According to ancient Hindu shastras a person’s life was broadly categorised into four stages called ashrams. The first stage was the Brahmacharya, followed by Grihastha, Vanaprastha and Sanyasa. These ashrama dharmas regulated the life of the people living in the ancient societies and guided them with certain standards of behaviour to be observed during each stage of life. Those were the rules of living of those times which people observed.
The Brahmacharya Ashrama provided the guidelines for childhood and adolescent stage and certain basic values were to be adhered to. These values had some basic objectives — to train the children, to exercise control over the sense organs, the indriyas that were the cause of all vaasanas, that were the root cause of all undesirable behaviour. Thus, it offered a prescription for a healthy mind-body coordination and disciplined development to prepare for an ideal citizen.
The Grihastha Ashrama offered the dharmic prescription for a healthy family life. It provided for the pleasures of worldly life in a righteous manner. From marriage to procreation, from industry and entrepreneurship to wealth and prosperity, that was necessary to ensure the progress of society and the world. The third ashrama that was the Vanaprastha, which people entered after fulfilling all duties of the family life —that is from bringing up a family to rearing children and then preparing them for facing the world and shoulder the responsibilities of a family life.
Thus, it was like passing the mantle in a relay providing both continuity and change. This was the gateway to the final stage, the Sanyasa, which could lead to moksha or liberation after living a full life. It was the ashrama dharma that gave a systematic prescription to ideal living and had a very rational basis for ensuring order in society. Though for many today, the ashrama dharma would appear to be a puritan and traditional approach far displaced from the norms of modern living, it did have the ingredients of the idealistic modern approach. The purpose of describing the life into four stages was to ensure that people played their part in this world and made way for the future generation.
It is against this backdrop that the significance of the Vanaprastha stage has to be understood. It was something like succession planning, a popular management jargon of the corporate world.
Passing the mantle to somebody after preparing him or her to shoulder those responsibilities was the right approach for a healthy society where opportunities were not denied. The biggest problem of the modern living is that people never realise the importance of Vanaprastha. Hanging the boots is a popular phrase that explains the significance of Vanaprastha. It is difficult to time the stage of hanging the boots. When to pave way for next generation is a difficult question to answer in the modern times when people just don’t want to give up their power and pelf.
Vanaprastha provides useful guidelines for peaceful departure from this world where the person comes for a limited period with a certain purpose. It is one’s duty to pass on the mantle to the future generation without any attachment to one’s own position. This is the spirit of the famous Brunt land Doctrine, which also says that you have not inherited but borrowed this world from the future generations.
The writer teaches management at Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad (Jharkhand) & can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com