[Advaita-l] catuh shloki manusmriti

[R Krishnamoorthy]

Dear
Good to read.Thanks.
R.Krishna Moorthy.

Sent from my iPad

> On 12-Sep-2025, at 11:51 AM, Rajaram Venkataramani via Advaita-l <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:
> 
> Overall, catuh shloki manusmriti by Nithin Sridhar is an excellent work
> that should be read by one and all. While this is a advaita vedanta group,
> a study of dharma is important too.
> 
> While l personally don't expect a text to be of unitary authorship to be
> considered useful and look more for consistency of thought, l find his
> arguments on authorship insightful. He has demonstrated a good
> understanding of modern scholarship and has approached it with logical
> rigour. It would be naive to think that the issue of authorship would be
> easily settled without a detailed linguistic and philological analysis, but
> he has successfully laid the foundations for further research into the
> question of authorship.
> 
> He has done a great job in clarifying why dharma sastras are pramana and in
> what sense they apply to the Hindu society and explaining why we should not
> ignore the text or its injunctions. He has also shown that the purpose of
> the text is to help āstikās understand what dharma is not present a set of
> laws.
> 
> Having established the importance of the text, which many of us are guilty
> of ignoring, he has lucidly presented the keys to decode the text. Even the
> most able teachers would take simple examples, but he has taken the popular
> and controversial verses on the status of women. Given the popular
> misunderstanding of these statements, this section alone is worth the
> efforts of the readers in getting the book.
> 
> The book is so readable and illuminating that anyone who read this far
> would continue reading the word for explanation of the first four verses
> with references to commentaries. Manu, a kshatriya, teaches the dharma for
> all the varnas to brahmana sages. This itself would show Hindus that it is
> not a brahmana hegemony at play and everyone irrespective of varna enjoyed
> a pride of place in the society. The women readers would particularly find
> it an eye opener to learn about sadhyovadhus and vivaha samskara and that
> the brahmavādinis had the adhikara for upanayanam and vedādhyanam and The
> appendices give a detailed understanding of varna concept, fallacy of
> revisionism and most appropriately end with a stuti dedicated the much
> maligned Manu.
> 
> The misconceptions about and the scars of social discrimination won't go
> due to this one book, however well researched and referenced, but there's
> no doubt that this is a firm step towards a correct traditional
> understanding of Manu dharma. Building further on this, I hope that he will
> soon publish an authoritative translation and explanation based on previous
> commentaries of all the 2700 verses. Thank him for his efforts in sharing
> his knowledge with us. 🙏
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