Notebook III: Artha

Meditations for Young Men

§1: Dharma is your duty, which is summed up in its own self-transcendence, as you progress from the gymnastics of virtue to the trivium of faith, hope, and love. So said Ashoka: “[W]hat is this Dharma made of? It consists in committing few sins and doing many good deeds, in acting with compassion, generosity, truthfulness, and purity” (SI 54-55, trans. Davis). It is the formal cause for which you exist as a man: your job is to seek to cultivate the virtues and to grow progressively in your love of God and God’s world, including your own self as the site of God’s revelation in the world. That’s the main gig. But your life as a man is also composed from artha with respect to coming-to-be. To be in the world is going to require certain resources. You are not wrong to be curious about how to do well in such things, so long as you remember that they come second to dharma. The specialists in artha will tell you otherwise: they have to, because that’s the nature of their discipline. But let this be your guiding rule: better to be a Lazarus rich in dharma than a Dives destitute of it. Your power and your wealth do not pass with you from this world, and they’ll be scattered once you leave it. If it happened to Ramesses the Great, believe me, it’s also going to happen to you. And if the shramanas could tell Alexander himself that “each man can have only so much land as this on which we are standing,” and “you will soon be dead and will have as much land as will suffice to bury your corpse,” then, believe me, you should keep this in mind about your own wealth and power too (Arrian, Anabasis 7.1.6, trans. Romm). But Dharma follows you across this and every world.