Page 5 - All India Magazine Jan-2025

The Four Asramas

The Indian system did not entirely leave this difficult growth to the
individual's unaided inner initiative. It supplied him with a frame-
work; it gave him a scale and gradation for his life which could be
made into a kind of ladder rising in that sense. This high conve-
nience was the object of the four Asramas. Life was divided into
four natural periods and each of them marked out a stage in the
working out of this cultural idea of living. There was the period
of the student, the period of the householder, the period of the
recluse or forest-dweller, the period of the free super social man,
parivr1jaka. The student life was framed to lay the groundwork of
what the man had to know, do and be. It gave a thorough training
in the necessary arts, sciences, branches of knowledge, but it was
still more insistent on the discipline of the ethical nature and in
earlier days contained as an indispensable factor a grounding in
the Vedic formula of spiritual knowledge. In these earlier days this
training was given in suitable surroundings far away from the life
of cities and the teacher was one who had himself passed through
the round of this circle of living and, very usually, even, one who
had arrived at some remarkable realisation of spiritual knowledge.
But subsequently education became more intellectual and mun-
dane; it was imparted in cities and universities and aimed less at
an inner preparation of character and knowledge and more at in-
struction and the training of the intelligence. But in the beginning
the Aryan man was really prepared in some degree for the four
great objects of his life, artha, k1ma, dharma, mok=a. Entering into
the householder stage to live out his knowledge, he was able to
serve there the three first human objects; he satisfied his natural
being and its interests and desire to take the joy of life, he paid his
debt to the society and its demands and by the way he discharged
his life functions he prepared himself for the last greatest purpose
of his existence. In the third stage he retired to the forest and

All India Magazine, January 2025 5