Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c10.s3.1

c10.s3.1

No account of the Bengal Vaisnava faith would be complete without some idea of its ethical outlook on life. But there are difficulties in the way of a critical examination of the subject. There is nowhere in the authoritative works of the Bengal school a systematic exposition of its ethical position, although moral rules are inculcated and aberrations condemned. As we find it in the general history of Indian thought, ethics is not a subject of independent speculation; and ethical principles, which underlie theory and practice, are expressed, in the main, only incidentally in connexion with religious and theological exposition. Morality is regarded as necessarily religious and religion as necessarily moral, so that the bearings of religious doctrine on moral life never receive independent or adequate treatment. Since ethics, in this theistic system, is regarded as a divinely inspired institution, the question of right or wrong does not seriously arise; for it is solved in the terms of the postulate. The ethical and the devotional are inseparable; right is right because it is divine, there is no further need for a search of its basis or sanction. This peculiar merging of religion and ethics is a feature which Bengal Vaisnavism shares with the general trend of Indian religious thought; but it renders difficult the disentangling of the strands of ethical and religious speculation.