A section from the journey

The Four Aims, Revisited

We met the four aims of life, the purusharthas, in the great epic: dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. The law-books take up these same four aims, but they do something new with them. They try to spell out, in practical detail, how a person should pursue each one rightly. There were even whole treatises on wealth and on pleasure. And above them all, the books keep one rule: dharma must guide the rest.

Do you remember the wide, kind map we once unrolled, of a whole human life? It had four worthy aims upon it. Let us bring it back, for the law-books take it up again, and use it in a new way.

The four aims are called the . We met them in the great epic. There is dharma, right living. There is artha, the honest gaining of means. There is kama, joy, love, and beauty. And there is moksha, final freedom. Four good things a person may rightly seek across a life.

Now here is what the law-books do that is new. The epic blessed these four in broad, warm strokes. The Dharmashastras roll up their sleeves and try to spell them out in practical detail. How, exactly, should a person earn well? Love well? Live rightly at each age? They weave the four aims together with a person's stage of life and their work, into a close picture of daily living.

This age was so serious about the worldly aims that it produced whole separate books devoted to them. Remember the Arthashastra, which we read a few steps ago? That is a manual on alone: on wealth, work, and the running of a state. And there was a famous treatise on too, a careful study of love and pleasure. The tradition did not blush at these subjects. It thought them worthy of real study.

So the tradition says plainly: earning is good, and joy is good. To gain honestly, to love, to delight in beauty, these belong to a full and healthy life. There is no frown here, no command to give everything up. The world and its goods are blessed.

But through all the detail, the books hold fast to one steady rule, the very same one the epic taught. must guide the rest. Wealth chased with no care for what is right curdles into greed. Pleasure taken with no care for what is right turns into harm. Right living is the riverbank that lets the other waters run clear.

And above all of them still stands , the final freedom, the farther shore. A person may earn and love and enjoy the journey richly, the books agree, while never quite forgetting that there is something deeper that even the best life finally leans toward.

So the four aims, which we first met as a gentle map, are drawn here with a firmer hand. A whole life: a person earning, loving, doing right, and at the last reaching toward freedom, with dharma holding the whole of it true. The same wise balance, now spelled out in full.

It can be a relief to hear a tradition say that work, money, and joy are good, not shameful. Where in your own life do you feel the pull of these aims, and where do you feel right living quietly asking to guide them? You need not judge yourself. Just notice the balance.