Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction (dharmaśāstra)
- 1 Sources and theologies (pramāṇa)
- 2 Hermeneutics and ethics (mīmāṃsā)
- 3 Debt and meaning (ṛṇa)
- 4 Persons and things (svatva)
- 5 Doubts and disputes (vyavahāra)
- 6 Rectitude and rehabilitation (daṇḍa)
- 7 Law and practice (ācāra)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction (dharmaśāstra)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction (dharmaśāstra)
- 1 Sources and theologies (pramāṇa)
- 2 Hermeneutics and ethics (mīmāṃsā)
- 3 Debt and meaning (ṛṇa)
- 4 Persons and things (svatva)
- 5 Doubts and disputes (vyavahāra)
- 6 Rectitude and rehabilitation (daṇḍa)
- 7 Law and practice (ācāra)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Law is the theology of ordinary life. It is both the instrument and the rhetoric by which the most familiar, repeated, and quotidian of human acts are first placed in a system or structure larger than individual experience. Law thus provides the initial movement toward a transcendence of personal consciousness and meaning that makes possible the higher order coordination of human activity, the vision of meaning in life abstracted, and the achievement of ethical, social, political, economic, and religious goods. Law, or rules if you prefer for now, are a key part of every child's socialization into a family, a school, or a team. The communal rules to which we subject our children and ourselves impart meaning and purpose to the collective of which we become a part. As the scope and scale of such rules increase to approach the level more commonly understood as law, the sense of achievement, good, and transcendence provided by the law becomes more abstract and distant. Nevertheless, at every level, the plurality of laws by which we lead our lives encode assumptions and ideas about what we aspire to as human beings and what we presume about ourselves and others. Those assumptions, ideas, and presuppositions I call theology, and they pertain to ordinary life, things near to us like family, birth, death, sex, money, marriage, and work – all common themes in the law.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Spirit of Hindu Law , pp. 1 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010