The Laws of Manu

by The Laws of Manu (retail) (epub)

  [15] These are the āvṛtas, ābhīras, and dhigvaṇas.

  [16] This and the next verse are paraphrases of 10.12 and 1o.11, adding the essential term ‘against the grain’ to designate union with a woman of a higher class than that of the man.

  [18] The ‘Tribal’ is a pulkasa (or pukkasa) and the ‘Wild Rooster’ is a kukkuṭaka.

  [19] The ‘Dog-cooker’ is the śvapāka (a term of opprobrium often more loosely applied to any Untouchable) and the ‘Reed-worker’ is the veṇa (a man who uses reeds, either as a musician or as a basket-maker).

  [20] Outlaws (literally, ‘Men of [Unorthodox] Vow’, vrātyas), are sometimes said to be members of a non-Aryan religious sect rather than the fallen Aryans that Manu defines. See 2.39.

  [21] ‘Birch-thorn’ is bhūrjakaṇṭaka (who is sometimes said to be a sorcerer), ‘Avantian’ is āvantya, ‘Banyans and Grain’ is vāṭadhāna, ‘Flower-bearing’ is puṣpadha, and ‘Having a Crest of Hair’ is śaikha. The commentators say that the mothers of these castes should be of the priestly class like their vrātya father. Avanti is in Western Malva, and the vāṭadhānas are said to be northern tribes.

  [22] ‘Pugilist’ is jhalla, ‘Wrestler’ is malla, ‘Licchavian’ is a man from Licchavi (in Tirhut, northern India), ‘Dancer’ is naṭa, ‘Scribe’ is karaṇa (literally ‘Doer’, a caste of scribes and accountants), ‘Scab’ is khasa, and ‘Southerner’ is draviḍa (a man from the Deccan and the lands south of the Deccan, the parts of India where they speak Dravidian languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tulu).

  [23] ‘Having an Excellent Bow’ is sudhanva, ‘Teacher’ is ācārya, ‘Bastard’ is vijanman, ‘Friendly’ is maitra, and ‘Kāruṣan’ and ‘Sātvat’ are people from the parts of India called the Kāruṣas and the Sātvats.

  [27] These six men, themselves born ‘against the grain’, compound the felony and perpetuate it by producing children ‘against the grain’ when they beget them in women of the caste of their mother (who is of higher birth than their father).

  [28] The second self, a son legitimately similar to his father, may be born in a woman of equal or immediately lower class. But even among the excluded classes (those described in 10.8–27, even below the servants, i.e. Untouchables), themselves born of women farther removed from their husbands’ classes or of higher classes, the legitimate son is defined, as he is for the accepted classes, as born ‘with the grain’ – of a mother equal to or immediately lower than his father.

  [29] That is, the men of one excluded caste beget even worse children with the women of another excluded caste.

  [31] ‘Against the current’ (pratikūlam, a synonym for ‘against the grain’, another term for sexual union with higher-class women) is parsed by the commentators in various ways to come up with a total of fifteen classes, not, strictly speaking, social classes or varṇas, of which there are only four, but classes in the broader sense, here classes of Untouchables. Starting with the six outcasts born ‘against the grain’, it is argued that the lowest (the ‘Fierce’ Untouchable) produces new castes with women of the five (Untouchable) classes above him; and so on until the ‘Magadhan’, the highest, produces degraded races with only one, in his own caste: 5+4+3+2+1=15.

  [32] The term ‘alien’ (dasyu, defined at 10.45) here seems to refer to the fifteen outcast tribes just mentioned. A ‘Plough-holder’ (sairindhra) is usually a personal valet (the women are maids: Draupadī in the Mahābhārata becomes a sairindhrī and serves a queen), who dresses hair and attends at the bath, or a gamekeeper.

  [33] The commentators assume, and verse 10.35 states, that the mother in this verse and the next is an ‘Unfit’ woman, as in the previous verse; the offspring, ‘Quite Friendly’, is the maitreyaka.

  [34] The ‘Seeker’ (mārgava) is also called a kaivarta, who seems (from 8.260, for instance) to be some sort of fisherman.

  [36] The mother in this verse may be an ‘Unfit’ woman, as in the previous three verses, or a ‘Videhan’ woman, as in the next verse. Both are problematic, since the ‘Hunter’ is said to produce other castes from these very women in verses 10.34 and 10.37. In any case, the three castes produced here are the kārāvara, āndhra, and meda. Andhra is a province of South India.

  [37] As sopāka seems to be a corruption of śvapāka, pāṇḍusopāka may be rendered as ‘Pale Puppy-cooker’, and as āhiṇḍika may be connected with the verb hiṇḍ, to wander, he might be called a ‘Wanderer’; but both of these etymologies are even more speculative than the others constructed for caste names in this translation.

  [38] The ‘Puppy-cooker’’s profession is much debated by lexicographers. It seems to imply that he digs up and sells roots that are fatal poisons, addictive drugs, or used in malevolent magic rituals; see 11.64.

  [39] The one ‘Who Ends Up at the Bottom’ is the antyāvasāyin.

  [41] The six acceptable sons ‘with the grain’ (a priest with a woman of the class of priest or ruler, a ruler with a woman of the class of ruler or commoner, and a commoner with a woman of the class of commoner or servant) are described in 10.5–7. Those born of ‘degradation’ are the sons born ‘with the grain’ but in women more than one class below the father.

  [42] These castes are probably those mentioned in the second half of the preceding verse, who rise in age after age (either in their own successive rebirths or in successive Ages, or yugas, of the world) by their own acts that generate inner heat and by the prevalence of their ‘seed’, that is, the higher class of their father (since they are born ‘with the grain’).

  [44] This list is a strange mixture of the names of geographical and political groups outside the borders of the Land of the Aryans, which have been left untranslated (except for ‘Southerners’, for dravidas, and ‘Greeks’, for yavanas [‘Ionians’]) and names of castes and tribes in Northern India: the ‘Sugarcane-boilers’ (paundrakas, who live in South Bihar and Bengal), the ‘Quicksilvers’ (pāradas, whose name may also be related to adultery, paradārya), the ‘Mountaineers’ (kirātas), ‘Precipice-dwellers’ (daradas, who live near Peshawar), and ‘Scabs’ (khasas, a variant of khasas, already defined in 10.22).

  [45] The servants are born from the feet of the primordial man (1.87), and so these alien (dasyu) tribes, being non-Aryan, are even lower than the tribes who are equated with servants in 10.41–4.

  [46] The outcasts are defined at 10.16–17, the degraded castes at 10.41.

  [48] ‘Notorious’ (cuñcu) and ‘Diver-bird’ (madgu) have not been mentioned yet, though some commentators identify the cucuka (sic, ‘Stammerer’) as the offspring of a commoner and a woman of the ruler class, and the ‘Diver-bird’ as the son of a servant and a woman of the ruling class.

  [51] ‘They must use discarded bowls’ (apapātra) is sometimes said to mean that the bowls that they touch must be discarded, or that they must not use any bowls at all, but the present translation seems better supported by 10.52 and 10.54.

  [55] The distinctive mark by which they are recognized (cihnita) might be a brand made (by the king) on the forehead or elsewhere on the body, or simply something worn or carried, as in 10.52.

  [56] Here, for once, han and vadh seem unequivocally to indicate capital rather than corporal punishment.

  [60] ‘That’ character may be the character of both parents, of his father, or the bad character of the confusion of classes.

  [63] Similar virtues are extolled at 4.246 and 5.107, and a more extensive concise version of the eternal duty, entailing ten points, is given at 6.91–4.

  [64] The genders of the parents of this transitional child have purposely been left ambiguous here, for the Sanskrit (in which both of them are male, the unmarked gender) is interpreted by some commentators to indicate that a man born of a priest father and servant mother has a child with a woman of the priestly class, others that a woman born of a priest father and servant mother has a child with a priest. It is possible that Manu meant to allow for both possibilities.

  [69] This and t
he following verses recapitulate much of 9.33–41.

  [72] Here the commentators refer to the story of ṛṣyaśṛnga, ‘the sage with an antelope horn’, a great sage whose mother was a gazelle (Mahābhārata 3.110–13); see also 9.34n and 10.42n. But compare the prohibition against sex with a female animal in 11.174.

  [73] That is, they are not equal because they are of different classes, but they are not unequal (that is, they are equal) in carrying out actions that are inappropriate to them and that they should therefore not do.

  [83] The Vedic graduate should avoid dependence on others (see 4.159–60), and the farmer is dependent on his beasts of burden, bullocks and so forth.

  [88] Kṣaudra and madhu seem to be two different kinds of honey.

  [90] The commentaries suggest that the ‘religious purposes’ (dharmārtham) might be that he will give (to priests) the money that he gets for the seeds, or that they are to be used in a sacrifice or in connection with an obligatory ritual.

  [91] The commentators suggest that the forbidden uses of sesame seeds might include selling them for other purposes and using them in bathing.

  [93] ‘Willingly’ would mean when he is not forced to do so by the conditions described in 10.81.

  [97] ‘Without any good qualities’ (viguṇa) may imply both that the duty is inherently inadequate (involving an impure occupation, for instance) and that one does not do it well. See 6.66 and the almost identical verse in the Bhagavad Gītā (3.35). In this verse, the fall ‘from caste’ that is usually implicit is, for once, explicit.

  [102] ‘What is purifying’ refers to the priest, whom the commentators liken to fire or to Ganges water, which is not defiled by water from the streets.

  [105] The story of Ajīgarta’s attempt to sacrifice his son, Śunaḥśepha, is told first in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (7.13–16) and retold many times in ancient India. Though it is true that Ajīgarta is not punished as a criminal, the text certainly depicts him as a most unsavoury character, and his son brutally rejects him when he attempts to ‘re-adopt’ Śunaḥśepha after Śunaḥśepha has become a king.

  [106] The myth of the sage (usually called not Vāmadeva but Gautama, which is Vāmadeva’s patronymic) who eats dog meat (or the meat of a cow or a human body) during a famine is often connected with the story of Śunaḥśepha (whose name means ‘Dog-penis’; see Mahābhārata 13.94–5). This theme is a paradigmatic moral dilemma that does, in fact, have evil consequences and is mentioned in ṛg Veda 4.18.13.

  [107] The story is told in Sāyana’s commentary on ṛg Veda 6.45.31, where Vṛdhu is the carpenter of the Paṇis, the enemies of the Aryans; see also Sānkhāyana Śrauta Sūtra 16.11.11, where his name is Bṛbu. One commentator points out that a carpenter would belong to the ‘Unfit’ (Āyogava) caste; another says that he is a king.

  [108] This, the most famous incident of a sage in distress, is told in the Mahābhārata (12.139) and many other texts.

  [115] Most of the commentators state that the first three are for all classes, the fourth for rulers, the fifth and sixth for commoners (or the fifth for commoners and the sixth for servants), and the seventh for priests.

  [116] These are understood to refer to times of distress. The commentators specify that the knowledge imparted is not Vedic but might include logic, exorcism, magic spells, and so forth. ‘Being supported’ (dhṛti) may also be translated as ‘remaining firm’, i.e. stiffening the upper lip or making do with little.

  [122] The commentators suggest that the word ‘priest’ should be understood in the context of such a sentence as ‘This man is a priest’, ‘This man is the slave of a priest’, ‘This man has taken refuge with a priest’, or ‘This man does the priest’s commands.’

  CHAPTER 11

  [1] A man who wants descendants; one who wants to perform sacrifices; a traveller; a man who has given away all his property for the Veda; (one who begs) for the sake of his guru, his father, his mother, or for the sake of his livelihood as a student of the Veda; and a man consumed with illness – [2] these nine priests should be known as Vedic graduates who beg in accordance with the law, and a gift should be given to these dispossessed men in proportion to their learning. [3] Food, together with a sacrificial gift, should be given to these priests. To others, it is said, food should be given but presented only outside the sacrificial grounds. [4] And a king, as is befitting, should bestow on priests learned in the Veda all kinds of jewels as well as sacrificial gifts for the performance of sacrifices.

  [5] A man who already has taken a wife and begs in order to get another wife obtains sexual pleasure as his only reward; for his descendants belong to the man who gave him the money. [6] [But he should, to the best of his ability, bestow riches on distinguished priests learned in the Veda, and after his death he will get to heaven.] [7] A man who has stored away food sufficient to support his dependants for three years or more is entitled to drink Soma. [8] But a twice-born man who has even less means than that and drinks Soma obtains no result from doing so, even if he has drunk Soma before. [9] A man who is capable of giving to other people while his own people are living in misery is a counterfeit of religion: what looks like honey has the taste of poison. [10] Anything that a man does with an eye on the afterlife, and that is done at the expense of his dependants, has an unhappy consequence for him both while he is living and after he dies.

  [11] If a patron’s sacrifice, and especially one offered by a priest, should be impeded somehow because of (the lack of) one part when there is a just king, [12] the item may be appropriated, so that the sacrifice might be completed, from the household of a commoner who has much livestock but neglects rituals and does not drink Soma. [13] Or, if he likes, he may appropriate two or three things from the house of a servant, for the property of a servant is not his at all when it comes to sacrifices. [14] He may also unhesitatingly raid the household of the man who owns a hundred head of cattle and does not light the sacrificial fires, and of the owner of a thousand head of cattle who does not sacrifice. [15] Or he may take it from a man who always takes and never gives, if that man does not offer it – in this way his fame spreads and his religious merit increases.

  [16] Similarly, a man who has not eaten for six meals because he has undertaken a day-to-day existence can, at the seventh meal, take something from a man who neglects rituals, [17] from wherever he finds it – from the granary, the field, or the house – but if he is questioned, he should then confess that (deed) to the man who questions him.

  [18] A ruler must never take what belongs to a priest; rather, if he has no means to stay alive himself, he should take the property of an alien or of a man who does not perform rituals. [19] A man who takes wealth from a wicked man and bestows it on a virtuous man makes himself a boat and delivers both of them. [20] Intelligent men know that the property of those who are always engaged in sacrifice belongs to the gods; but the wealth of those who do not sacrifice is said to belong to the demons.

  [21] A just king should not inflict punishment on him; for it is because of the ruler’s irresponsibility that a priest faints with hunger. [22] When the king has determined the number of the man’s dependants and recognized his canonical learning and his character, he should provide him, out of his (the king’s) own household, with a livelihood that will allow him to fulfil his duties. [23] And when he has made arrangements for his livelihood, he should protect him in every possible way; for a king obtains the sixth part of the religious merit of the one whom he protects.

  [24] A priest should never beg from a servant for wealth to be used for the purpose of sacrifice, for the sacrificer who begs (like that) is reborn as a ‘Fierce’ Untouchable after his death. [25] A priest who begs for materials for the sake of sacrifice and does not offer it all up becomes a bird of prey or a crow for a period of a hundred years. [26] An evil-hearted man who greedily seizes what belongs to the gods or the priests lives in the next world on the leftovers of vultures.

  [27] If the prescribed animal sacrifices and Soma sacri
fices are left unperformed, for the sake of redemption at the turn of the year one must always make the propitiatory offering of the sacrificial offering called ‘For All Men’. [28] A twice-born man who fulfils his duty in accordance with the rules for extremities when he is not in extremity does not obtain any reward for it in the next life – that is the considered opinion. [29] A substitute for the rule was formulated by the All-Gods, the Amenables, the priests, and the great sages who were afraid of dying in times of extremity. [30] It should be known that there will be no reward in the next world for the misguided man who, though capable of following the principal rule, lives according to the secondary rule.

  [31] A priest who knows the law need not report anything to the king. By means of his own manly power, he may chastise those men who have wronged him. [32] Between his own manly power and the manly power of the king, his own manly power is stronger; therefore a twice-born (priest) may suppress his enemies by means of his own manly power alone. [33] He should not hesitate to deploy the revealed canonical texts of the Atharva Veda. Speech is the weapon of the priest, and with it a twice-born man can slay his enemies. [34] A ruler should get himself through an extremity by means of the manly power of his own two arms, a commoner or servant by means of wealth, but a priest by means of chanting (Vedic verses) and making offerings into the fire. [35] The priest is said to be the ordainer, the chastiser, the expounder, and the friend (of all). One should not say improper things to him, nor should one harangue him with empty words.

  [36] A virgin, a young girl, a man of little learning, a naive man, a man in distress, and a man who has not undergone the transformative rituals should not act as the priest of the oblation of the daily fire sacrifice. [37] If those people offer the sacrifice they fall into hell, and so does he to whom the sacrifice belongs. Therefore the priest of the oblation should be someone competent in the ritual of the three sacrificial fires, one who has crossed to the far shore of the Vedas.