Insight Editions · No. 464
Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation
The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of Ancient India
Alain Daniélou
A complete study edition of Alain Daniélou's Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation: the Hindu view of history, caste and the four tyrannies, the three tendencies, the four aims of life (dharma, artha, kama, moksha), the three debts, the erotic arts, degrees and paths of liberation, the four stages of life, and the thirty-two sciences and sixty-four arts.
A study guide to Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation: The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of Ancient India by Alain Daniélou (Inner Traditions International, 1993). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the author's estate or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
CORE CLAIM
A complete human life has four aims, and none can be reached if the others are neglected. Virtue (dharma), success (artha), pleasure (kama) and liberation (moksha) map onto four stages of life and four orders of society, and the Hindu caste order is, for Daniélou, the social form that lets every group and every person pursue all four.
SCOPE
A publisher's note by Ehud C. Sperling, an introduction by Robert Lawlor, 10 chapters in two parts (the historical and social bases; the four aims and four stages), and two appendices on the thirty-two sciences and the sixty-four arts.
KEY SOURCES
Manu smriti, Yajñavalkya smriti, the Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata, the Puranas, Kautilya's Artha Shastra, Shukra's Shukra Niti, Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra, and the Benares review Siddhanta (special issue on the four aims, 1956).
BEST FOR
Readers who want a compact map of the classical Hindu theory of the good life, and readers of Daniélou who want his full defense of caste in one place.
The Book on One Page
Published by Inner Traditions in 1993, this is Daniélou's systematic account of the purusharthas, the four aims of life, set inside his larger picture of Hindu cosmology and society.
The book rests on a fourfold pattern. Hindu thought, Daniélou says, sees every cycle as divided into four: the four ages of the world (from the Age of Truth to the present Kali Yuga), the four stages of a life (childhood, youth, maturity, old age), the four castes (worker, merchant, warrior, priest) and the four aims (virtue, success, pleasure, liberation). "At no stage in life, however, can any of these aims be achieved if the others are neglected."
Part One lays the groundwork. Chapter 1 sketches Indian prehistory as Daniélou understands it: an ancient pre-Aryan population, a Dravidian and Shaivite civilization, Aryan invaders, and a slow synthesis that produced Sanskrit and classical Hinduism. Chapter 2, the longest, argues that caste is a rational order that protects diversity, separates functions, and prevents the "four tyrannies" of priest, aristocrat, bourgeois or worker.
Part Two builds the theory. Chapter 3 gives the cosmology: the world as energy, three tendencies (sattva, rajas, tamas), and moral law as part of natural law. Chapter 4 introduces the four aims and karma. Chapters 5 to 8 treat each aim in turn: dharma (duty, ritual purity, the three debts, women), artha (wealth and power), kama (pleasure and the erotic arts) and moksha (liberation, its degrees and paths). Chapter 9 sets out the four ashramas, the stages of student, householder, forest dweller and renouncer. Chapter 10 concludes that Hindu society is "among the most modern and most adaptable in the world".
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Historical Background | Hindu view of history; pre-Aryan India; Aryans; Sanskrit. |
| 2 | The Bases of Social Order | Cycles, castes, the four tyrannies, race, marriage, diet, outcastes. |
| 3 | The Nature of the World | Energy, perception, three tendencies, worlds within worlds. |
| 4 | The Four Aims of Life | Purusharthas in pairs; karma. |
| 5 | Dharma: Duty, Virtue | Three levels of ethics; purity; three debts; women; population. |
| 6 | Artha: Wealth, Success, Power | Ten mainstays; acquiring and using wealth; statecraft. |
| 7 | Kama: Pleasure, Sexuality, Enjoyment | Pleasure as path; marriage and love; erotic arts. |
| 8 | Moksha: Liberation | Degrees of union; knowledge, action, love; samadhi. |
| 9 | The Four Stages of Life | Student, householder, forest dweller, renouncer. |
| 10 | Conclusions | Hindu society in the modern world. |
Publisher's Note and Introduction
Two short pieces frame the book as an alternative to modern Western social ideals.
Publisher's note
Ehud C. Sperling argues that the West's ideals of egalitarian democracy and multiculturalism coexist with constant pressure on cultures to assimilate, and with conflict wherever they resist. He offers the book "in this spirit of inquiry, and not as a formula". He asks how India's many races, cultures and "more than fifty" languages survived for over five thousand years.
Robert Lawlor's introduction
Robert Lawlor calls the book "an extended metaphor", a "metaphoric gestalt" built on natural fourfold divisions across human experience, such as the four stages of biological growth and four "racial colors" related to four earth pigments. He argues that ancient languages relied on number and form analogy and that modern language has lost this metaphoric depth.
CRITICAL LENS. Both pieces set up the book as a critique of equality. Lawlor's scheme of four "racial colors" of humanity is a symbolic idea, not a scientific one; modern genetics does not divide humans into four color-based races. Keep this in mind when the same scheme appears in chapter 2.
The Historical Background
How Hindus think about history, and Daniélou's reconstruction of India's origins.
History and legend
"The Hindu lives in eternity." Seeing time as cyclical and the world as appearance, the Hindu historian looks in events for "an image or reflection" of cosmic law, punctuated by the avataras, the "descents" of gods. There are few ancient texts of history in the Western sense. The Puranas, eighteen principal and eighteen secondary, some "larger than the Bible", still await critical study.
The birth of a civilization
Daniélou's sequence: - The first inhabitants belonged to a very ancient race related to Australian aborigines and to hill peoples of Indochina. Their descendants speak Munda languages, and some still avoid agriculture as "a violation of Mother Earth". - A later population spoke Dravidian languages and built cities. Daniélou identifies them with the Asuras of the texts, who "had philosophers, scholars, architects", and whose science "was unequalled". - The Aryans, pastoral nomads, came later. In contact with the Asura masters they became city dwellers, and their sages learned from them, giving rise to the Upanishads and the traditional sciences. - Shaivite rites in the south, such as burial with familiar objects, are "clearly pre-Aryan". He links them to Sumer, Crete and early Egypt and calls the cults of Osiris and Dionysus "late survivals of Shaivite religion".
Sanskrit
Sanskrit is "an ideal improvement of Vedic", a refined language built over the Prakrits that became Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and others.
CRITICAL LENS. The Asura identification, the link between Shaivism and Dionysus, and the very early dating of pre-Aryan civilization are Daniélou's own theses. The outline of Munda, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan layers is broadly accepted, but scholars debate how and when Indo-Aryan speakers arrived and reject a simple "invasion" model.
The Bases of Social Order
The longest chapter and the core of the argument: caste as a rational, protective order.
The cycles
In Hindu cosmology the universe is "formed only of energy relations". Time and space exist only for living beings. Mankind has appeared six times before, reached high technical levels and been destroyed; it will rise and fall seven times more. We live in the Kali Yuga, the Age of Conflicts, which will end, according to the Bhavishya Purana, in a catastrophe under the sea (the "Mule's Head") before a new Golden Age. The first men of each cycle are the rishis, seers close to the gods who codify the laws.
The castes
Four groups correspond to four functions: Shudra (artisan, worker), Vaishya (farmer, merchant), Kshatriya (aristocrat, warrior) and Brahmana (priest, scholar). "The higher the rank of a human group, the more duties prevail over rights." The first three castes are twice-born through initiation; Manu says "there is no fifth caste". Each group has "its independent sphere of activity, forbidden to the other groups."
The four tyrannies
Following Manu, he names four kinds of tyranny: rule by clergy, aristocracy, bourgeoisie or proletariat. All are "equally unstable and unjust" because one caste must crush the others. Only the caste balance avoids them.
Race and racism
The caste system's respect for different races and cultures is "exactly the contrary of what the West terms racism." Western egalitarianism, he argues, forces everyone into its own way of life and so "can only lead to genocide or false assimilation". Asking Pygmies or Mundas to become bankers or disappear is "a sinister jest".
Marriage, diet and conquest
- Marriage exists to preserve caste and community; the "love marriage or marriage out of caste" is, for the Hindu lawmaker, more dangerous than prostitution or homosexuality, which concern only individual morality.
- Diet rules require that castes not eat together; this protects each group's proper food.
- When a group adopts a new religion, a new caste forms, as with Sikhs and Christians.
- Exceptional persons may leave caste only personally, as a sannyasi outside all castes, and without procreating.
Outcastes and the "less advanced races"
Genuine outcastes, he says, are rare and are individuals expelled for misconduct. Untouchable groups are artisan castes "subject to a few additional restrictions". Keeping tribes and some worker castes at a distance is presented as "the only way" for ancient cultures to survive.
The desire to deprive others of what one cannot have oneself, or does not want to have, is morally indefensible and fundamentally antisocial.
Alain DaniélouCRITICAL LENS. This chapter presents caste as Brahmanical law books describe it, and largely from the top. It minimizes untouchability, which Indian reformers such as B. R. Ambedkar documented as systematic exclusion and violence, and which the Indian Constitution abolished. Its claims that marriage across caste is immoral, and its language of "less advanced races", reflect views most readers and scholars today reject. Read it as an ideological defense, valuable for understanding traditionalist thought, not as a neutral description.
The Nature of the World
The cosmology on which the social theory is built.
Creation and perception
The only language common to all theories of the world is "energetic and mathematical". The brain works by combinations of currents, as language works by a small set of roots; the "play of language" mirrors "the play of currents forming cosmic thought". Creation begins when "an eddy appears in the immobile and neutral substratum of Universal Consciousness". The universe takes the form our senses give it: "the divine dream takes on an independent shape".
Law before the world
Physical and moral laws are either reflections of cosmic laws formulated before creation or "absurd, arbitrary, and useless conventions." Opposites such as spirit and matter, good and evil, are complementary and exist "only in relation to each other."
Matter, the stars and life
An atom is "as vast as a galaxy"; there is no limit to "worlds contained one within another", and there are many inhabited worlds. All beings are made of three tendencies: sattva (cohesion, light), tamas (disintegration, darkness) and rajas (movement, activity). Their proportions determine the nature of plants, animals, persons and, he adds, races.
Why it matters. If moral law is natural law, then the rules of caste and the four aims are not human inventions but discoveries. The whole book depends on this step.
The Four Aims of Life
The purusharthas as a single system, and the law of action.
The four aims
The life of a person (purusha) has four aims (artha) and "is not complete until all four have been accomplished": - Dharma: duty and virtue, self-realization on the moral level. - Artha: material goods, success and power, on the social level. - Kama: pleasure and love, on the sensual level. - Moksha: liberation, on the spiritual level.
The aims work in pairs. Wealth reflects virtue; both belong to sattva, the tendency to order and accumulation. Pleasure reflects divine bliss; both belong to tamas, the tendency to dissolution. So dharma and artha sit together, and kama and moksha sit together.
The Bhagavad Gita shows the danger of skipping a stage: when Arjuna wants to renounce the war, Krishna reminds him of his warrior duty and warns that such renunciation would be failure. A saint's remark sums up the attitude to pleasure: "I have never renounced any vice: it is they that have left me."
Action (karma)
"As a man acts, as he behaves, so he becomes." Evil acts do not bear fruit at once "like the cow", but "gradually gnaw the roots" of the doer. Each child is born with active and passive elements from past action.
Takeaway. The four aims are not a ladder where higher replaces lower. Each must be lived; liberation comes after duty, wealth and pleasure have done their work.
Dharma: Duty and Virtue
The first aim: three levels of ethics, purity, the three debts and the role of women.
Ethics on three levels
"Duty fulfilled obliterates evil." For Hindus, ethics is not obedience to a code given by men or prophets; moral law "existed before the world began". Daniélou distinguishes: 1. Universal duties binding on all. 2. Group or caste ethics, based on the different natures and functions of each group. Priests and merchants are vegetarian; it is "no virtue for a soldier to be vegetarian". The state should not regulate marriage, sex or the use of drugs, whose rules vary by caste. 3. Individual ethics, "the only true ethic", concerning each person's inner development.
He argues that because Hindu society is rigorous on the outside, it needs no propaganda to enforce conformity, and so it can allow "nonconformist or exceptional persons the greatest possible freedom."
Purity and untouchability
Daily life requires guarding against defilement through contact with blood, excrement, unclean occupations and so on; the ritual bath restores purity. Daniélou turns the usual picture around: "It is the Brahman who is untouchable", bound by restrictions so strict he must dig his own well.
The three debts
Every person owes three debts: to the gods (worship, sacrifice, cooperation with natural order), to the ancestors (offspring and rites) and to the sages (study and teaching). "Man may seek liberation after paying his three debts."
Women and population
Esoterically "the feminine principle is dominant": in secret rites the priest worships the goddess, and the mother's blessing is required before a son may renounce the world. The wife's presence is indispensable in Vedic rites. Woman, passive as lover and active as mother, "rules over the interior world as man rules over the external world." Brahmans are kept few by late marriage and early retirement, so that they form an elite.
CRITICAL LENS. The claim that "the Brahman is untouchable" is a striking reversal but hides the real burden, which fell on those excluded from wells, temples and schools. The account of women also takes the law books' ideal as reality. Compare it with historical studies of women's lives and with low-caste testimony.
Artha: Wealth, Success and Power
The second aim: material goods as the means of every other aim.
Self-realization on the social level
"The instrument for any kind of realization is called artha." Means include education, land, money, cattle and grain. Pleasure depends on social duty, which depends on wealth, so "virtue and pleasure depend on material goods." The ten mainstays of life are knowledge, know-how, food, manpower, cattle raising, trade, agriculture, thrift, inheritance and finance.
The use of wealth
Wealth is not an end in itself; the purely ambitious man limits himself as much as the puritan or the libertine. Wealth lets a person pay the three debts, the condition of liberation. "Property is the foundation of society." Yet the sayings he gathers are also warnings: money "divides friends, brothers, husbands and wives"; the miser "reaps no pleasure from his riches"; "he whose wealth is pure is truly pure, not he who purifies himself ritually" (Manu). Of eighteen passions harmful to wealth, ten come from pleasure (including women, hunting, gambling, drugs, dance and music) and eight from anger.
Statecraft
Following the Artha Shastra and Shukra, a ruler may study politics "without any moral considerations, just as poisons might be studied". The chapter lists the subjects of administration, including the army and fortifications.
Takeaway. In this scheme, wealth is a spiritual instrument. A person who despises money without first earning and using it has, in Daniélou's terms, skipped a stage.
Kama: Pleasure, Sexuality, Enjoyment
The third aim, and the one Daniélou develops with most energy.
Pleasure as a condition of life
Pleasure includes "whatever pleases the senses". The body is "the basis of all realization", a vehicle to be cared for "like a fine horse". "The sexual organ is always the ultimate source of pleasure," he quotes from an Upanishad. Pleasure requires conventions that keep one person's desire from intruding on another's; this is where ethics begins.
Pleasure and liberation
"The extreme sensation of pleasure is considered to be an image or reflection of the infinite ecstasy" of union with the divine. That is why mystics use the vocabulary of love. Love is also "the path that leads to it": its total giving of self shows the worthlessness of worldly concerns. The Kama Sutra says, "He who knows all the secrets of the erotic arts becomes chaste." The Chandogya Upanishad describes intercourse as a sacrificial fire in which "the gods sacrifice semen and a child is born." Desire is "the same that binds the stars and atoms".
Marriage and love
Marriage is a social institution for the joint fulfillment of the three worldly aims; it is distinct from passion. The lives of the saints even present a courtesan, Varamukhi, as a model of devotion. The erotic texts list seven kinds of attraction, from love to brute desire. Men who "lived as women" shared the life of the harem.
Erotic arts
Old houses in Benares, he says, all have a love chamber at the top of the house. He summarizes Kama Sutra typologies (the doe, mare and elephant types of woman; the rabbit, hare and horse types of man) and named embraces such as "the creeper" and "the tree-climb".
CRITICAL LENS. The positive theory of pleasure as a spiritual path is a genuine strand of Indian thought, especially in Tantra and the Kama Sutra tradition. But the chapter also passes on caste and class contempt, for instance the claim that working women's desire is "neuter" because it is born only of gain. Separate the philosophy of kama from these social prejudices.
Moksha: Liberation
The fourth aim: what liberation is, who can seek it and how.
The aim behind all aims
Every effort seeks to abolish sorrow, so the supreme aim is "absolute happiness and total joy", union with a being "beyond all suffering and death". "Liberation is the essential meaning of life, because it alone leads beyond death." Nature resists: "The gods do not like men to escape them."
Degrees of divine union
Liberation has two stages. Religions consider the first: survival of a transmigrant body (senses, life rhythms, mind, memory, consciousness, sense of self) in union with the divine. Metaphysics considers the second: total return to the causal substratum and dissolution of the individual. Daniélou suggests the first may be "a pious fiction" that makes people less afraid of death.
Transcendent reality
"Man's only bond is that he believes himself to be bound." Liberation is "the fruit of knowledge", seeing through the limits of perception. The Sankhya cosmology describes the twenty-five tattvas, from the unmanifest to the person (purusha), whose direct perception frees us.
The paths
Three paths match the first three aims and the three tendencies: | Path | Aim it matches | Tendency | |---|---|---| | Knowledge | Duty | Sattva | | Action (ritual, yoga) | Wealth | Rajas | | Love (bhakti) | Pleasure | Tamas |
Devotion is "the easiest" in the Kali Yuga; "love knows no caste". In the highest samadhi, consciousness does not return; the body survives briefly "as an automaton" and the chain of lives is broken.
Takeaway. The three paths are not rivals. Each draws on one of the worldly aims and leads beyond it, which is why the book insists the worldly aims must be lived first.
The Four Stages of Life
The four ashramas as the time plan of a full life.
"All cycles in the world we perceive are characterized by the number four." Life has its spring, summer, autumn and winter; each stage has its own duties, rights and pleasures, and "it is dangerous to try to skip any of them."
1. The quest for knowledge (brahmacharya)
Children of traditional Brahman families leave home at ten to twelve and seek a master in a center such as Benares, living in his house and serving him. Daniélou rejects the "recent puritanical interpretation" of brahmacharya as chastity: "a single ablution suffices" to purify a student from sexual acts; only marriage is incompatible with student life. The mother is the first teacher.
2. Family life (grihastha)
The householder marries, tends the household fire, and supports the other three stages: "for their livelihood, all depend on the married man" (Manu). Manu lists families to avoid in marriage and eight forms of union, from the "marriage of Sages" to the vilest, the "union of Evil Spirits".
3. Retreat into the forest (vana-prastha)
"When his son has a son," the householder withdraws to the forest, alone or with his wife, to study, meditate and live simply.
4. Renunciation (sannyasa)
In the last stage he becomes a wandering monk, begging his food and moving between holy places. One "cannot take a vow of abstinence or poverty without knowing love and wealth."
The cost of early renunciation. Daniélou notes that a young man drawn to monastic life marries and leaves almost at once, and that his wife "will spend her whole loveless life" in his family, honored but alone. The example shows the ideal's price for those who did not choose it.
Conclusions: Hindu Society in the Modern World
Daniélou's verdict on the Hindu order.
Two facts stand out: Hindu society's balance, which let it survive all invasions "without revolutions" for over four thousand years, and its power to assimilate conquerors, conquered peoples and new ideas. The princely states, he argues, adapted to modern technology better than British India while keeping the hierarchy.
He calls Hindu principles "among the most modern and most adaptable in the world". Their apparent rigidity is a defensive reaction to centuries of Muslim and European rule, and the present governing class is "entirely trained by Western standards". Casteless equality, he argues, has always ended in "the destruction of the weak by the strong", because every group in fact behaves like a caste. Western critics who denounce the Brahman for not dining with the sweeper rarely invite street sweepers to lunch themselves.
CRITICAL LENS. The claim of four thousand years "without revolutions" ignores Buddhism, Jainism, bhakti movements, and many caste mobility and reform movements. The defense of the princely states and the dismissal of independent India's governing class reflect his political loyalties. His point that all societies form castes of a kind is worth pondering; his conclusion that formal caste is the best answer is contested.
The Thirty-Two Sciences and Sixty-Four Arts
The traditional curriculum that supports the four aims.
The sciences
The four aims depend on knowledge codified as thirty-two sciences and sixty-four arts. Shukra defines the difference: "Whatever can be explained entirely by means of words is a science, while whatever even a deaf-mute can understand is an art." The sciences begin with the Vedas, whose transmission is valid only if oral. They include the six darshanas, among them Vaisheshika (experimental science, which "can only be atheistic"), Mimansa (the science of ritual), Sankhya (twenty-five principles, no personal creator god) and Vedanta; the epics; the Puranas, some of which he believes predate the Aryans; the Smritis or law codes; and treatises on architecture and yantras.
The arts
The Shukra Niti divides the arts into arts of pleasure (twenty-four of action, twenty of games, sixteen erotic, four noble) and magical arts. Examples include diction, oratory, memorizing, extemporizing poetry, marionettes, costume and makeup, and the agricultural arts of irrigation, horticulture and arboriculture.
Takeaway. The appendices show the four aims as a whole education: science and art serve duty, wealth and pleasure alike, and so prepare for liberation.
The Whole Book
What the book argues, what it offers and where to be careful.
Master takeaways
- Four aims, all required: virtue, success, pleasure, liberation.
- The aims come in pairs: duty with wealth, pleasure with liberation.
- Four stages of life give each aim its season.
- Moral law is natural law, existing before the world.
- Ethics has three levels: universal, group and individual; only the last is "true".
- Three debts (gods, ancestors, sages) must be paid before liberation.
- Wealth is a means to every other aim, not an end.
- Pleasure reflects divine bliss and can lead to it.
- Liberation has degrees, from survival in union to total dissolution.
- Three paths (knowledge, action, love) match the three tendencies.
- Caste is defended as protection of diversity against the "four tyrannies".
- Equality, for Daniélou, means assimilation and leads to cultural destruction.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Four aims (purusharthas) | Dharma, artha, kama, moksha | Checking if a life is balanced |
| Four stages (ashramas) | Student, householder, forest, renouncer | Planning life by season |
| Three gunas | Sattva, rajas, tamas | Classifying natures and paths |
| Three debts | Gods, ancestors, teachers | Thinking about obligations |
| Four tyrannies | Rule by one class oppresses the rest | Analyzing political regimes |
| Three levels of ethics | Universal, group, individual | Separating social rules from inner growth |
On the whole book. As an account of the classical purushartha and ashrama scheme, the book is clear, well sourced in the Sanskrit tradition and often wise, especially in refusing to oppose pleasure and spirituality. As social theory it is a forceful defense of caste and of separation by race and birth, drawn from Brahmanical law books and Daniélou's Benares teachers. It understates the suffering caste caused and ignores critics within India. Read the theory of the four aims with appreciation and the social theory with the counter-voices of Indian reformers beside it.
Who's who
| Name | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Ehud C. Sperling | Publisher, author of the note |
| Robert Lawlor | Author of the introduction |
| Manu, Yajñavalkya | Law-givers of the Smritis |
| Krishna, Arjuna | Bhagavad Gita figures on duty |
| Kautilya | Author of the Artha Shastra |
| Shukra-acharya | Author of the Shukra Niti |
| Vatsyayana | Author of the Kama Sutra |
| Kapila, Badarayana, Kanada | Founders of Sankhya, Vedanta, Vaisheshika |
Connect it
- India: A Civilization of Differences extends the caste argument of chapter 2.
- The Complete Kama Sutra is Daniélou's translation of the main source for chapter 7.
- Yoga: Mastering the Secrets of Matter and the Universe expands the path of action.
- The Way to the Labyrinth shows where he learned this system, in Benares.
About This Edition
An independent study guide to Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation: The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of Ancient India by Alain Daniélou (Inner Traditions International, 1993).
This edition condenses the book chapter by chapter for personal study. It follows Daniélou's order and terms and quotes briefly from the texts he cites. CRITICAL LENS boxes flag claims that are disputed or that reflect his traditionalist and caste-based views. Please read the original for its full quotations and appendices.