Purushartha And Parampara

Only a society entirely constituted by enlightened beings can afford to dispense with smriti. All other societies need both sruti and smriti.

- Makarand R Paranjape

LAST MONTH, WE saw how the individual is both the product and the creator of tradition, though the latter possibilities are often denied to most ordinary people. But just as our genes are previously given to us, our traditions have already left their mark on our minds. This is true also of traditions of discontinuity and rejection. That is why it is possible to argue for a tradition of modernity, which we may characterise as disruptive and contra-distinctive from traditions of affirmation and continuity. Though tradition, in the broader sense of the totality of genetic information, does not exhaust the capacities or possibilities of our physical and mental existence. It provides the base, but not necessarily the limits. Therefore, each individual must reprocess his tradition in the light of his own experiences; some merely pass it on, while others change it, even to the extent of effecting a mutation. Any process of recreation thus involves a rejection of some aspect of the inherited past as it does a reinvention or revitalisation of others. Socially, too, this process happens sometimes smoothly, at other times violently, in a cataclysmic rupture.

In Hindu culture, the relationship between the individual and parampara was regulated by a set of codes or purusharthas—dharma (virtue, ethics), artha (power, profit), kama (desire, pleasure) and moksha (freedom, transcendence), signifying the four-fold expression and general thrust of life itself. In our traditional understanding, they were seen as a unity, in continuum, not fragmented or divided. Thus, there was no dichotomy between moksha and dharma, on the one hand, and artha and kama, on the other. The opposition between the sacred and the secular, spirit and matter, was inadmissible. That is why paramartha (ultimate value) includes, not rejects,