Desires to deny or live through
KIM Hyeong-JunResearcher at the Institute of South Asian Studies Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
Desires are what human beings have been taught to stay away
from, no matter what side of the planet they are on. People
are born with “the will to live” and “the will to have,” both
of which are closely related to our basic desires for food and
sex. In other words, human beings try to satisfy their “will to have” by
desiring to eat and their “will to live” by feeling sexual desire. They want
Wise men in the West and East believed that people’s desire to “have
more” and “live longer” encourages them to go against the law of nature
and end up miserable. After all, how you deal with the eruption of your
desires determines whether you can be happy or not. A question arises, then:
how do Hinduism and Confucianism differ in their approach to the desire to
Confucianism denies desires
Confucius chose the self-control of it (�), roughly translated as “proper
behavior or performance of rituals,” as a way of getting rid of human greed.
Here, self-control, or keji (克己), means to overcome yourself, seeing and
hearing only it. The desire to own things is not what “ the perfect man,” or
juzi (君子), is supposed to pursue. His teachings affected Korea’s social
classes during its Joseon Dynasty. Scholars were at the top of the social
pyramid, followed by farmers, with craftsmen in the middle. Merchants
were at the bottom and were treated accordingly.
Money is evil, making you turn your back even on your parents and
siblings and causing you to leave behind all your yearnings for gold: such is
what Confucius taught and what caused Koreans to look down on and deny
the material prosperity that Koreans had been pursuing. Confucius’ negative
view of desire often causes conflicts in modern capitalist societies, however,
where economic prosperity is an important objective. Conflicts between
classes in contemporary Korean society come down to a clash between
Hinduism lives through desires
Korea is still under the influence of Confucianism that teaches people to
stay away from money. What about India’s Hinduism? At a first glance,
Indians seem to have fairly contradictory views on desire. For instance,
Ramakrishna, a famous nineteenth-century Indian mystic, did not carry a
single penny with him and refused to even touch one. When people donated
money or goods to him, a person accompanying him took care of them for
him. He allegedly panicked when money touched any part of his body, even
slightly. His loathing of material property appears to have been even more
Where, then, did this intense denial of desires come from? It seems that it
is closely related to traditional Hindu asceticism and abstinence. However,
extreme forms of denial might have been practiced by monks pursuing the
perfect “liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth” (moksa), but they
were never possible for ordinary people.
There are four traditional life aims in India: aratha (wealth), kama (love),
dharma (law) and moksa. The first two are secular; the last (moksa) is the
ultimate, and dharma is the bridge between them. Aratha and kama are the
processes people need to live through on their own and overcome.
According to the teachings of Hinduism, blind denial is bound to have the
adverse effect of creating a distorted image of desire. The best way of
coping is to follow your desire all the way to the end and discover its true
When dealing with your desire for wealth, you will either come to realize
that, while the things you want are finite, there is no end to your desire, or
that there is no way to satisfy your desire, at which point you can cut
yourself free from the futile desire to own things.
However, there is a catch. If you come to realize neither of those truths,
India has a simple and clear answer: samsara, the cycle of birth, life, death,
and rebirth. If you cling to your desires throughout your life, this will
become your karma in the next one. You will live the repeated cycle, and
samsara does not end until you finish your “homework.”
In addition, people are taught not to deny but to live through their desires;
this is why the Arthasastra, an ancient Indian treatise on how to make
realistic gains, is important to Indian people. Indians want to get the most out of things
Indians often seem obsessive about having precious metals like gold and
silver or money. They want to show off their social class by wearing
glamorous jewelry and expensive clothes from head to toe. Indian
merchants never let go of customers from whom they know they can make
real money, and they tend not to care very much about the problems their
pursuit of material gain may cause. This is one of the reasons why Korean
companies find it difficult to do business in India.
However, one must not become frustrated by those difficulties. Whether
you make it or break it in India depends entirely on how far you are willing
to go to understand the people. Do you really think you’ve gone far enough?
Have you ever thought that you might want to read the Arthasastra in order
to grasp the reasons for Indians’ pursuit of material wealth? Attributed to
Kautilya, the chief minister of the emperor Chandragupta (the founder of the
Maurya dynasty) in 317 BC, the word “Arthasastra” combines the word
“artha” (or “material prosperity”) and the word “sastra” (or “ teaching”).
The author wrote extensively about how to use economic policy, public
administration, military strategy, and broad national policies to maximize a
nation’s interests from a completely utilitarian point of view. Therefore, the
treatise is important not only in understanding the social and political
systems of the time but also in understanding the origin of India’s unique
Some might doubt that the document written in ancient times could be of
any help in understanding what is going on in today’s industrial capitalist
society. They might realize the cost of that mistaken doubt, however, once
they begin to discover how strongly traditional India’s approach to life
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