code, which he expressed in edicts as dharma. (See, for example, the virtues listed in Rock Edict 13.) Aśoka’s edicts also acknowledged religious groups (pāṣaṇḍa) that, importantly, would not otherwise have acknowledged the orthodoxy of one another. Morality, then, was conditioned to serve the peace of the empire. Truth’s claims were so narrowed as to find broad agreement. As such, dharma, initially understood in the Vedas as a cosmological principle that defined ritualistic practices, was repurposed for the peace of the kingdom. Cosmology was set aside for statecraft, and the universe was seemingly shrunk to the borders of the Mauryan domain.

Aśoka’s reconstitution of dharma, then, effects the writing of the Dharmaśāstras because it radically redefines social harmony as dharma at the expense of an ontological order, one which the Brahmans assumed in the prescriptions of Vedic religion. In Patrick Olivelle’s consideration of the relevant selections of Aśoka’s edicts,⁷See Patrick Olivelle, “Gṛhastha in Aśoka’s Classification of Religious People,” in Gṛhastha: The Householder in Ancient Indian Religious Culture, ed. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). it becomes clear that Aśoka (as stated above) includes various religious sects in the comprehensive term, pāṣaṇḍa. By decree, then, Aśoka lends social, religious, and legal legitimacy to groups with different and incompatible views. To that point, Pillar Edict 7 names the Buddhists, Brahmans, Ājīvka, and Jains as pāṣaṇḍa—a mixture of āstika and nāstika⁸The terms āstika and nāstika are used to distinguish those who accept the authority of the Vedas and those who refuse their authority. The point, here, is that Aśoka’s social project gave these disparate groups equal religious standing as pāṣaṇḍa, an inconceivable concession for the Brahmans, given that the Buddhist and Jains rejected the authority of the Vedas. groups subsisting together in Aśokan dharma.

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The Dharmaśāstras, in a real sense, became the Brahmanical response to this codification of Aśokan dharma; and yet, their response took an unexpected but important form. Olivelle’s larger point is that Aśoka’s edicts connect the gṛhastha—the religious householder—with his wandering, ascetic counterpart, the pravrajita. The gṛhastha, then, “is a person dedicated to religious pursuits. In an interesting, and perhaps ironical twist, it is within the Brahmanical tradition as represented by the Dharmaśāstras that the term gṛhastha continues as a central term within the religious discourse of India.”⁹Olivelle, “Gṛhastha in Aśoka’s Classification of Religious People,” 55. In this way, the Brahmanical tradition henceforth incorporates Aśoka’s new use and novel association to requalify (again!) the identity of the religious community in a way that is more consistent with the Brahmanical understanding of the Vedas. From this point onward, the term gṛhastha is employed by the Brahmans to highlight a new domain of orthodox religious practices. The Dharmaśāstras reconfirm the orthodox religious community, absent of the nāstikas: The orthodox are culled in number from the Aśokan conception, even as their sphere and kinds of practices are widened to the domestic sphere.

This hermeneutical maneuver takes a rather technical turn: Brahmanical religion is reconfirmed by the Dharmaśāstras’ reinvigorated use of gṛhastha in the eventual formalization of the āśrama system. The word, āśrama was probably first used to identify a place dedicated to the pursuit of ascetic practices and austerities: a hermitage, likely in the forest and removed from the normal concourse of life;¹⁰Olivelle, “Orders of Life: Āśrama,” 78. but, as Olivelle explains, the idea of āśrama is eventually enlarged to describe a theological construct, incorporating the preexisting institutions into a dharmic scheme.¹¹Olivelle, “Orders of Life: Āśrama,” 79. As such, āśrama’s use in the Dharmaśāstras differs from any classical¹²Olivelle uses the phrase “classical system” to differentiate this technical term from the other, popular idea, that appears around the time of Manu. Olivelle, “Orders of Life: Āśrama,” 81. understanding of the term, relating to stages of life.

Like gṛhastha, then, āśrama also enters the Indian religious lexicon comparatively late, owing its existence to the explanation and justification of dharma in the new ways of ascetic life that emerged on the Indian subcontinent. As such, consideration must again be given to the significance of dogmatic developments when examining the course of religious change and controversy. “The āśrama system can thus be seen as a structure for inclusion aimed at managing diversity not by eliminating it but by recognizing and including diverse religious modes of life within an overarching theological system.”¹³Olivelle, “Orders of Life: Āśrama,” 79. The concept of āśrama—relating as it does the place and virtue of ascetic toil—provided a way for certain benefits of ascetic practice to be received in the normal concourse of life, even by the religious man that chose to marry and pursue dharma as a gṛhastha. The āśrama system—confirming gṛhastha by its new connection to the ascetic pravrajita—lends the householder the ascetic’s religious value.

Accordingly, the home also becomes the sphere of formal religious activity, beyond the realm of the kunda, the fire pit where the Vedic ritual is officiated by the priest. Not only is the gṛhastha hereby elevated to the honor of the ascetic pravrajita, but a variety of the householder’s common habits are increasingly given religious significance.  Everyday activities and necessities are eventually codified as daily practices (āhnika) of the gṛhastha, investing them with both ritual significance and obligation. These become rules for living, rules that previously belonged to the ascetic alone.¹⁴Timothy Lubin, “Daily Duties: Āhnika,” in Hindu Law: A New History of DharmaśāStra (Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 188. As Timothy Lubin notes, the Vedas enumerate purification rites and make them stand in association with acts of worship,¹⁵Lubin lists eight practices that were commonly listed as āhnikani. “The first thing to note is that the first half of this list contains acts of self-purification, while the latter half comprises acts of worship.” See Lubin, 80. such that the first is prerequisite and in anticipation of the second. Therefore, as Vedic purification rituals are attached to a growing list of other purifications that are not present in the Vedic text—associated with defecations, urination, etc., so is the idea of āhnika enlarged and domesticated in the Hindu mind. Eventually, the Yājñavalkya Dharmaśāstra (dated 3^rd to 5^th century AD) collects the various duties together, and later commentators adorn the collection with the name āhnika.¹⁶Lubin, 188. Slowly, then, the ideas associated with the ascetic pravrajita are “transferred (assumed to apply) to the ordinary householder as well, constituting status as an āśrama, that is, as a formal ‘religious profession.”¹⁷Lubin, 188.

Importantly, Olivelle also argues that the āśrama system—which he calls an innovation—was devised by reformers, opening participation to ways of life and practices that were now understood and justified in a theological system.¹⁸Olivelle, “Orders of Life: Āśrama,” 79. “The purpose of this theological innovation was to create a scheme within which the pivotal category of dharma could be extended to include religious modes of life different from that of the Vedic householder.”¹⁹Olivelle, “Orders of Life: Āśrama,” 79. In other words, it was not a reactionary move, but positive and conciliatory.²⁰Olivelle, “Orders of Life: Āśrama,” 79. If so, the point remains that it was, quite strikingly, still a theological move, standing as it did in the shadow of Aśoka’s reconstitution of dharma as a social project, divorced from certain theological presuppositions. Insofar as Aśoka highlighted harmony over other religious sentiments and commitments, he refashioned dharma as his own child; as such, the Dharmaśāstric project proceeds, at least in part, because the Brahmans rather expected the king to be dharma’s guardian.

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This last point stands as reason to recall that one of dharma’s earliest conceptions is as that of kṣatrasya kṣatram—the power behind royal power.²¹Patrick Olivelle, “The Semantic History of Dharma: The Middle and Late Vedic Periods,” in Dharma: Studies in Its Semantic, Cultural, and Religious History (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2009), 81. Power was invested in the king to confirm an order that stood outside and beyond the king and his subjects. This was the setting in which Buddhist dhamma arrived. At whatever point Siddhartha Gautama was given the provocative title, cakravartin—usually ascribed to a world conqueror—and his teaching associated with a king’s royal edict (śāsana), some kind of conflict with the Brahmans was inevitable. It is true that the movement that we now know as Buddhism, eventually found a place among many others on the Indian subcontinent, but it must have initially appeared as something more than the challenge of a king—but, rather, as something that endangered the fall of the gods. Buddhism’s appropriation of royal symbols to garner power and prestige²²Patrick Olivelle, “Power of Words: The Ascetic Appropriation and the Semantic Evolution of Dharma,” in Language, Texts, and Society: Explorations in Ancient Indian Culture and Religion (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2005), 122. was, historically and dogmatically speaking, inseparable from the accompanying assumption that the new dharma replaced the word’s previous association with a Vedic deity, Varuṇa. As such, it was predictable that a certain contingent of Vedic adherents would react to this religious challenge. The Dharmaśāstras eventually took form as a part of that reaction.

This said, historical reactions can be observed by the modern reader without them necessarily deserving the pejorative, reactionary. One of the difficulties of describing religious and philosophical change as development, is the modern tendency to conflate change with progress, tending to ascribe to change something that is inherently good. It is a rather ideological, even Hegelian approach to history. If we consider the point more precisely in the kind of challenge that Buddhism presented its first audiences, we may take fuller account of the complex situation to which the Dharmaśāstras were written. The power of the king and the order of the world were simultaneously religious claims, even as was Aśoka’s later effort to define social order in fewer, less divisive terms. The Dharmaśāstras would eventually incorporate some of these new terms—gṛhastha and āśrama, for example—into a constructive theological project, but only because some people were already challenging theological assumptions by denying them in a variety of ways. Authority is, in the end, beholden to the claims it makes and withholds regarding ontology.

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What is not addressed here but, nevertheless stands awkwardly behind the issues raised by the Dharmaśāstras, is the question of why a new theological construction needed to take the form that it did among the Brahmans. Significantly, this question, takes account of a still larger history, one where the Vedas, enshrined with the name and claims of śruti, prescribe a sacrificial religion and order that again and again invited sentimental and dogmatic challenges in what is now India: the Upaniṣads became an answer to mystical appetite; tantric religion found its hearers, at least in part, in reaction to conventional classifications of caste and purity; bhakti admits that there are sentiments that bare rites cannot touch on the Vedic terms, etc. Why, history begs, must there arise a new theological construction at all—especially one possessing an imported hermeneutic, such as we see in the Dharmaśāstras, one that is yet absent in the Vedas, themselves? Why innovations at all? The point, here, is not to highlight that the Brahmanical religion invited disagreements and doubts—that is to be expected of every significant claim; rather, the point is that that these developments followed one after another despite the kind of revelation and orthodoxy that the Vedas were assigned. I am not sure that anyone could have predicted the arguments of the Dharmaśāstras, but in their present reconsideration it will be of little surprise as to the kind of project they eventually represented: The Dharmaśāstras needed uphold and advance certain understandings of dharma, even as they reconstituted ritual space and practices, so that Brahmanical dharma might be rescued from the misperceptions of the rishis, and the Vedic account.