Page 35 - All India Magazine Aug-2025

turn necessitate opposite results for good or evil. This is the chain
of karma, the bondage of works, which is the Hindu Fate and from
which the Hindus seek salvation.
CWSA 13: 48

Unique dharma of each
The whole right practice of life founded on this knowledge was
in the view of Indian culture a Dharma, a living according to a just
understanding and right view of self-culture, of the knowledge of
things and life and of action in that knowledge. Thus each man and
class and kind and species and each activity of soul, mind, life, body
has its dharma. But the largest or at least most vitally important part
of the Dharma was held to be the culture and ordering of the ethical
nature of man. The ethical aspect of life, contrary to the amazingly
ignorant observation of a certain type of critics, attracted a quite
enormous amount of attention, occupied the greater part of Indian
thought and writing not devoted to the things of pure knowledge
and of the spirit and was so far pushed that there is no ethical for-
mation or ideal which does not reach in it its highest conception
and a certain divine absolutism of ideal practice. Indian thought
took for granted, — though there are some remarkable speculations
to the contrary, — the ethical nature of man and the ethical law
of the world. It considered that man was justified in satisfying his
desires, since that is necessary for the satisfaction and expansion of
life, but not in obeying the dictates of desire as the law of his being;
for in all things there is a greater law, each has not only its side of
interest and desire, but its dharma or rule of right practice, satisfac-
tion, expansion, regulation. The Dharma, then, fixed by the wise in
the Shastra is the right thing to observe, the true rule of action.
First in the web of Dharma comes the social law; for man's life is
only initially for his vital, personal, individual self, but much more
imperatively for the community, though most imperatively of all
for the greatest Self one in himself and in all beings, for God, for
the Spirit. Therefore first the individual must subordinate himself

All India Magazine, August 2025 35