The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s1.3

c4.s1.3

This is a powerful ideal. Here it will no longer do to invoke the flexibility and adaptiveness of tradition. The well-known statement on the essential dharmic behavior proper to each of the four ages—austerity, knowledge, sacrifice, and gift—is not meant to give a brief for change. It only reflects man’s diminished capacity to live the dharma in full. The atemporal dharma itself, however, remains immune to the changes of the ages.² Man will be ignorant and confused because “Dharma and Adharma do not go about saying here we are, nor do gods, gandharvas, or ancestors say: This is dharma that is adharma.”³ But this does not affect the integrity of the eternal dharma. The proper guideline is the conduct of the correct and well instructed, the *śiṣṭa*, who acts disinterestedly and without any mundane attachment. The essential condition of true dharmic behavior is the absence of worldly cause or motivation.⁴ In this way, the dharma presents itself as the unbroken tradition of a monolithic and eternal order carried forward over the generations by the disinterested conduct of the *śiṣṭas*.