At all layers of textual development, the dharma literature proves unexpectedly rich in describing, evoking, and regulating what users of English call emotions . Although emotion , whose history even in English is only a few centuries old, has no ready counterpart in the Sanskrit material, reading the Dharmasūtras and Smṛtis in a manner alert to emotions provides a perspective useful for interpreting this material in fresh ways, as well as potential contributions of the dharma literature to the study of emotion more broadly. While we can hew closer to the texts when tracking particular phenomena such as anger, envy, fear, desire, grief, love, remorse, and other specific experiences mentioned in the texts, the heuristic use of the analytic category emotion gives us a tool to better understand this literature’s treatment of social relations.
Once we begin to notice them, we find that emotions are seen everywhere to be doing things—sometimes they support, perform, and enact the normative social values promoted by the dharma authors, while at other times, they interrupt or threaten those norms. In this chapter, I chart two general ways of treating emotions in the dharmasūtras of Ᾱpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha, and the smṛṭi of Manu, all of which are early sources that largely establish the terms of discussion for the subsequent tradition. The first concerns a treatment of emotions in which they are seen to be—and cultivated to become—integrated harmoniously into the normative disciplinary, ritual, and legal order that the texts prescribe. Emotions in these contexts are contiguous features of a highly ordered construction of human experience and action. A second treatment of emotions available in the material is where they are depicted as disruptive to this very order. Emotions are here seen as threatening to the ritual norms and moral vision advanced by the texts. In both contexts, we learn how this body of highly explicit examination and regulation of social life comes to put forth a distinctive vision of human experience negotiating a complex social world.
I propose what I will call an ecological approach to the study of emotions in these texts, through which to observe what emotions do within the fields of experience in which they are embedded. An ecological account of human experience that attends to the relationships between humans and their social and material environments can help undo some of the implicit and explicit dualistic assumptions that may yet underlie contemporary Western thinking on emotions and of which our Indian sources are refreshingly innocent (as might be suggested in such dualisms as mental and physical, inner and outer, private and public, e.g.). An ecological approach suggests that experience is a field of relationships of phenomena and processes that are mutually conditioning and constitutive, dynamic and subject to growth over time, and local and contextual. 1 A particular ecosystem may be interpreted as comprised of many features and relationships (a forest is made up of, e.g., plants, water, soil, sun, weather, animals, and insects, all of which are interacting, as well as larger contexts, narratives, and histories, such as weather and climate patterns, migration routes, watersheds, and so on). Ecology is the field of study that identifies those elements and their many intricate and complex relationships, often for the purposes of “management.” Similarly, we might say that a field of experience may be seen, upon critical reflection, to be comprised of bodily sensation, action and reaction, emotions, intentions, motivations, ritual and formal structures, material objects, persons, narratives, larger contexts, and so on. Śāstric discourse on dharma is a distinctive type of ecological reflection on human experience, in which certain features and their relationships are noticed and named. It has a telos —describing and constructing an ideal social order—that shapes what is noticed, analyzed, and subjected to regulation. What is important for us to notice is how frequently and to what purposes items that we call emotions occur in their accounts, where and how they occur with other noticed features, and the various ways they function and interact within them.
Thus, an ecological approach considers emotions as complex phenomena embedded in processes that can only be understood within the larger fields that they help constitute and which, in turn, allow us to identify them. It also attends to the processes behind selecting such phenomena and describing them, and asks about the aims and choices of those descriptions. This approach can help us consider emotional phenomena without assuming what they are or what they consist of. We need not presume or decide at the outset, for example, whether emotions are physical or mental phenomena, or (to mention other preoccupations in modern Western discussions of them) whether they are socially constructed or biological phenomena, culturally relative or universal. By not defining, in advance, rigid criteria for what is to count as “emotion,” we can be open to conceptual distinctions, analytical categories, and taxonomies that emerge from the texts themselves. For example, what we label as emotions may sometimes be listed with items not usually considered emotions in current Western taxonomies. Consider, for example, Manu’s enumeration of emotions among other phenomena in a listing of the motivations for perjury: greed (lobha ), confusion (moha ), fear (bhaya ), friendship (maitra ), desire (kāma ), anger (krodha ), ignorance (ajñāna ), and immaturity (bālabhāva ). 2 While we will look more carefully at this listing below, here we may note that the more “recognizable” (at least to modern English users) emotions of fear and anger function in this listing as promptings much like motivations of greed and desire, and alongside other existential conditions like confusion, ignorance, and immaturity. Here their shared function as motivations puts these various phenomena together in a single grouping, helping us to see how what we might call emotions can, in certain instances, share similar features with and act in similar ways as other phenomena. Such instances are opportunities to reexamine assumptions that would neatly separate cognitive, conative, and affective experience in light of different descriptions and analyses of experience.
To turn to a specific example, we can explore the rules for chaste studentship (brahmacārya ) for the Brahmin male, which involve a highly specified and structured long-term relationship with a teacher. This training aims to make him a śiṣṭa , a cultured and learned man, defined at the outset by Baudhāyana in dispositional and emotional terms: a śiṣṭa is free of envy (matsara ), pride (ahaṃkāra ), deceit (dambha ), arrogance (darpa ), greed (lobha ), folly (moha ), anger (krodha ), desire (alolupa ), and he possesses just a jarful of grain. 3 This character is developed through an ecology of respect to the teacher, which is instilled and realized through ritual initiation and a code of conduct involving austerity, study, and service. The Dharmasūtra authorities give an exacting account of the student’s service, omitting no point of etiquette in this relationship in which he lives with his teacher, learns to greet him appropriately, gathers his water and firewood, seeks alms for him, sees to his meals, gets him ready for bed, washes and massages his feet, and so on. 4 The activities of seeking alms and providing physical care foster and display the virtues of modesty and humility highly valued for Brahmin males at this stage of life: he is to become full of shame or modesty (hrī ) and free of pride (ahaṃkāra ). 5 The whole program creates comportment—the student is to avoid boisterous and unfitting entertainments such as dancing, casinos, and fairs, and remain chaste; and it creates disposition—the student is to be at all times “gentle (mṛdu ), calm (śānta ), self-controlled (dānta ), modest (hrīmat ), firmly resolute (dṛḍhadhṛti ), enthusiastic (aglāna ), not given to anger (akrodhana ), and free of envy (anasūyu ).” 6
What we might select and refer to as emotions are depicted quite organically within this idealized representation of experience as seamlessly generated, supported, and revealed by actions, constraints, dispositions, bodily states, and decorum. This idealized but also normative account is a flowing and successful integration of the duties of this station of life, fully realized not simply by following rules but by becoming a person “delighting” in the dharma (dharmaruci ). 7 The field of experience includes the teacher’s disposition toward him. For his part, the teacher is enjoined to “long for” (anukāṅkṣa ) his pupil as his own son, 8 even while he is ever ready to correct him. He must not hesitate to instill fear (abhitrāsa ) into his student when appropriate, and make him fast or bathe, or even banish him when such punishments are warranted. 9 Emotions are subject to injunction—the teacher should love him; they are also tools of a teacher’s pedagogy where frightening the student may sometimes prove useful. The student’s relationship with his teacher shows how emotions, actions, and physical states act upon and are acted upon by one another, represented organically. Later we shall consider examples in which emotions are not so neatly folded into the vision of social life valued by the dharma authorities, but through these prescriptions, we see an ecology in which norms, activities, and bodily and emotional experience mutually support, and indeed, help constitute, one another.
As we watch what emotions do, we may examine other ways in which they are seen to be contiguous with the larger social order envisioned by the dharma texts’ meticulous erection and maintenance of social distinctions. This can be seen, for example, through the naturalization of an ideology of happiness. When Ᾱpastamba, in a manner representative of similar claims in all the texts, asserts that, “highest and unmeasured happiness (sukha ) belongs to those of all classes who carry out their own dharma ,” 10 he is laying claim to a natural order in which human happiness is fulfilled by following highly stratified and marked social prescription. Similarly, contentment is also concurrent with the ways of life described as the four “stages” of a twice-born male: chaste student, householder, forest hermit, and renouncer; “one who abides properly in these will be contented (kṣema ).” 11 Normative values can be expressed in terms of emotions that then index the evaluative features of an entire vision of life.
Emotions are deployed for revealing and constructing social distinctions and practices for the four classes: Brahmins, the ruling elite, the productive classes, and the menial class, each of whom has its own distinctive “dharma .” We have already seen something of the ideal emotional character of the Brahmin male, which is these texts’ principal concern, but they also inscribe the character of a Śūdra, a member of the servant class. Emotions are here conflated with vices: a Śūdra is envious (asūya ), slanderous (piśuna ), ungrateful (kṛtaghna ), and bears grudges (dīrgharoṣaka ). 12 Śūdras’ debased nature and social condition are to be well marked through emotional terms: for instance, Manu prescribes that Śūdras be given names that elicit disgust (jugūpsā ). 13 Emotional dispositions (along with other properties) also signal women’s nature: at creation, “women were assigned desire (kāma ), anger (krodha ), crookedness (anārjava ), a hostile disposition (drohabhāva ), bad conduct (kucaryā ), and an [attachment to] beds, couches, and jewelry.” 14
Yet while emotions are often deployed to mark social class, stage of life, and gender, they are sometimes put to the task of exploring what might be common to all humans. The texts sometimes generate lists of universal emotions and qualities: all creatures are “burned” (dah ) by “anger (krodho ), excitement (harṣa ), rage (roṣa ), greed (lobha ), folly (moha ), deceit (dambha ), malice (droha ), speaking falsely (mṛṣodya ), gluttony (atyāśa ), being accusatory (parivāda ), envy (asūya ), desire (kāma ), wrath (manyu ), lack of self-possession (anātmya ), and lack of self discipline (ayoga ), all of which can be ‘eradicated through yoga.’” 15 And all orders of social life can and should pursue the opposites of these. 16 Emotions can be a social leveler, at least for certain practices, and useful for moral exhortation. For all their differences, people from all classes should—and presumably can—abjure “slander (paiśunya ), jealousy (matsara ), arrogance (abhimāna ), pride (ahaṃkāra ), faithlessness (aśraddhā ), crookedness (anārjava ), praising oneself (ātmastava ), abusing others (paragarhā ), deceit (dambha ), greed (lobha ), folly (moha ), anger (krodha ), and envy (asūya ).” 17 Anger and envy, mentioned frequently in these texts, seem to be particularly problematic emotions in whomever they occur.
There are various ways in which emotions can be seen as crucial components of ritual practice, a field of experience of great concern to the dharma authorities. Emotions are often listed among the other situational variables (people, actions, material objects, etc.) that constitute the description and teleology of particular ritual contexts. For example, Vasiṣṭha describes the ritual prescriptions of banishing those fallen from caste. These involve a low-ranking person taking a broken, unusable pot filled with water and turning it over with his left foot. The outcaste’s relatives, with hair disheveled, should each touch the outcaste and then have no further ritual recourse with him. The possibilities for readmission are also specified through ritual penance that also involves a pot, this time a fine one (whole clay or golden), filled with water and poured over the readmitted person in a purifying lustration suggesting a new birth. Vasiṣṭha quotes an earlier authority:
One should walk in front of those being readmitted in the manner of reveling and laughing, and behind those who have fallen in the manner of grieving and weeping. 18
In this small example, we see the performance of emotion as both display and experience of this breach and reconstitution of the community. Grieving and weeping are ritual features, along with the symbolic pots and water, disheveled hair, and parading through the village that make manifest and exhibit the rupture and loss to the group that excommunication entails. When readmitted, the newly regenerated person is preceded by laughter and revelry, through which the restoration of the group is felt and exhibited as the community is made whole.
Emotions sometimes operate as motivations and are the impetus for ritual activity. In the same section on readmitting an outcaste, Vasiṣṭha allows that even one who has abused a teacher, mother, or father may be readmitted through an expiation, owing to their graciousness (prasāda ). 19 When we consider the profound reverence in which the teacher, mother, and father are held in these texts, and the seriousness of abusing them, we can note just how significant an intervention their kindness and graciousness are here.
When emotions are construed as motivations, they are sometimes relevant and even decisive features of the legal aspects of Dharmaśāstra. A king, when judging a legal case, is to set aside his own “likes (priya ) and dislikes (apriya )” and learn to “master love (kāma ) and anger (krodha )” in order to render judgment impartially (samatā ) and to model justice for his subjects. 20 Emotions are relevant also in cases of perjury. 21 In a listing we considered above, Manu says that people can lie in court, motivated by greed (lobha ), confusion (moha ), fear (bhaya ), friendship (maitra ), desire (kāma ), anger (krodha ), ignorance (ajñāna ), and immaturity (bālabhāva ). 22 Not only is such testimony inadmissible in a legal case, but the false witness is to be subjected to financial penalty based on his motivation, with greed, friendship, desire, and anger more heavily penalized than lying out of confusion, fear, or immaturity. 23 In the context of law, emotions threaten the correct exercise of dharma , here configured as justice requiring impartiality. Moreover, as much as emotions might be similar to one another and to other phenomena listed here in their capacity to prompt action, they also differ one from the other, and can be treated axiologically through this scale of penalties corresponding to them.
Another field in which emotions are assumed to be operative in social practice and requiring careful management by categorizing and ranking is in the kinds of marriage that all the dharma authorities name and describe (though each adds subtle nuances within a shared schematic). 24 The best kinds of marriages, called “divine” (Brahmā ), are matches between socially appropriate families, made on the basis of the good learning and character of the man and the promise of progeny, done according to the appropriate rituals, and involving jewelry bestowed on the bride. Marriages that are less admired are made through bride price, termed “demonic” (āsura ) marriages, and lower still are marriages forged by mutual desire or sexual love (kāma ) of the couple (these are “gāndharva ” marriages). When a man abducts a woman through violence, it is a “fiendish” (rākṣasa ) marriage, and when one rapes a girl who is asleep, intoxicated, or insane, it is a “ghoulish” (paiśāca ) marriage. These are ranked in a descending scale of value that prizes social respectability, ritual propriety, and fertility over love, although Gautama does mention “companionship” (sahatva ) in his description of divine marriages. The types of marriage are variously inflected by caste considerations with Brahmins not practicing the lowest versions, and the quality of the sons issuing from these marriages is sometimes specified and scaled accordingly. And while Baudhāyana ranks marriages based on kāma in the usual order as lower than those transacted with bride price, he gets uncharacteristically romantic in allowing that “some praise gāndharva marriages for everyone because these follow loving affection (sneha ).” 25 He also finds practices entailing the selling of women into marriage by people befuddled with greed (lobhamohita ) to be particularly craven. 26
As much as they might prefer a perfect alignment of comportment, ritual order, and emotion, the dharma authorities recognize that human emotions sometimes lie orthogonal to the tidy social order they prescribe. (Even in the most flourishing and healthy ecosystems, clouds roll in, cyclones tear through, floodwaters deluge, and lightning strikes.) In some cases, this disquieting fact is simply acknowledged; at other times, it introduces an option or flexibility, as when Baudhāyana accommodates at least the view that love could be the chief driving factor in a marriage. Sexual love (kāma ) between men and women is handled variously when it appears to challenge the tidiness of the ritually stipulated and socially respectable life. For example, Ᾱpastamba prescribes that a man should really only sleep with his wife during her fertile season; however, if she desires sex at other times, he is to oblige her. 27 Women’s feelings appear to count. And while the texts give highly precise stipulations on how a Brahmin male is to greet each of his relations and teachers upon returning from a journey, they sometimes have the delicacy to step aside and allow a man to decide for himself how he may wish to greet his wife. 28 But, when it comes to the matter of who should be permitted to marry in the first place, kāma can make matters unruly. For their first marriage, twice-born men should marry women in their same social class, but in reality, some men may, as a result of kāma , be driven to marry women of lower social rank. Manu is willing to acknowledge, though not fully sanction these unions, but is obliged to mention various deleterious consequences for the descendants who will result from them as they slip in social distinction. And he simply refuses to admit of the possibility of a Brahmin male marrying a Śūdra woman, even in times of extremity, as no instances of this are known. 29
Emotions allow us to track the flexibility of authorities and the mechanisms they deploy for accommodating the more troublesome elements of human experience. For example, suicide is immoral, and those who commit it should not be given funeral rites: however, Vasiṣṭha acknowledges that loved ones may, “out of loving affection (snigdha ),” perform funeral rites for a suicide, and prescribes a penance for the deceased. 30 Love, like graciousness, is a recognized intervention that can, in the end, be accommodated ritually with the expedient remedy of penalties.
In these cases, emotions are relevant to the dharma authorities in their capacity to motivate actions of legal or ritual significance. In other cases, simply having certain emotional experiences is subject to śāstric censure. A man merely coveting (abhimanyate ) another’s riches is in fact a thief; 31 a wife committing adultery in her heart or mind (manas can mean both) is to be penalized (though with a less severe penalty than if she said something adulterous or actually committed adultery). 32 Without assuming a Cartesian metaphysical dualism between mind and body, we notice that sometimes the texts see matters of the heart as relevant to the social and moral order they describe. In these instances, they are pressing beyond legal and ritual domains into the realm of morality. That theft and adultery committed with the mind come to be considered blameworthy actions suggests just how far ranging śāstric regulation conceives itself to be.
Further interest in the moral quality of emotional experience is developed in Manu’s use of a tripartite depiction of behavior, an analytic framework shared by his Buddhist contemporaries. Morally relevant action (i.e., karma producing good and bad [śubha and aśubha ] results), can be divided into a list of ten immoral deeds, which are further divided into three categories: mental, verbal, and physical. The three mental actions are coveting another’s property, keeping in one’s mind what is undesirable, and holding what is untrue; the four verbal actions are speaking harshly, falsely, slanderously, and idly; and the three physical actions are taking what is not given, unsanctioned violence, and sleeping with another man’s wife. Moreover, the effects of mental actions are felt in the mind; those resulting from bad speech are experienced in speech; and bad physical actions redound on the body. 33 These distinctions—mental, verbal, and physical—should be seen as analytical distinctions (rather than as metaphysical categories) deployed to suggest that a wide range of phenomena can count as action. They make possible a very formal way of organizing and rendering in moral terms disruptive emotion: both coveting and desiring what is wrongful are not only motivations but also actions in their own right, and as actions, they are subject to śāstric regulation and karmic culpability. In addition, some of the verbal and physical actions are shot through with emotion, whereby, for example, speaking harshly is the enactment of anger. (Manu specifically mentions anger [krodha ] and desire [kāma ] in reference to all three types of action. 34 ) This account suggests that emotions are not conceived as matters of mind that find expression in physical action; rather, they are actions registering throughout the human organism.
Śāstric authors notice moral sensibility: they are sensitive to how moral experience is felt. We see this in their phenomenology of—and reparations for—remorse: Baudhāyana says, “a man constantly grieves in his mind when recalling his misdeeds, but austerity and vigilance will release him from evil.” 35 There is a painful grief in ruminating on one’s wrongdoing for which one may turn to śāstric advice to ameliorate. Their advice suggests that actions of austerity and fastidiousness will free the mind of such grief. Indeed, we see a visceral configuration of remorse when Baudhāyana elsewhere speaks of one being “weighed heavily upon by one’s own actions,” a heaviness from which one might release the self through ritual action. 36 But, Manu has it somewhat differently. He says that the body is free from wrongdoing when the mind hates the evil deed; by feeling remorse at having done the evil, one is free of it, and by resolving to do the action no more, one is purified. 37 Here the mind’s work of hating the deed and regretting it are deployed to liberate and purify the body from wrongdoing.
Moral regulation and sensibility are not the only occasions in which these texts draw analytic distinctions between what may be a matter of “inner” experience and what is observed in verbal or bodily expression. Manu enjoins kings to master the detection of inner states (bhāvam antargatam ) by the voice, color, movement, expression, eyes, and gesture. 38 Inner experience can be detected through the shrewd discernment of a trained observer, and, thus, we need not assume that it is private. The management of social relations for the purposes of statecraft entails the premise of inner experience, which is yet observable by others.
In the end, it is perhaps an inevitable feature of human life that unruly emotions will not always comply with highly idealized representations of practice and will elude all attempts to accommodate, regulate, and manage them. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the ritual expiations following a serious breach in code when the Brahmin student—whose optimistic alignment of disposition and conduct began our study—breaks his vows. Should he lapse by eating meat or having sex with a woman, he may take recourse in a ritual act of purification that involves, among other things, spreading darbha grass and pouring oblations of ghee into a sacred fire while uttering:
It was done by Desire (kāma ). Desire does it. All of this belongs to Desire. To that one who makes me act, Svāhā!
It was done by Mind (manas ). Mind does it. All of this belongs to Mind. To that one who makes me act, Svāhā!
It was done by Passion (rajas ). Passion does it. All of this belongs to Passion. To that one who makes me act, Svāhā!
It was done by Dullness (tamas ). Dullness does it. All of this belongs to Dullness. To that one who makes me act, Svāhā!
It was done by Evil (pāpman ). Evil does it. All of this belongs to Evil. To that one who makes me act, Svāhā!
It was done by Wrath (manyu ). Wrath does it. All of this belongs to Wrath. To that one who makes me act, Svāhā. 39
There are several angles from which to approach this ritual obeisance. Phenomenologically, it does seem that often desire, mind, passion, dullness, evil, and wrath are the agents driving us. And so, conveniently, they may be assigned the blame in our breaches of conduct. Two of the drivers here, passion and dullness, evoke the ancient teaching of three guṇas —sattva (lucidity, truth, goodness), rajas (energy, passion, hate) and tamas (darkness, ignorance, gloom) mentioned also by Manu as pervasive qualities of the self. 40 Here they, along with other powerful forces, are deified as powerful agents that must be hailed—“svāhā ”—in homage or appeasement (or both). Perhaps the emotional forces eluding śāstric stricture may only, in the end, simply be saluted.
Manu reveals a cosmogony that depicts certain emotions as they were emitted at the time of creation; they are bigger than we are, and, indeed, were among the basic stuff generated at the beginning of time. Along with the constellations and the planets, the mountains, the rivers, and the rest of the universe, Brahmā, the Lord of Creation, emitted ascetic heat (tapas ), speech (vāc ), pleasure (rati ), desire (kāma ), and anger (krodha ) in the making of creatures. 41 He also made distinctions and pairs of opposites: “to discern actions he distinguished dharma from non-dharma , and he yoked creatures with these pairs, such as pleasure (sukha ) and suffering (duḥkha ).” 42 Just as the moral, ritual, and legal norms of dharma are naturalized features of the cosmos from the beginning, so too the creatures of the world have their being in pleasure and pain. Moreover, Manu says, “whatever he gave out at creation—savagery or harmlessness, gentleness or cruelty, dharma or lack of dharma , truth or falseness—these take possession of one thereafter.” 43 While not exactly fixed features of created beings, emotional tendencies are consistently recurrent in us and they come to possess us periodically. They are not epiphenomena of social life but part of the organic ecology of being in the world.
Manu acknowledges the double bind in which we find ourselves: one should not act out of desire (kāma ), yet desire impels all that we do, even when we do what is laudable, like studying the Veda and performing rituals. 44 Desire is the impulse driving us and while disapproved of, it must be accommodated in the rules of social life. And not just desire—the dharma texts take many emotions to be deeply pervasive and active in human life. Vasiṣṭha ends his treatise with the rueful observation that although as we age our hair and teeth wear out, our hopes (āśā ) for life and wealth show no signs of waning; thirst (tṛṣṇā ) is a lifelong disease, and only those who can give it up find happiness (sukha ). 45
Given the texts’ assuming of the ubiquity of emotions in human experience, it should hardly surprise us that they try to negotiate their presence in social life, even in those spheres of practice like ritual and law, that modern scholars might see as unrelated to emotion. While the dharma texts may not share our category “emotion” (any more than they do “ritual” or “law”), bringing it to our readings of them has opened up ways to interpret their treatment of human experience, both in emotions’ potential to reveal a harmonious and ordered conception of human social life, as well as to disrupt it. What emerges is just how sensitive to the emotional dimension of life and its relationship to their values the Dharma-sūtrakāras are.