Manusmriti

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The Manusmriti ( Sanskrit : मनुस्मृति Manusmṛti [ mʌnʊsmrɪtɪ ]), also known under the name Manavadharmashastra ( मानवधर्मशास्त्र Mānavadharmaśāstra [ ˌmaːnʌʋʌˌdʱʌrmʌɕaːstrʌ ]) is an Indian text , the title of "Code of Manu is playing." This text belongs to the Dharmasutras and Dharmashastras , which are revelations and treatises on appropriate behavior. The Manusmriti belongs to the text group of the Smritis , which are regarded as texts handed down by teachers (in contrast to theShrutis , who are considered to be texts "heard" by the wise and to whom a higher authority is assigned).

Although today's knowledge of politics and law in ancient India is mainly based on knowledge of these texts, they are not to be understood as legal books in the actual sense. The rules of conduct for the four Varnas laid down in them steered the social and political processes within the subcontinent over a long period of time. The Manusmriti is therefore not to be understood as a code of law in the legal but in the normative sense. However, they show how social and religious life should be and what, as a result, was not desirable. The text gives the perspective of the Brahmins . The time of origin is set between 200 BC. And 200 AD.

Socio-political significance of the Manusmriti

The Manusmriti is a treatise on the Dharma in which social duties are codified, but which today's Hindus do not grant absolute authority in everyday life.

The duties of the four stages of life are described: Brahmacarin (student), Grihastha (housekeeper), Vanaprastha (those who go into the forest) and Samnyasin ( those who give up the world). Each of these stages of life has its own obligations. The Manusmriti deals with the samskaras (sacraments), the Veda study, the marriage, the daily ceremonies, the shraddhas (rites), permitted and forbidden foods, ritual purity and impurity, the duties of the king. It is significant that the Book of Manu begins with creation and that at the end the consequences of good and bad deeds in future life are not left unmentioned.

The Manusmriti is the most important text source of ancient India on the caste system . To what extent these statements reflect the lived social reality is not certain. Nevertheless, it is a very informative source of how social life would have been desirable from the Brahmanic point of view of the time. The text recommends a woman from the same caste for the first marriage of a twice-born ( Brahmins , Kshatriyas , Vaishyas ). “A Brahmin who takes a Shudra woman into his bed will (after his death) sink into Hell; if he has a child from her, he will lose his Brahmin rank ”(III, 17).

The fifth chapter deals with purity and the observance of purity: “When a brahmin touches an untouchable person, a menstruating woman, an outcast, a woman in childbed, a corpse, or someone who has touched a corpse, he must get through purifying a ritual bath ”(V, 85).

The seventh chapter is devoted to the special duties and rights of the king ( Rajadharma ) (as is Arthashastra ). Even if there are reasons to believe that the republican form of government was also known in classical India, the king was undoubtedly the central figure of the state as a rule. The question of the divinity of his status cannot be answered clearly. Even if many descriptions seem to indicate a divine status, its membership of the class of Kshatriya makes it subordinate to the Brahmins . This leads to a number of restrictions - especially in the ritual area, which exclude a royal power within the Varna society in an absolute or divine sense. The Indian kingship was mostly hereditary and the king was asked to surround himself with ministers, who in turn were supported by an extensive administrative apparatus that reached deep into the lowest strata and into the most distant parts of the kingdom. These principles of order could be applied until the recent past z. B. in the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal . The last king, Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev (until the end of 2007) saw his seizure of power on February 1, 2005 legitimized by the obligations arising from the Rajadharma.

reception

Nietzsche

In his writings Götzen-Twilight and The Antichrist , Friedrich Nietzsche upholds the Manu code of law against the laws of monotheistic cultures. In his opinion, it reflected centuries of experience. He considered the caste system contained in the Manu code of law to be natural, while the modern social system based on human equality was "decadent" and unnatural. In his opinion, as with Manu, the castes should be separated from one another and have different (prior) rights. While the "noble", the philosophers, should lay down the laws, the physically strong should take over the executive and the "mediocre" form the working majority of the population. In addition, he credits the Manusmriti with the fact that women are described there much more flatteringly than in Christianity and that their bodies are not considered unclean, on the contrary, as particularly pure.

For his adaptation of Manusmriti, Nietzsche uses a very dubious French translation by the avowed anti-Semite Louis Jacolliot. Many of the passages quoted by Nietzsche, which allegedly come from the Manusmriti, are in fact additions by Jacolliot, for which no ancient textual witnesses can be found. Jacolliot advocated the historically untenable theory that the Jews were the originally expelled Tschandala des Manusmriti. With Nietzsche, the reference to Manu is not intended to return to a premodern caste order, but to remove the basis of Christian-democratic equalization.

Yukio Mishima

In his tetralogy The Sea of ​​Fertility, Yukio Mishima repeatedly refers to the code of Manu. For the protagonist and legal scholar Honda, these writings form an antipole to European natural law and, at the same time, a higher-level sphere.

literature

  • Johann Chr. Hüttner [transl.]: The laws of Manu . Husum, 1981. (Revised version of “Menu's regulation according to Culluca's explanation”. Weimar, 1797). German translation of the Manusmriti. ISBN 3-88716-001-0 .
  • Max Müller : The Sacred Books of the East , Vol. 25, Georg Bühler : The Laws of Manu , Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1993 (first published by Oxford University Press, 1886)
  • Karl-Heinz Krämer: Rajadharma and Rajaniti: On the ideology of the Hindu kingship in Nepal .
  • Wendy Doniger / Brian Smith: The Laws of Manu. London. 1991.
  • Axel Michaels (translator): Manusmrti. Manus law book . Verlag der Weltreligionen, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-458-70028-9 (first German translation from Sanskrit)
  • Ganganath Jha: Manusmṛti with the Manubhāṣya of Medhātithi . Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1920, ISBN 81-208-1155-0 .

Literature on Manusmriti in Nietzsche

  • Andreas Urs Sommer : Ex oriente lux? On the supposed “Orientation to the East” in Nietzsche's Antichrist, in: Nietzsche Studies 28 (1999), pp. 194–214.
  • David Smith: Nietzsche's Hinduism, Nietzsche's India, in: New Nietzsche Studies 6, No. 3/4 and 7, No. 1/2 (2005/06), pp. 135–154.
  • Koenraad Elst: Manu as a Weapon against Egalitarianism. Nietzsche and Hindu Political Philosophy, in: Siemens, Herman W. / Roodt, Vasti (Ed.): Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche's Legacy for Political Thought, Berlin / New York 2008, 543-582.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Louis Jacolliot: Les legislateurs religieux. Manou. Moïse. Mahomet. Traditions religieuses comparées des lois de Manou, de la Bible, du Coran, du Rituel Egyptien, du Zend-Avesta des Parses et des traditions finnoises. Paris 1876.
  2. ↑ In detail, Andreas Urs Sommer: Ex oriente lux? On the supposed “Orientation to the East” in Nietzsche's Antichrist, in: Nietzsche Studies 28 (1999), pp. 194–214.