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Yājñavalkya Smṛti

The law book beneath the commentary British courts in India applied: conduct, lawsuits and penance in a thousand verses, voiced by a Vedic sage.

by Yājñavalkya139 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Original title
Yājñavalkyasmṛti
Original language
Sanskrit

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Overview

In 1810 the East India Company official and Sanskritist Henry Thomas Colebrooke published an English translation of the inheritance chapter of the Mitākṣarā, and British courts in India came to apply it to Hindu inheritance. The Mitākṣarā is a commentary on this book, written in the late eleventh century by Vijñāneśvara at the court of the Chālukya king Vikramāditya VI, and outside Bengal, where a rival treatise prevailed, it became the chief authority on Hindu law. The book itself is a dharmaśāstra, a treatise on dharma, the duties proper to each person's station, and in about a thousand verses it sets out religious, civil and criminal law and the duties of kings. Its three books cover conduct, legal procedure and penance. Its frame borrows the sage of the Upaniṣads: sages come to Yājñavalkya at Mithilā and ask him to declare the duties of every class and stage of life, and in the third book the speaker calls himself the one who received the forest teaching from the sun. The attribution is part of the book's authority, not its history. Patrick Olivelle, who edited and translated it in 2019, places the composition in the fourth or fifth century CE, under the Gupta emperors, by an author whose name is lost. Scholars have often contrasted its terse, orderly method with the more discursive Manusmṛti, the older and more famous law book, and its rules of evidence are explicit: written documents, possession and witnesses are the means of proof, and ordeals are the fallback where these fail. The third book also lays down the duties of the renouncer, with a teaching on the self and on yoga. The text here is the verses alone, without the Mitākṣarā.

Key concepts

What does dharma mean in a law book like this?

Dharma here means the duties proper to a person's place in society and stage of life, and it covers what modern readers would split apart: ritual, morality, civil and criminal law, and penance. That is why one book can rule both on the interest a lender may charge and on how a mourner should behave. Law, in this sense, is one part of right conduct rather than a separate field.

What are the classes and the stages of life the book is built on?

Society is divided into four classes, varṇa: priests, warriors and rulers, merchants and farmers, and labourers. The first three are called twice-born, because initiation into Vedic study counts as a second birth. A twice-born man's life moves through stages, āśrama: student, householder, forest-dweller and renouncer. Most rules in the book differ by class and stage, so knowing a person's place is the first step in knowing their duty.

What is prāyaścitta, penance, in the third book?

Prāyaścitta is the act that removes the consequences of a wrong, so that a person is fit again to live, eat and worship among others. Penances are matched to faults and graded in severity, from reciting sacred verses to long fasts. Eating forbidden food such as garlic or a village pig, for example, calls for a month-long fast regulated by the moon.

Who is the kṣetrajña, the 'knower of the field'?

The kṣetrajña is the self as the one who knows the body, the 'field' in which experience grows. The book calls this self unmanifest and identifies it with the Lord present in all beings. The term carries the third book's turn from law to liberation: purifications reach body and mind, but the knower of the field is cleansed only by knowledge of God.

What is āśauca, the impurity that follows a birth or a death?

Āśauca is a period of ritual impurity that falls on relatives after a birth or a death in the family. Its length depends on the case and on class: after a death, three or ten nights as a rule, and by class twelve days for a warrior's family, fifteen for a merchant's and thirty for a labourer's. Small children are treated differently: one who dies before the age of two is buried, and no water offering is made.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Proof Before the King

How should a court find out what happened between two people who both claim to be right? The answer decides whether law rests on evidence a judge can weigh or on a sign from the gods.

The second book turns dharma into court procedure before the king and his assessors. Its order of proof is explicit: written documents, possession and witnesses first, an ordeal only where all of these fail. Around it stand rules precise enough to apply, from the interest a lender may charge to the order in which heirs take a sonless man's estate, with the widow and daughters first. Even a king's failures are accounted for, since fate is said to be nothing but his own effort from a former life.

  • law
  • evidence
  • criminal law
  • punishment
  • kingship
  • inheritance
  • property
  • family law
  • debt

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Purity and Penance

What makes a person fit to eat, marry, mourn and worship among others, and how is that fitness restored once lost? Beneath it lies a harder question: does purity belong to the body, the mind or one's birth?

The first and third books govern a householder's life by purity: what may be eaten, whom one may marry, how long a death makes a house impure, which penance cancels which fault. The rules are graded by class throughout, from mourning periods to the ordeals of the court. Yet the same book counts what pleases oneself among the roots of dharma, sets non-violence, truthfulness and compassion as duties for everyone, and ranks knowledge of God as the highest cleansing of all.

  • ritual
  • social hierarchy
  • atonement
  • ritual purity
  • religious merit
  • purification
  • penance
  • ancestral rites
  • marriage

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The Self Beyond the Law

Why would a book of rules end by pointing past its rules? The third book asks what a person is beneath class, duty and ritual, and what frees them from the round of births.

In the section on the renouncer, the law book becomes a teaching on the self. Spun round by restlessness and dullness, the self wanders through hundreds of births shaped by deeds of mind, speech and body, and is freed by the knowledge yoga brings. That knowledge is called the highest duty, ranked above sacrifice and study. Freedom is not kept for renouncers alone: an honest householder devoted to truth is freed as well, and so, in one striking verse, is the musician who truly understands the lute.

  • self
  • liberation
  • rebirth
  • karma
  • yoga
  • cosmology
  • afterlife

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Within this work

passages held
139
distinct concepts
272
by passages held, corpus-wide
#437

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “evidence” and “law”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 10 pairings. 95 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
evidencelaw5
atonementritual3
atonementsocial hierarchy3
criminal lawevidence2
evidenceritual2
religious meritritual2
ritualsocial hierarchy2
ritual puritysocial hierarchy2
atonementritual purity1
lawsocial hierarchy1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad III–IV)

    Not a book he wrote but the books in which he speaks: the two central chapters of a Vedic Upaniṣad, where Yājñavalkya debates at Janaka's court and then teaches the king and, at home, his own wife Maitreyī.

     SA
  2. Yājñavalkya Smṛti (Yājñavalkyasmṛti) you are here SA
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— or open another of their works