The Laws of Manu

Before anyone acts, birth into one of four classes and a stage of life has already settled what they owe and to whom. At stake is whether a just order can be inherited rather than chosen.

At creation the four classes are given their work: the Brahmin studies, teaches and sacrifices, the Kṣatriya protects the people, the Vaiśya keeps cattle, trades and farms, and the Śūdra serves the other three. Better one's own duty done badly than another's done well, the rule runs. Yet the same code names virtues owed by all four alike, non-violence, truthfulness, not stealing, purity and self-restraint, and in hard times lets a Brahmin who cannot live by teaching take up a warrior's or a farmer's work.

• social hierarchy
• caste
• caste hierarchy
• dharma
• duty
• education
• knowledge

All other ways of life, the student's, the hermit's and the renouncer's, live on what the householder gives. What does his house owe its ancestors, its guests and its women, and what does it ask of them?

Marriage, sons and the monthly offerings to the dead keep a family line alive, and a man who seeks liberation before studying the Veda, fathering sons and offering sacrifice sinks down. Women stand at the centre and under guard: where women are honoured the gods rejoice, yet a woman is kept by her father, then her husband, then her sons, and is never fit for independence. A father may take no bride-price, and the levirate, a widow bearing a son by her husband's brother, is set out and then condemned.

• marriage
• family
• gender
• kinship
• inheritance
• property
• ancestor worship
• charity

Left without punishment, the strong would prey on the weak. What gives a king the right to wield that force, and what keeps it from turning on the people it guards?

Fashioned from portions of the gods, the king is set over the classes and stages of life to keep each in its own duty. His real instrument is daṇḍa, the rod of punishment, which rules the people, protects them and stays awake while they sleep, and which he must apply after weighing place and time. Courts sort disputes under eighteen heads, from unpaid debts to the duties of husband and wife, witnesses are told their own self watches them, and a king who oppresses his realm soon loses it.

• kingship
• statecraft
• political authority
• punishment
• criminal justice
• religious law
• truthfulness

A death in the family, a forbidden food or a wrong contact leaves a stain that only a rite can lift. Can a wrong once done be undone, and what does the undoing ask of the one who did it?

Daily life is threaded with rites: prayers at the two twilights, five great offerings each day for the householder, rules for food and for the ten days of impurity after a death. Some things never pollute by touch, flies, a cow, sunlight, wind. When a wrong is done, penance follows, fasts and vows graded to the sin, and the authorities disagree whether it reaches deliberate sins at all. Remorse frees the sinner, the text says, but only the resolve not to do it again makes him pure.

• ritual
• ritual purity
• purification
• atonement
• ritual penance

Every act of mind, speech and body bears fruit, and the fruit is the next birth. At stake is how a code that sanctions killing in sacrifice can still prize non-violence and praise abstaining from meat.

Consequences close the whole code. Three qualities, goodness, passion and darkness, colour every act: the good rise to the gods, the passionate return as humans, the dark fall into animal births. Sins of the body bring rebirth as a plant, of speech as a bird or beast, of the mind among the lowest humans. Eating meat is no fault, the code allows, yet abstaining bears great fruit, and killing ordained by the Veda is declared to be no killing at all.

• karma
• religious merit
• nonviolence