Matilal, Bimal Krishna; Jonardon Ganeri (ed);
Ethics and epics: the collected essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal, Volume 2
Oxford University Press, 2002, 445 pages
ISBN 0195655117, 9780195655117
topics: | philosophy | india | ethics
here is a master philosopher dealing with myth and how it relates to our modern lives. raises some fascinating moral questions, and attempts to show us how various philosophers in the indian and western tradition have looked at them, and attempts his own solution. the later parts relate to some elaborations on semantics in sanskrit, buddhism, and modern articulations of indian philosophy.
when does an act become moral? when does an act become religious?
can a moral act be religious by the same token? what is meant by the
word 'religious?
suppose mr X is a very rich man. He gave some money, a large sum, to an
orphanage. as a consequence, a large number of orphans were fed, clothed and
taken care of. now should we say that mr X has performed a noble, morally
admirable act? i know there will be people who would disagree. it will be
said, for example,
(1) 'well, mr X is actually a vain man,' or
(2) 'he is a kalobAjari [black-marketeer], he made money in an unfair way,'
'he is a pu.njipati [capitalist, hoarder], he made money by exploiting
the labour group.' or
(3) he is trying to please God to get some religious merit (pUNya), he is
bribing the divinity to avoid hell; or
(4) he is simply trying to avoid income tax, etc., etc.
we can thus go on imputing motivation after motivation to poor mr X. ...
[despite this very interesting discussion of motivation, does not return to
these aspects later]
Those moral philosophers who are CONSEQUENTIALISTS would say that this act
saves a lot of human lives and so on. Hence we have to give him some moral
credit. he is not a saint. but he is certainly better than some others.
can we gauge his act in our barometer of religiosity? well. we would
say, he has done a secular act by helping an orphanage, and this may be
a moral act. depending upon the motivation or its consequences, but it
is not a religious act.
is this a true picture of what has happened here? what is a religious
act? what quality must an act have in order to be religious? several
answers may be forthcoming:
(1) a religious act is one that pleases god. well, how do we know
what pleases god? well, one knows, one can tell, one just feels.
(2) a religious act is one that is enjoined in the scriptures.
(3) a religious act is one that brings one nearer to one's religious
goal: mokSha, nirvANa, or salvation.
(4) a religious act is one which is not immoral, and has one or all of the
three characteristics mentioned above (God, scriptures, mokSha).
'not immoral': some religious acts may be neither moral nor immoral
(e.g. picking flowers for pUja). of course, some so-called religious acts
are definitely immoral, e.g. killing someone because he is not a believer.
we include the former, and exclude the latter.
the first, 2nd, 3d require him to believe in god. what if he doesn't? will
he then go to hell (which he doesn't believe in, either)?
our fourth formulation of the definition of a religious act brings us closer
to the most pertinent question: can an act be simply moral without being
religious in any sense? would a religious man admit that his notion of
religion is so narrow as to exclude acts like that of mr X? should we say
that our religion could not care less if somebody does something to help and
save some of his fellow human beings? ~
how about a more disturbing question: can some 'religious' acts be amoral and
immoral? can we give up morality in this way for the pursuit of religion? is
it possible to support a genocide, a blood-bath, a bloody war, a crusade, or
a jehad in the name of religion? [5]
plato in his book euthyphro has raised a very central question about
religion and morality:
5
is it that gods love what is morally right? or, is a
thing morally right because gods love it?
[polytheistic? can substitute "god" for "gods"]
but maybe to accommodate such non-theistic religions as buddhism and jainism
(perhaps vedanta also), we should put it as follows: is a moral act a
religious act (i.e. would it automatically have religious approval) by the
same token? or, is an act morally good because it is religious, that is, has
religious approval?
the moral-vs-religious dilemma:
* 'religious-because-moral' theory: any philanthropist = religious man.
* 'moral-because-religious' theory: to kill a non-believer would be a
virtue, a religious act!
a well-known case of moral dilemma is, i think, the bhagavadgita
situation. ... should arjuna fight the bloody battle and kill his venerable
grandfather, teacher, uncle, brothers, etc.? or, should he not?
it is (morally) obligatory, for arjuna as a man, as a human being, as a
member of a family and a human society, to feel revulsion about the
senseless killing of his own venerable relatives, his near and dear ones.
at the same time. as a ksatriya, as a royal prince, it is his duty to
fight wars when challenged, to recover the lost throne... it is what we
call an 'impossible' situation,'an apt illustration of the 'action-guide'
dilemma that i am talking about. he must kill and must not kill.
aho bata mahatpApaM kartuM vyavasitA vayam
yadrAjyasuKalobhena hantuM svajanamudyatAH gita I.45
Alas! we have resolved to commit a great sin. inasmuch as we are
endeavouring to slay our kinsmen out of a craving for the pleasures
of dominion.
the enigmatic gita has sometimes been criticized as a very violent text,
one that incites violence and killing. it tells you to kill not only
fellowmen but also relatives and superiors....
it was oppenheimer who apparently quoted from chapter xi of the
gita after the first successful test explosion of the atom bomb!
the most damaging and repulsive use of the gita has been made by the
notorious cult-leader and killer charles manson, who in his defence against
the charge of the most cruel and inhuman murder of an innocent pregnant
woman, film-star sharon tate, quoted:
nainaM chindanti shastrANi nainaM dahati pAvakaH
na cainaM kledayantyApo na shoSayati mArutaH gita II.23--
Him weapons cut not, Him fire burns not, and
Him water wets not; Him wind dries not.
we can reject all these as gross misinterpretations. but the fact remains.
what kind of religious text is [the gita], which incites senseless killing,
and a sort of amoral, if not wholly immoral, behaviour?
without being an apologist, i would like to say that the gita can,
paradoxically, be treated as a text that discourages violence or bloody
battles. it may also show the futility of all such battles.
let us ask: was krsna really doing anything wrong by asking arjuna to
forget all human concerns, noble sentiments and moral qualms, so that he
could fight and kill? i think arjuna's noble and moral concern for the
life of his near and dear ones came to him when it was already too late,
when daggers were drawn, and bows were strung and fitted with arrows in the
battlefield of kurukShetra. and who was arjuna? the entire bhArata war was
for Arjuna. It was his game and he should play. Throughout his life he has
been preparing himself for this moment of truth. His whole life has been
organized so as to be the best archer (pArtha eva dhanurdharaH), the best
warrior, fighter - which means the best killer. ... he cannot stop midway.
the best way to avoid a bloody battle is to give up the preparations for it.
kSudraM hRdayadaurbalyaM tyaktvottiSTha paraMtapa [gita II.3]
cast off this mean faint·heartedness and arise, 0 scorcher of thine
enemies.
[BKM also cites agamemnon sacrificing a favourite daughter in order to
win a war and save the state]
from mahAbhArata:
in the great bhArata war, in the karNa-parvan, yudhiSThira was once so
humiliated in the battle with karNa that he 'blew his top'. he lost his calm
(falsifying the meaning of his own name - sthira = calm; yudha =battle) and
insulted arjuna by condemning his gANDiva... , asking arjuna to give up his
famous weapon. now Arjuna's promise was to kill anybody who would insult
his gANDiva, hence he took his sword and was about to do the most foolish
thing, when krSNa intervened, as usual.
The dilemma was presented as 'should i lie and not kill yudhiSThira or , , ,
should I kill him and be faithful to my promise?' (promise-keeping is
identified with truthfulness in almost all cultures.)
---
[in his opening essay in moral dilemmas in the mahAbhArata, matilal
juxtaposes this quote from kant's introduction to the metaphysics of morals
(1797)]:
because ... duty and obligation are in general concepts that express
the objective practical necessity of certain actions and
because two mutually opposing rules cannot be necessary at the same
time, then if it is a duty to act according to one of them, it is not
only not a duty but contrary to duty to act according to the other.
for kant it seems that the objective practical rules should form a
harmonious whole, a system characterized by consistency, much
like a system of true beliefs.
the moral conflict, which no doubt arises in the minds of the moral agents,
cannot, therefore, be genuine. it would be at best a confusion, at worst an
illusion. it conflates, according to kant, a genuine duty with a ground of
that duty. hence, in a so-called dilemma, one horn is a genuine duty, and the
other is merely a ground of duty. there may be conflict between grounds but
not between duties. hence, in kantian ethics, no agent can be forced to
violate his duty. this is at least one of the interpretations of kantian
thought. hence arjuna might be said to be anticipating the kantian model.
---
[to mitigate the situation], krSNa tells a story, that of a sage,
kaushika. he had taken a vow of telling the truth always. a group of
gangsters, in hot pursuit of some innocent men, came to ask him which way
they had fled. should he break his vow and tell a lie and save the men's
lives, or should he not? remember: a sage is a very religious person. He
told the truth, and the men were chased and killed.
when kaushika died, he did not go to heaven or to his sAdhanocita dhAma,
for he had put his selfish religious dogma over the selfless, morally
admirable action. truth-telling may be morally admirable and hence
certainly a religious virtue, but not under all conditions. one of the
certain marks of morally superior (and in my scheme, 'religiously'
superior) action is its non-self-regarding character. as philosophers in
the kantian tradition have no doubt emphasized, it seems to agree with the
moral and religious intuition which krsNa includes in his instructions to
arjuna.
this story once generated a very well-publicized controversy, (in the
1890s), between two great minds, Bankimchandra and Rabindranath.
At the centre of the controversy there was
a genuine moral dilemma, and the dispute was about how best to resolve it.
when bankimchandra depicted krSNa thus in his kr.SNacharit, young
rabindranAth protested with the zeal of a religious purist:
konokhAnei mithyA satya hay nA. shraddhAspada bankimbAbu balileo hay
nA; svayam shrIkr^ShNa balileo hoy nA.
falsehood can never be true under any circumstances even if respected
bankimbAbu or shrIkr^SNa himself says it can be.
[bhArati, agrahAyaNa. 1291. p. 347).
This argument is in complete agreement with a position of Kant, who discusses
an uncannily similar situation in 'On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies for
Benevolent Motives':
[quoting a French philosopher on Kant:]
The moral principle that it is one's duty to speak the truth, if it were
taken singly and unconditionally, would make all society impossible. We
have the proof of this in the very direct consequences which have been
drawn from the principle by a German philosopher, who goes so far as to
affirm that to tell a falsehood to a murderer, who asked us whether our
friend, of whom he was in pursuit, had not taken refuge in our house,
would be a crime.
[Kant responds]: ' ... if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public
justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it
may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the
murderer s question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the
latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of
the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas if you
lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though
unknown to you), so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed
his purpose on him, then you might with Justice be accused as the cause
of his death. For if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it,
perhaps the murderer, while seeking for his enemy in the house, might
have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been
prevented. ... To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a
sacred unconditional command of reason, and not to be limited by any
expediency.
Kant, E: 'On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies for Benevolent Motives',
Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics,
Appendix (1889, pp. 361, 362-3):
matilal disagrees with rabindranath and kant (both his "personal heroes").
rabindranath's response to the kaushika story was that kaushika should have
said, "yes, i know, but i won't tell you." bankim then responded, "that is
possible, but is it probable?"
returns to a fourth dilemma, that of devatAr grAs, in which the brahmin
maitra is escorting the widowed mokShadA and her infant son. In a severe
storm, when her infant nephew has to be sacrificed to appease the elements,
he is powerless to help, but in the end,
'Phiriye Aniba tore' kahi UrdhvashvAse
brAhman muhUrta majhe jhAnp dila jale
Ar uThila nA. sUrya gela astAcale.
'I'll bring you back' cried the Brahmin
plunging headlong into the raging waters.
he never came up. The sun set in the west.
where kaushika failed, maitra succeeded. here both truth and humanity
have won. this probably approximates the 'ideal' resolution of the
dilemma, by which i mean the poetic resolution of the dilemma. a truly
religious man can transcend his so-called religious dogma and put moral
concerns over narrowly religious ones.
matilal doesn't give further justifications.
AM: But why does BKM approve of maitra's self-immolation? should he not
have prevented the sacrifice in the first place? what if the storm had
not receded despite all [following kant's argument]?
[note tagore's paNrakShA (durgesh dumarAj) and some other early poems also
have such a theme.]
[also note: in his conversations with einstein, it is Tagore who says that
truth depends on the observer, whereas einstein holds for an absolute vision
of "truth".]
deals with some of the same dilemmas as above, but differing viewpoints.
the question that draupadI asked was more concerned with the rights or
legality of her husband's action than with the morality of the situation.
did yudhiShThira. having first lost his own freedom (as well as the freedom
of the four brothers) and thus becoming a slave of the kauravas, have any
right to gamble again with draupadi as the stake? The question reveals an
intricate point of law or the legal convention of the community, and also
makes a social point, the point of a social rebel, presumably of a
non-conformist. in the story, the question was met by either silence or
side-long glances. bhIShma. the oldest of the kauravas. only recognized that
this was 'a very good point': but was unable to answer it. only vikarNa, an
insignificant character. sided with draupadI. society still did not allow the
wife any freedom or autonomy as an independent person. it regarded wives as
'properties' of husbands, which hence can be staked in a gambling match. The
incident seems to have a deep significance. if draupadi's questions were
properly answered. it would have required a 'paradigm shift' in india's
social thought.
[many of these situations] have no satisfactory solution, although, in each
case, an ad hoc practical action-guide was devised in the original story
while the main problem remained unsolved.
[in this case, the situation is saved by a miracle.]
the mahabharata, which well-known indological scholars like
hermann 0ldenberg and e. washbrook hopkins have called 'the most
monstrous chaos' of an epic narrative, 'a text that is not a text'. it represents
a corpus of some 200,000 lines, eight times the size of the illiad and
the odvssev put together, that has influenced and captivated the minds of
almost all indians for about two millennia.
certainly. there exists a lacuna in the tradition of indian philosophy.
professional philosophers of india over the last two thousand years have been
consistently concerned with the problems of logic and epistemology,
metaphysics and soteriology, and sometimes they have made very important
contributions to the global heritage of philosophy.
but, except some cursory comments and some insightful observations, the
philosophers of india have very seldom discussed what we call moral
philosophy today.
it is true that the dharmaShAstra texts were there to supplement the hindu
discussion of ethics. classification of virtues and vices. and enumeration of
duties related to the social status of the individual. but morality was never
discussed as such in these texts. on the other hand, the tradition itself was
very self-conscious about moral values. moral conflicts and dilemmas, as well
as about the difficulties of what we call practical reason or practical
wisdom. this consciousness found its expression in the epic stories and
narrative literature which will, therefore, be used for any illuminating
discussion of moral philosophy in india.
it is true that morality is not an indian term and its sanskrit equivalent is
not easy to find. the nearest that you can get is to use the rather
ubiquitous and enigmatic term dharma. however. the basic assumption of the
above question is wrong - one cannot argue that if a particular term was not
used in a particular tradition, then the social or political reality denoted
by the term would not also exist in that tradition.
for in that case, one might as well argue that, since the term 'religion'
did not have a sanskrit equivalent in ancient india, the social reality
that you call religion did not exist in ancient or classical india.
[discusses arjuna's gANDiva dilemma (see above) and krishna's reference to
kaushika. mentions r.m. hare's analysis of truth and morality ("do not lie
except to the enemy in wartime"); can read krishna as hare's more evolved
moral soul, the archangel.
also sartre's dilemma - whether to join the french resistance or care for his
aging mother? --> the agent is "condemned to be free".
let us note four types of case where conflict arises. in all cases, the
agent wants to do x as well as y, but both cannot be done because of
contingencies of circumstances; so he does x and foregoes y.
case 1: what is foregone, that is, y, is a reward or a possession.
case 2: y may be simply an omission or failure to pursue a desired
project. (let us note two sub-varieties, at least)
2a: when the desired project is not central to the agent's final
commitment in life, that is, it is a luxury.
2b: when the desired project is central to the agent's final
commitment.
case 3: when y is something that, if it is not done, the omission is
harmful. two subvarieties again.
3a: when it is harmful to the agent.
3b: when it is harmful to others.
case 4: when non-doing of y does harm to the agent or to others,
but is reparable.
kausika's situation may properly belong to case 2. he had a iifeplan,
a project that was central to his life - similar
to case 2b, for truth-telling was central to his life-plan. would he then be
justified in foregoing this duty so central to his life-plan, and tell a lie to
save travellers? is this what krsna's ethics demanded? it is not difficult
to see, in this case, that kausika had a genuine dilemma, and that that
dilemma was moral. if truth-telling was only peripheral to kaushika's
life-plan, that is, if he belonged to our case 2a. then, of course, one could
easily say that kausika chose the wrong alternative from a moral point
of view. but case 2b makes the conflict more evenly balanced.
hence a theory of ranking the alternative becomes necessary. krSna's ethics
demanded such ordering of priorities. it was said by krSna that according
to him. saving the lives of the creatures should get the highest priority
(mb, 8.249.20). he clearly ranked the value of saving a life higher
than telling the truth.
here krsna clearly deviated from kant. or even from the ideal that
was sometimes upheld by rama in the ramayana. in other words,
anachronistically speaking, rama was more kantian. but i believe krsna's
ethics had a concern for a richer scheme of values, moral or non-moral,
presupposing a very complex societal and familial structure. it also
envisions a society when saving innocent lives has higher priority.
1 moral dilemmas and religious dogmas 1 2 sri ramakrSNa: simplicity with profundity 3 3 moral dilemmas: insights from indian epics 14 4 elusiveness and ambiguity in dharma-ethics 19 5 dharma and rationality 36 6 rationality. dharma and the pramANa theory 49
7 rAma's moral decisions 85 8 krsNa: in defence of a devious divinity 91 9 the throne: was duryodhana wrong 109 10 karma and renunciation 123 11 caste, karma and the gItA 136 12 love and sensuality in the epics 145 13 violence in the epics: sati and suicide 154
14 the problem of inter-faith studies 161 15 towards defining religion in the indian context 166 16 religion and value 175 17 between peace and deterrence 196 18 ethical relativism and confrontation of cultures 218 19 pluralism, relativism and interaction between cultures 242
20 the east, the other 265 21 salvation in a bottle: religion, psychedelics and mysticism a post-mortem 278 22 yoga, mediation and mantras: the oceanic feeling 309 23 back to godhead: the hare krSna movement
24 on omnipotence 355 25 duhkha, nirvANa and holy men 369 26 on the universality of suffering 381 27 the quest for immortality 390 28 karma and the moral order 405 29 a note on samkara's theodicy 421