Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c7.20

v1.c7.20

and to be a son is to be subject. But what is there then that will not torment me later? Who could ever be happy, if he has killed a woman, and moreover his own mother! And who could ever win calm and peace who has not heeded his father? Not to disregard the father is right and fitting, and it is a firm principle to shield one's mother. Both duties are right and salutary. How can I act, that the matter may not get beyond me? For the father sets his own self in the mother at the begetting, we are told, to keep virtue, good ways, race, and family in being. I here have been made a son by my mother and father; how should I not have the knowledge! Of both I know that they are my origin. That which my father said at the birth ceremony and at the by-ceremony—its confirmation is made complete in the firm resolve to honour my father.¹ The first guru who has nourished and taught a man is the highest law; what a father says is the moral rule set down as fixed even in the Vedas. For the father the son is but a joy, but for the son the father is all; he alone gives as an offering his body and all else there is to give. Therefore a man shall act according to his father's words, and never take thought upon it; mortal sins (pātaka) even are washed away from him who follows his father's bidding. In matters of eating and of other things that are for use, in the instruction and in the whole view of life, at the union with a lord (or with the husband), and at the holy custom of parting the hair the father is the law, the father is heaven, the father is the loftiest asceticism. If the father is made to rejoice, then all the gods rejoice. Those words of blessing are fulfilled for a man which