Adopt the Dharma

The need of carrying out their respective functions was so strongly ingrained in the minds of the various classes that ordinarily they would never think of deviating from their dharma The Bhagavad-Gita taught that people should lay down their lives in defense of their own dharma rather than adopt the dharma of others, which is dangerous.

The lower orders worked hard in the firm

belief that they would deserve a better life in the next world or birth. This

belief lessened the intensity and frequency of tensions and conflicts between

those who actually produced and those who lived off these producers as princes,

priests, officials, soldiers and big merchants.

Hence the necessity for exercising coercion

against the lower orders was not so strong in ancient India, What was done by

slaves and other producing sections in Greece and Rome under, the threat of

whip was done by the visas and sudras out of conviction formed through

brahmanical indoctrination.

Philosophical Systems

The Indian thinkers looked upon the world

as illusion and deliberated deeply on the elation between the soul and God. In

fact philosophers of no other country delved as deeply into this problem as the

Indians did. Ancient India is considered famous for its contribution to

philosophy and spiritualism. But the Indians also developed a materialistic

view of the world.

In the six systems of philosophy which the

Indians created we find elements of materialist philosophy in the Samkhya

system of Kapila, who was born around 580 B.C. He believed that the soul can

attain liberation only through real knowledge. Real knowledge can be acquired

througn .observation, inference and words. The Samkhya system does not

recognize the existence of God. According to it, the world has not been created

by God but by “’nature and the world and human life are regulated by

natural forces.

Materialist philosophy received the

greatest impetus from Charvaka, who lived in about the sixth century B.C. The

philosophy that he propounded is known as lokayata. He argued that what is not

experienced by man through his sensual organs does not really exist. It implies

that gods do not exist. The Indians thus developed both the idealist as well as

the materialist systems of philosophy. The idealist system taught that the

world is an illusion and ignorance.

People were asked by the Upanishads to

abandon the world and to strive for real knowledge. Western thinkers have taken

to the teachings of the Upanishads because they are unable to solve the human

problems created by modern technology. The famous German philosopher

Schopenhauer finds in his system a place for the Vedas and the Upanishads. Ho

used to say that the Upanishads consoled him m this life and would also console

.him after death.