Manusmriti

The Manusmriti (Sanskrit: मनुस्मृति), also known as the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra or Laws of Manu, is believed to be the first ancient Sanskrit legal text in the Dharmaśāstra tradition of Hinduism.

(full text, multiple translations and formats)

1. The great Seers having approached Manu seated intent, having reverenced him, duly spoke this speech.
2. Lord! deign to tell us truly in order the rules of all the castes and of all the castes that arise between (them).
3. For thou, Lord, alone knowest the true sense of the objects of this universal, self-existent system, unattainable by (simple) reason, not to be reasoned out.
4. He whose glory is unmeasured, being duly questioned those magnanimous ones, having saluted all the great Seers, answered them: Hear!
5. This (All) was darkness, imperceptible, without definite qualities, undiscoverable, unknowable, as if wholly in sleep.
6. Then the self-existent Lord became manifest, making this undiscrete (All) discernible with his power, unobstructed by the chief elements and the like, removing the darkness.
7. He who can be apprehended by the suprasensual, (who is) subtile, undiscrete, eternal, who consists of all elements, incomprehensible, he verily became manifest of himself.
8. Wishing to produce different beings from his own body, he -having desired, first created water alone; in that he cast seed.
9. That became a golden egg, like in splendour to the thousand - rayed (sun); in that was born spontaneously Brahma, the grand parent of all the worlds.

• • Lecture One, p 1-2, (Translation by Arthur Coke Burnell)

• Those who seek great prosperity and happiness should never inflict pain on women. Where women are honored, in that family great men are born, but where they are not honored, all acts are fruitless. Where women pass their days in misery and sorrow because of the misdeeds of their husbands, that family soon entirely perishes, but where they are happy because of the good conduct of their husbands, the family continually prospers.
  • Manusmriti (3:55-57)[1]

• पूजयेदशनं नित्यं अद्याच्चैनमकुत्सयन् ।
  दृष्ट्वा हृष्येत् प्रसीदेच्च प्रतिनन्देच्च सर्वश: ॥
  पूजितं ह्यशनं नियं बलमूर्जं च यच्छति ।
  अपूजितं तु तद्भुक्तं उभयं नाशयेदिदं ॥
  • Food should always be worshipped and taken with the utmost reverence. The sight of food should delight one’s heart and fill it with joy. It should always be cherished whatever the situation. Food thus honoured gives one strength and energy. Food taken irreverently destroys both strength and energy.
    • 2.54-55

• अनारोग्यमनायुष्यं अस्वर्ग्यं चातिभोजनं ।
  अपुण्यं लोकविद्विष्टं तस्मात् तत्परिवर्जयेत् ॥
  • Excessive eating is prejudicial to health, to fame, and to (bliss in) heaven; it prevents (the acquisition of) spiritual merit, and is odious among men; one ought, for these reasons, to avoid it carefully.
    • 2.57; translated by George Bühler

• इन्द्रियाणां विचरतां विषयेष्वपहारिषु ।
  संयमे यत्नमातिष्ठेत् विद्वान् यन्तेव वाजिनां॥
  • The five senses chase the objects of their desire which powerfully attract them. Wise men should endeavour to keep them under control like a horseman controls his horses.
    • 2.88

• Evil actions performed in this world do not bear fruit immediately like the cow, which gives milk after being fed, but gradually gnaw the roots of him who commits them.
  • 4.172

• Meat can never be obtained without injury to living creatures, and injury to sentient beings is detrimental to (the attainment of) heavenly bliss; let him therefore shun (the use of) meat. Having well considered the (disgusting) origin of flesh and the (cruelty of) fettering and slaying corporeal beings, let him entirely abstain from eating flesh.
  • 5.48-49; translated by George Bühler

• धर्मो रक्षति रक्षितः
  • Dharma protects those who protect dharma.
    • 8.15
    • Variant translation: Dharma protected protects.

• Learn that sacred law which is followed by men learned (in the Veda) and assented to in their hearts by the virtuous, who are ever exempt from hatred and inordinate affection.
  • 2.1; George Bühler translation

• When a man has studied the Veda in accordance with the rules, and begotten sons in accordance with his duty, and sacrificed with sacrifices according to his ability, he may set his mind-and-heart on freedom. (MS 6.36)

• That land where the black antelope naturally roams, one must know to be fit for the performance of sacrifices; (the tract) different from that (is) the country of the Mlekkhas.
  • Manu Smriti 11.22 (2.23)

• Where women are honored there the gods are pleased; but where they are not honored no sacred rite yields rewards.
  • Manu Smriti (III.56)

• [Brahmāvarta or] ―the district between the Sarasvatī and Dṛṣadvatī is the home of the Veda.
  • Manu 11.17

• One thing I want to impress upon you is that Manu did not give the law of caste and that he could not do so. Caste existed long before Manu. He was an upholder of it and therefore philosophized about it, but certainly he did not and could not ordain the present order of Hindu Society [...] The spread and growth of the caste system is too gigantic a task to be achieved by the power or cunning of an individual or of a class [...] The Brahmins may have been guilty of many things, and I dare say they were, but the imposing of the caste system on the non-Brahmin population was beyond their mettle.
  • B.R. Ambedkar, "Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches: Castes in India and 11 other essays", p. 106. B.R. Ambedkar 1916 16, quoted from Elst, Koenraad. Manu as a weapon against egalitarianism: Nietzsche and Hindu political philosophy in : Siemens & Vasti Roodt, eds.: Nietzsche, Power and Politics (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2008).

• In the opinion of the best contemporary orientalists, it [Manusmriti] does not, as a whole, represent a set of rules ever actually administered in Hindustan. It is in great part an ideal picture of that which, in the view of a Brahmin, ought to be law.
  • David Buxbaum (1998), Family Law and Customary Law in Asia: A Contemporary Legal Perspective, Springer Academic, ISBN 978-9401757942, p. 204

• [Calling it a law book] skews it towards what the British hoped to make of it: a tool with which to rule the Hindoos. A broader title like 'teaching' would better suggest what the text is.
  • Wendy Doniger, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 512

• There is no historical evidence for either an active propagation or implementation of Dharmasastra [Manusmriti] by a ruler or any state – as distinct from other forms of recognizing, respecting and using the text. Thinking of Dharmasastra as a legal code and of its authors as lawgivers is thus a serious misunderstanding of its history.
  • Donald Davis (2010), The Spirit of Hindu Law, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521877046, p. 14

• The Manu Smrti is usually referred to, especially by its modern leftist critics in India, as the casteist manifesto pure and simple. This is fair enough in the sense that there is no unjustly disregarded anti-caste element tucked away somewhere in Manu’s vision of society; the text is indeed casteist through and through. However, the scope of the Manu Smrti is broader, dealing with intra-family matters, the punishment of crime, the king’s (in the sense of: the state’s) duties, money-lending and usury, et al.
  • Elst, Koenraad. Manu as a weapon against egalitarianism: Nietzsche and Hindu political philosophy in : Siemens & Vasti Roodt, eds.: Nietzsche, Power and Politics (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2008).

• “The cosmogony of the Manava Dharmashastra is the broadest and most comprehensive we have thus far encountered.”
  • Joseph Guigniaut , in Jain, S., & Jain, M. (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. vol 4. Introduction

• We know nothing more interesting than to read Manu with the Bible in front of us. The latter book, a code of pillage and debauchery, which never knew the immortality of the soul, can not sustain the tiniest comparison with the ancient law book of the Hindus.
  • Louis Jacolliot , Les legislateurs religieux, p. 54. in Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.254

• The laws of Manu very probably were considerably older than those of Solon or even of Lycurgus, although the promulgation of them, before they were reduced to writing, might have been covered with the first monarchies established in Egypt and India.
  • William Jones, Expansion of Cultural Imperalism Through Globalisation.

• Manu Smriti was the foundation upon which the Egyptian, the Persian, the Grecian and the Roman codes of law were built and that the influence of Manu is still felt in Europe.
  • Louis Jacolliot, Bible in India

• Even the much-maligned Manusmriti (commonly known in the West as the Laws of Manu) was never enforced as the divine and all-encompassing law of Hindus – except by the British rulers who enforced it to show that the colonizers were ruling in accordance with 'Hindu Law' (a canon they had constructed themselves). Moreover, Manu's code is explicit in stating that it is not universal. It calls for updates, amendments and rewrites in order to suit different circumstances.
  • Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• Nelson in 1887, in a legal brief before the Madras High Court of British India, had stated, "there are various contradictions and inconsistencies in the Manu Smriti itself, and that these contradictions would lead one to conclude that such a commentary did not lay down legal principles to be followed but were merely recommendatory in nature."
  • G. Srikantan (2014), Thomas Duve (ed.), Entanglements in Legal History, Max Planck Institute: Germany, ISBN 978-3944773001, p. 123

• What a yes-saying Aryan religion, born from the ruling classes, looks like: Manu’s law-book. What a yes-saying Semitic religion, born from the ruling classes, looks like: Mohammed’s law-book, the Old Testament in its older parts. What a no-saying Semitic religion, born from the oppressed classes, looks like: in Indian-Aryan concepts; the New Testament, a Chandala religion. What a no-saying Aryan religion looks like, grown among the dominant classes: Buddhism.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, (14[195] 13.380 f.), quoted from Elst, Koenraad. Manu as a weapon against egalitarianism: Nietzsche and Hindu political philosophy in : Siemens & Vasti Roodt, eds.: Nietzsche, Power and Politics (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2008).

• I owe to these last weeks a very important lesson: I found Manu's book of laws in a French translation done in India under strict supervision from the most eminent priests and scholars there. This absolutely Aryan work, a priestly codex of morality based on the Vedas, on the idea of caste and very ancient tradition-not pessimistic, albeit very sacerdotal-supplements my views on religion in me most remarkable way. I confess to having the impression that everything else that we have by way of moral lawgiving seems to me an imitation and even a caricature of it-preeminently, Egypticism does; but even Plato seems to me in all the main points simply to have been well instructed by a Brahmin. It makes the Jews look like a Chandala race which learns from its masters the principles of making a priestly caste the master which organizes a people.
  • Nietzsche. In a letter of 31 May 1888 to Peter Gast, (letter to Peter Gast, KSA 14.420) in Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. p 107

• Now let us consider the other case which is called morality, the case of the rearing of a particular race and species. The most magnificent example of this is offered by Indian morality, and is sanctioned religiously as the “Law of Manu.” In this book the task is set of rearing no less than four races at once: a priestly race, a warrior race, a merchant and agricultural race, and finally a race of servants—the Sudras. It is quite obvious that we are no longer in a circus watching tamers of wild animals in this book. To have conceived even the plan of such a breeding scheme, presupposes the existence of a man who is a hundred times milder and more reasonable than the mere lion-tamer. One breathes more freely, after stepping out of the Christian atmosphere of hospitals and prisons, into this more salubrious, loftier and more spacious world. What a wretched thing the New Testament is beside Manu, what an evil odour hangs around it!—But even this organisation found it necessary to be terrible,—not this time in a struggle with the animal-man, but with his opposite, the non-caste man, the hotch-potch man, the Chandala. And once again it had no other means of making him weak and harmless, than by making him sick,—it was the struggle with the greatest[Pg 47] “number.” Nothing perhaps is more offensive to our feelings than these measures of security on the part of Indian morality. The third edict, for instance (Avadana-Sastra I.), which treats “of impure vegetables,” ordains that the only nourishment that the Chandala should be allowed must consist of garlic and onions, as the holy scriptures forbid their being given corn or grain-bearing fruit, water and fire. The same edict declares that the water which they need must be drawn neither out of rivers, wells or ponds, but only out of the ditches leading to swamps and out of the holes left by the footprints of animals. They are likewise forbidden to wash either their linen or themselves since the water which is graciously granted to them must only be used for quenching their thirst. Finally Sudra women are forbidden to assist Chandala women at their confinements, while Chandala women are also forbidden to assist each other at such times. The results of sanitary regulations of this kind could not fail to make themselves felt; deadly epidemics and the most ghastly venereal diseases soon appeared, and in consequence of these again “the Law of the Knife,”—that is to say circumcision, was prescribed for male children and the removal of the small labia from the females. Manu himself says: “the Chandala are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (—this is the necessary consequence of the idea of breeding). Their clothes shall consist only of the rags torn from corpses, their vessels shall be the fragments of broken pottery, their ornaments shall be made of old iron, and their religion shall be the worship of evil spirits; without rest they shall wander from place to place.[Pg 48] They are forbidden to write from left to right or to use their right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and writing from left to right are reserved to people of virtue, to people of race.”
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols , Translator: Anthony M. Ludovici
  • Variant: Here we are manifestly no longer among animal-tamers: a species of human being a hundred times more gentle and rational is presupposed even to conceive the plan of such a breeding. One draws a breath of relief when coming out of the Christian sick-house and dungeon atmosphere into this healthier, higher, wider world. How paltry the 'New Testament' is compared with Manu, how ill it smells!"
  • Nietzsche , in Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.109
  • Variant: One draws a breath of relief when coming out of the Christian sick-house and dungeon atmosphere to this healthier, higher wider world. How paltry the 'New Testament' is compared with Manu, how ill it smells! One sees immediately that it has a real philosophy behind it, in It, not merely an ill-smelling Jewish acidity compounded of rabbinisim and superstition ... All the things upon which Christianity vents its abysmal vulgarity, procreation, for example, woman, marriage, are here treated seriously, with reverence, with love and trust.

• These regulations are instructive enough: we can see in them the absolutely pure and primeval humanity of the Aryans,—we learn that the notion “pure blood,” is the reverse of harmless. On the other hand it becomes clear among which people the hatred, the Chandala hatred of this humanity has been immortalised, among which people it has become religion and genius. From this point of view the gospels are documents of the highest value; and the Book of Enoch is still more so. Christianity as sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as grown upon this soil, represents the counter-movement against that morality of breeding, of race and of privilege:—it is essentially an anti-Aryan religion: Christianity is the transvaluation of all Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values, the proclaimed gospel of the poor and of the low, the general insurrection of all the down-trodden, the wretched, the bungled and the botched, against the “race,”—the immortal revenge of the Chandala as the religion of love.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols , Translator: Anthony M. Ludovici

• The morality of breeding and the morality of taming, in the means which they adopt in order to prevail, are quite worthy of each other: we may lay down as a leading principle that in order to create morality a man must have the absolute will to[Pg 49] immorality. This is the great and strange problem with which I have so long been occupied: the psychology of the “Improvers” of mankind. A small, and at bottom perfectly insignificant fact, known as the “pia fraus,” first gave me access to this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who “improve” mankind. Neither Manu, nor Plato, nor Confucius, nor the teachers of Judaism and Christianity, have ever doubted their right to falsehood. They have never doubted their right to quite a number of other things To express oneself in a formula, one might say:—all means which have been used heretofore with the object of making man moral, were through and through immoral.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols , Translator: Anthony M. Ludovici

• In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is my objection to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self–contamination of man by the concept of sin—therefore, its means are also bad.—I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much as name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil–smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,—it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it the nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the whip–hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life—the sun shines upon the whole book.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, tr. H. L. Mencken

• I know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of Manu; these old grey–beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another place: "there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden." Finally, in still another place—perhaps this is also a holy lie—: "all the orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure."
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, tr. H. L. Mencken
  • Variant: I do not know any book that says as many kind and delicate things to females as in the law book of Manu; these old men and saints have a way of minding their manners in front of women that has perhaps never been surpassed.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, (AC 56) quoted from Elst, Koenraad. Manu as a weapon against egalitarianism: Nietzsche and Hindu political philosophy in : Siemens & Vasti Roodt, eds.: Nietzsche, Power and Politics (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2008).

• One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti by the simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the ends sought by the Code of Manu—by putting these enormously antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the necessity of making Christianity contemptible.—A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law–book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law–book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the "thou shall," on which obedience is based. The problem lies exactly here.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, tr. H. L. Mencken

• To draw up such a law–book as Manu’s means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, tr. H. L. Mencken

• It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity—the last–named represents the great majority, and the first two the select.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, tr. H. L. Mencken

• The belief in the authenticity of Kulluka's text was openly articulated by Burnell (1884, xxix): "There is then no doubt that the textus receptus, viz., that of Kulluka Bhatta, as adopted in India and by European scholars, is very near on the whole to the original text." This is far from the truth. Indeed, one of the great surprises of my editorial work has been to discover how few of the over fifty manuscripts that I collated actually follow the vulgate in key readings.
  • Patrick Olivelle (2005), Manu's Code of Law, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195171464, pp. 353–354, 356–382

• [The Aryan] religion was, in its poetic fancies, as far exalted above [the native's] crude systems of worship as the sublime teachings of Christianity soar above the doctrines of the code of Menu.
  • W. C. Pearce in 1876 quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 1

• Hindu Sashtras also contain a Sanitary Code no less correct in principle, and that the great law-giver, Manu, was one of the greatest sanitary reformers the world has ever seen.
  • Arthur Oliver Villiers Russell, Political Thinkers of Modern India: Lala Lajpat Rai. vol. 15, p. 293

• Should the judges, who quote a sentence or two from Manusmriti, not adduce evidence to establish, first, that the half a dozen verses that are cited again and again are representative of the work; second, that the smritis are intrinsic to Hinduism; third, that the kind of oppression and differentiation that these verses imply actually prevailed in practice?
  • Arun Shourie - Falling Over Backwards (2012)

• More serious is Nietzsche’s uncritical reliance on the flawed translation of the text by Jacolliot, an amateur openly denounced by leading philologists like Friedrich Max Muller. Uncritical reading of this text led Nietzsche to quote mistranslations and later insertions in support of the claim concerning the Chandala (low caste) origins of the Semites, used to attack Christianity in TI and AC. Elst goes on to highlight what Nietzsche missed or omitted in his reading of the text, including not just the actual politics and institutions of the caste system, but also some striking affinities with his own views and teachings. Despite these philological blunders and misjudgements, however, Nietzsche seems to have landed on his feet after all; for in Elst’s view, he did succeed in grasping Manu’s view of man and society.
  • Herman Siemens and Vasti Roodt , in Introduction, in : Herman Siemens (editor)_ Vasti Roodt (editor) - Nietzsche, Power and Politics_ Rethinking Nietzsche's Legacy for Political Thought-De Gruyter (2008) p 26

• Mahabharata
• Vedas

• English translation of George Bühler
• Sanskrit and English