The Sphere and Significance of Ethics, Morality, and Religion in Hindu Tradition

Abstract

THE PRESENT PAPER has two purposes: (1) To show that, contrary to the widely shared view, even in the Hindu philosophical perspective there is ethics, understood as the search for principle by reference to which the quality of human action can be evaluated, comparable to that of certain well-known Western thinkers (as we shall see toward the end of this paper). Such an attempt, if successful, should convince us that the Hindus, not only aimed at leading moral life, but also raised and sought to answer the important question as to what constitutes the essential basis of morality itself. (2) To show that it is because of the presence therein of such principle that Hindu thought in its entirety represents one single, coherent, or unified pattern from its formulation in the Vedas down through the succeeding ages-and that divergences and differences pertain only to the way in which this principle in its developing stages is employed in the attainment of the final goal of life, conceived in different terms by different schools. Hence, ethics as the formulated principle and morality as the application thereof to the demand of the ideal, according to the Hindus, are in the ultimate analysis means to the attainment of supramoral end which constitutes or falls within the sphere of religion. Consequently, the spheres of ethics and morality lose their identity and their validity on the attainment of the wider sphere of religion, which in its turn constitutes (as will be pointed out later) the spiritual aspect of the general sphere of philosophy as understood by the Hindus. Although the spheres of ethics and morality pertain to a self which in itself does not become better through good work, nor worse through bad work,'1 and, although for that matter their significance is temporal, yet, on