The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c10.s14.6

c10.s14.6

But Meyer's position is eminently questionable when he objects to the usual description of the *Smriti* works as *Gesetzbücher oder Rechtswerke* i.e. law books (p. 1). He thinks that law has absolutely nothing to do with the essential or only object of these *Sūtras* and *Śāstras* on *dharma*. Their chief object rather is, says he, the teaching of *āchāra*. And, "what is *āchāra*?" he askes. "It is the conduct that brings health and welfare (*heilbringende Verhalten*) from the religious and moral standpoint," he answers. Even supposing that the treatises on *dharma* deal with nothing but *āchāra* and *sadāchāra*, good conduct, conduct of the good or conduct of the good regions etc. such as can be learnt by a pupil from his *āchārya*, a preceptor, as Meyer explains (pp. 2-3), there is no need for depriving these treatises of their character as books on law. After all, one must admit as a matter of course that not all law is "positive," such as can be enforced by the sanction of the state, or secular and worldly. But as cementing bonds of community no rules or regulations are more appropriately to be termed laws than those of Confucian "propriety" or the Hindu *āchāra* and Buddhist *sila*. And since Meyer has no difficulty in believing that *die Urliteratur aller Völker die Zauberliteratur ist* (the original or primitive literature of all peoples is the literature of charms and magic) he has only to go another step and encounter the fundamental reality that primitive law (whether private, i.e., relating to family and property, or public, i.e., relating to the king or the state) is also intimately mixed up with magic, incantations, charms and allied phenomena. In other words, in so far as *dharma* literature is the literature of magic it can at the same time and because of this fact be the literature of law.