forwarding my Dharmic Brahmin Matrimony Article, written in 2006 June for Shree Nirmal Choubey WBF World Brahman Federation, and comments from Prof BVK Sastry and Prof Ramanath Sharma
Thirumala Raya Halemane
DHAARMIC BRAAHMAN MATRIMONY
Dr T Raya Halemane, Howell, NJ, USA, Email – trhal...@gmail.com
Braahmans have practiced dharmic matrimony, as per the shaastras, from ancient times. This superior and most civilized form of marriage process and living together as wife and husband, and family, is getting a bad reputation because of negative stereotyping by the press and westernization. We discuss some of the issues involved, and suggest that WBF can take an active role in this issue to help the community by popularizing the dhaarmic marriage process and vivaaha system and steer braahmans away from self-destruction.
1. Introduction:
Sex is a very strong energy in nature, and comes from the basic constitution of the human body/mind/soul makeup and is a fundamental activity for living, and for continuation of human species. All feelings, like love, lust, anger, hate, depression, greed, happiness have energies associated with them, and the different feelings and energies sometimes get mixed up. Feeling is the basic starting point for any action. Feeling is necessary for action. But, one can just feel and act (like an emotional action or a reaction to something) or one can feel, think and act. The latter, that is to do the thinking also before taking action is prudent, rational and wise.
Feeling is the basic instinct for all animals, but thinking is done most superbly by human beings. Culture and civilization are the result of thinking before acting. This extra step in-between denotes the cultural refinement and civility and the extra considerations shown to others that are characteristic of human civilized societies. In any such society, males and females, children and adults have to live together, harmoniously, with each other. Sathya and Dharma are the only two basic and primary, and most fundamental pillars for harmony in society - other values are derived from these.
2. Importance of Marriage – its Robustness:
Marriage is a social instrument/contrivance that gives a sense of stability, confidence, and assurance to the married partners and their children. Dharma ensures that the marriage process and married life, both, include the values of fairness and responsibility, love and sympathy, mutuality of respect as well as service. Marriage is by far the most robust type of sexual man-woman relationship that exists as a general formula.
Other arrangements that can be considered, like, living together, free sex, swinging, change-partners-every-so-many-years etc, have their own appeals, and may work for some in a limited sense, for sure, but they are less reliable, less trustworthy, more susceptible to negative effects and negative feelings, less robust. Most of all, children get excluded from full attention and suffer in these scenarios. It is not what a parent desires for their children – a parent wants a true, loving, sexy, dhaarmic marriage for their children, and, they do not wish for any aberrations. While shaastras allow many types of ways of finding partners, for the Braahmans, with saatvik characteristics being the most dominant, dhaarmic marriage is the most suitable.
3. Legalize Remedies for Problems in Marriage:
But aberrations and marriage perturbations do happen/exist in practice, and formulas have been devised to take care of these in dhaarmic ways. For example, under certain conditions, shaastras allow for a man to take a second wife (only with the approval of the first wife - my mother brought my attention to this prerequisite), not as a right, but as a way to address shortcomings in the first marriage. More negative situations of today, like total estrangement and divorce, will require relevant newer remedies. However, please note that, in general, most (though not all) negative situations result from botched up processes prior to the problem, or because society itself has deviated from the dhaarmic marriage process, and attitudes, behaviors and expectations have deviated from what is suitable for continuation of dhaarmic matrimony.
At present in countries around the world, except for Islamic men with rights to marry four wives, people are not allowed second spouses, although the "consenting-adults" maxim allows for extramarital relationships (which may sometimes bring some relief to aggrieved parties, while causing more harm to the first marriage itself). This should change, second wives/husbands should be legally allowed, with the consent of the first marriage partner. Human condition is often hard and complex, and there is no reason for the law to make it even harder.
4. Western Marriage System:
In the current western marriage system, notions like "love at first sight", "let me find my own lover/partner", "free to choose", "compatibility", "care-free-life" etc are celebrated. Actually the dhaarmic system also incorporates all these features plus more. If you have fully accepted the dhaarmic system and the person you are marrying, as you should, you would have liked the person from the first opportunity or even the first thought of marriage, and that love would have kept on growing, so it includes "love at first sight". The dhaarmic process also takes care of other cases where the youth may have needed a bit more parental guidance and persuading - after marriage the love grows despite this, the acceptance is automatic.
You can find your own partner/lover and be married dhaarmically. Moreover, when others help to introduce a new person to you, the responsibility of the final decision is still yours, both for the boy and the girl, their wishes and acceptance are included, so in their mind, they will feel they themselves found their lover/partner, despite meeting through a third party. This is also what happens most of the time anyway in the western world, meeting the other person in some context or occasion. Free to choose and compatibility are considered in the dhaarmic system as well, but additional input from others are often taken into account, or can be ignored also.
Of course, in the dhaarmic system, compatibility test and freedom of choice does not normally include living together as sex partners – this, as everyone knows, has many negative fallouts and cannot really serve the intended purpose. Instead, with the right attitude, and complete acceptance of the choice made at marriage, compatibility can be worked out and achieved by the new wife and husband. Besides, statistics of divorce rates suggest that the western marriage system is less compatible in the long run than the dhaarmic system. Care free life is actually not at all practical for anybody, but, in reality, a happy dhaarmically married couple are more care free (confident and assured, free of worries) about their relationship and sex life, than anyone in the western system, where both the man and woman are worried constantly about devious attacks on their relationship from all directions, they never achieve care-free-status.
Western writers and commentators often justify the deceptive and cheating behaviors of men and women as because of their being true to their nature, by comparing with behaviors in the animal kingdom (!) – it is actually a lack of self-discipline that people fall into when society allows it, humans becoming more uncivilized to each other.
5. Dhaarmic Matrimony Is Not the Negative Stereotyped Arranged Marriage:
Stereotyping of the Hindu traditional marriage system as badly or forcibly arranged marriages, and focusing on the wrong/bad examples has caused a lot of harm in the minds of our youngsters. And, they are suffering because of this, and the parents are in turn suffering. The young men and women are suffering most because they are neither here nor there – unable and unwilling to use either the traditional system or the modern you-are-on-your-own system. Rebellious while young, they turn away from the traditional system, and, for one reason or other, do not get the answers/results they had hoped for on their own, and they suffer - wasted efforts, wasted time, wasted energies, wasted money, not enough sex and companionship, no life partner, evaporated hopes and plenty of disillusionment. Because of this, the continuation of vedic dharma is also at stake, as the youngsters are abandoning traditional learning, as the new young families are not practicing it. This will result in a slow and sure death for the most civilized and most noble culture in the world, the culture of the braahmans.
8. Educate and Popularize Dhaarmic Vivaaha:
WBF and other Hindu organizations have to explain our marriage system in a proper and fair manner, not get weighed down by the negative stereotyping as "arranged marriage" and get embarrassed about it, the best system in the world – dhaarmic vivaaha, or dharmic marriage process or matrimonial system, and dhaarmic living as husband and wife and family.
Dhaarmic matrimony pays attention to many aspects and considerations. The true wishes of the boy and the girl are respected. The helping role of the relatives and friends is accommodated. The close relatives play an advisory role and also are responsible for coming to rescue in case of difficulties any time before or after marriage. A supporting environment is created by the positive and helping attitudes of the people around. The marriage rituals, ceremonies and other social events are designed to naturally foster the growth of a loving relationship in a supportive new environment (everything is designed for the two to come closer emotionally, mentally, physically). While our boys and girls are free to find their life partners on their own, if they so desire, they should be clear about what the traditional dhaarmic alternative is and it should be available to them if they exercise this option instead.
I hope WBF can setup a way for braahmans from all over the world to interact, in exchanging their matrimonial needs, to find spouses for themselves or their relatives, to make this possible to be done in a suitable way, respecting privacy, discouraging misuse and abuse of the facility. Perhaps a web-based system can be maintained either by WBF or negotiated as a subsite/choice of an existing matrimonial business company. And then, a lot of education and spreading of the message (in print, in public, in private, by mouth, and by other media) has to be done and the concept has to be talked up and popularized so that our youth consider it to be a viable and even better alternative to the pure randomness and chance (without help) that they now seem to be laying their hopes on.
Dr. Thirumala Raya Halemane
From: BVK Sastry <sastr...@hindu-university.edu>
Date: Fri, Aug 4, 2006 at 11:47 PM
Subject: BVK Sastry- DHAARMIC BRAAHMAN MATRIMONY
To: Thirumala Halemane <trhal...@gmail.com>
Namaste
I enjoyed your deliberations on this interesting topic. I have placed my observations below.
Regards
BVK Sastry
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(his comments are below as given under each section heading)
3. Legalize Remedies for Problems in Marriage:
BVK Sastry: Islam also has primary rules which restrict the men and women to a life of chastity, monogamy and regulated sexual pleasure. The later interpretations and the licencsuous practices have overruled the original text without any authority. No one in Islamic traditions want to talk about this aberration!
Marriage is different from consenting adults life style. Marriage focus is on primacy of Dharma and Vamsha-gotra. Other wise things get dominated by ‘perosnalized pleasure models’ as detailed in Kama-shastra. Present practices of Hindu /Brahminical traditions also have aberrations due to mix up of the ‘sanyasa-vanaprastha life style’ models in to Gruhastha-Naagarika models! .
4. Western Marriage System:
BVK Sastry: Several aberrations of Medieval period of India under Moghul rule and British rule need to be set right under the guidance of the rule book and also for the relevance of the globalized life style! .
BVK Sastry: Just as Spirituality, ritual are customized, the love-life is also customized within broad guidelines of Artha-Kama- and Ethics (niti)! This integrated format is cultural tradition. This has a historic component and universal component. The universal component need to be revived and redefined in its format for current period ! That is an issue of deeper nature, where the Varna-ashrama-vamsha systems need to be addressed . Not many are ready for this discussion, for they hold on to the historic imprints than the universal principles.
5. Dhaarmic Matrimony Is Not the Negative Stereotyped Arranged Marriage:
8. Educate and Popularize Dhaarmic Vivaaha:
I hope WBF can setup a way for braahmans from all over the world to interact, in exchanging their matrimonial needs, to find spouses for themselves or their relatives, to make this possible to be done in a suitable way, respecting privacy, discouraging misuse and abuse of the facility.
BVK Sastry: I would be happy to be associated with this kind of effort as it meets one of the objectives of the Hindu University programs ! .
(end of BVK Sastry comments)
===
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Thirumala Halemane <trhal...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 12:57 PM
Subject: My Article - Dhaarmic Braahman Matrimony
To: yogeendr...@yahoo.com
Dear Yogeendra Bhat Uli,
Please read my attached article and comment.
I will be happy to get the comments of Shree Puthige Swamiji also.
We are all extremely thrilled about his wonderful efforts around the world for Hinduism.
Thanks.
Thirumala Raya Halemane
________________________________
From: Rama N Sharma <ra...@hawaii.edu>
Date: Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 2:58 AM
Subject: Re: Article on Matrimonial Issues
To: Nirmal Choubey <nirmal_...@yahoo.com>
Cc: Thirumala Halemane <trhal...@gmail.com>, <vinod...@gmail.com>, Anoop Bhargava <anoop_b...@yahoo.com>, Sailesh Mishra <sailes...@yahoo.com>, MG Prasad <mgpr...@comcast.net>, Yegnam Subramanium <yeg...@yahoo.com>
Choubeyji / Rayaji:
The article surely fills up a need. It is good but it is very very generalized. I would like some words on what exactly we mean by dhaarmic weddig (a couple or three sentences). The wedding samskaara (a few sentences, may be 5) itself deserve some mention, especially on the significance of hrdaya-sparsha, dhruva(or suurya-darshana) and, above all, the saptapadii. As you know, this samskaara comes straight from the Grhya-suutra and except for some minor regional variations it is practiced more or less the same all over India. I have written a big article on this, and I make it a point to explain the wedding whenever I perform it, with the meaning of the mantras, etc. For its own reasons this could be claimed as the worlds best wedding ceremony. May be there is not enough time but if you can add a few sentences that will make it much more fuller. Regards.
