There are indications in some of the Dharmasūtras that there was resistance to the acceptance of the fourth āśrama by the Vedic Hindus. However, this resistance gave way to special emphasis on the life of renunciation after the rise of Buddhism and the Advaitic interpretation of Upaniṣadic Vedānta. Here it may be noted parenthetically that the growing prestige of the Advaita during the centuries preceding Rāmānuja and other teachers bhakti were responsible for the devaluation of socially oriented ethical life on the one hand and the decline of the secular sciences on the other. As a reaction to it, the Bhakta philosophers were generally averse to the life of saṁnyāsa and attached greater importance to the life of the householder. They also preached the path of bhaksi, instead of the path of knowledge, thus recommending sublimation . rather than suppression of his emotional life by man.

　　 At a later stage, the modern spokesmen of the Hindu renaissance from the advent of Dayānanda and Vivekānanda onward, looked to the Gītā tradition of karma-yoga for inspiring the people with activistic thought and ideals.

　　 These historical matters have some measure of relevance for the modern Indians. From the broader point of view, the development of human thought the important question is: Are there any elements in the Indian ethicoreligious

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thought that may be helpful to the modern man in reconstructing his moral and religious ideas, or in overcoming the spiritual crisis engendered by the growth of scientific outlook and scientism?

　　 Indian ethlcoreligious thought, comprising of Jaina, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions, if anything, seems to suffer from a profusion of precepts and ideas. Working within the framework of a few central concerns and presuppositions, the three traditions developed significant variants of thought and practice in the sphere of religion or spirituality, which was conceived, in a peculiar fashion, to. be both a continuation and a culmination of ethical or good life. This may sound unconvincing to those scholars who find Indian culture marked by a conflict between the claims of moral life on one hand and those of mokṣa on .the other. R. C. Zaehner., for instance, sees this conflict in the repentance felt by the king (or emperor) Yudhiṣṭhira after the Mahābhārata war. The vic­torious Yudhiṣṭhira wanted to renounce the world and pursue liberation rather enjoy the fruits of a blood-stained victory. Yudhiṣṭhira bewailed the fact of his being a member of the warrior class that enjoined fighting battles as a duty. It is worth noticing here that the conflict referred to by Yudhiṣṭhira prevailed, not so much between the life of virtue and that devoted to the pursuit of mokṣa, as between the duties of a varṇa or class, whose performance was necessary for the preservation or maintenance of the social order, and the virtues that led one to salvation. It was definitely not a case of conflict between the pursuit of virtue and the pursuit of mokṣa or salvation. The conflict underlines the fact that, in order to be a useful member of society or a good citizen, one may have to compromise the higher ideals of virtuous or pure life. Such a conflict may easily arise in the mind of a statesman or general trying to entrap a powerful adversary.

　　 Another group of scholars, or scholarly interpreters of Indian culture, who see some sort of incompatibility between ethical life aiming at social welfare and spiritual life aiming at some transcendent perfection or mokṣa, are those who have been greatly impressed by the implications of such metaphysical systems as the Advaita Vedānta, the Sāṁkhya. and others. Following such interpreters of particularly the Hindu philosophical systems at the late S. Radhakrishnan and some others, they fail to see any "affinity or commensurability" between dharma and mokṣa and find "all patterns of temporal life .. . equally indifferent to the experience of mokṣa."[8]

　　 The misgivings of the aforesaid scholars call for a twofold comment. First, the sort of conflict alluded to by Zaehner could arise only in persons rigidly committed to the varṇa or caste system. This means that the conflict under reference need not afflict a Buddhist or a Jaina or a modern Hindu subscribing to liberal democratic ideals. Second, as already observed, a conflict between following svadharma and pursuing mokṣa is not equatable with a conflict between a virtuous life and a life of spiritual discipline for mokṣa. All that can be conceded to those seeing conflict here is that a virtuous life may not be

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identified with the life of active service to fellow humans. The suspicion of incommensurability between life temporal and life eternal, or between the pursuit of morality and the pursuit of mokṣa, is based partly on the misunder­standing of the true background of Vedantic thought, and partly on a mis­conception of the relationship between the metaphysical systems, on the one hand. and fundamental insights in ethicoreligious thought, on the other, Quite a few schools of Indian philosophy, the Advaita prominent among them, believe in the ideal of jīvanmiikli, which implies the possibility of realizing highest perfection here on earth. For those believing in this ideal, the question of a conflict between the temporal and eternal orders of existence does not arise at all. That question can arise only for the theistic systems, Indian and Western.