Agrarian Society - Akira the Don, Alan Watts

The Hindu

Divide life into certain stages

What are called the Ashamas

The first is called Brahmacarya

The second Grehasta

And the third Vanaprastha

Brahmacarya

Means the stage of the student, the apprenticeship

Grehasta the stage of the householder

And Vanaprastha

The stage of the forest dweller

This is related

To the cultural history of early India

Before we have agrarian communities

We have a hunting culture

Which is on the move

In a hunting culture

Every male

Knows the whole culture

There is no division of labor

And the holy man of the hunting culture

Is of course called a Shaman

A Shaman

Is a

A realized man

A man who knows the inner secret

He’s seen through the gate

And he finds it by going away alone into the forest

And cutting himself off

From the tribe

That is to say from social conditioning

And he goes maybe for a long period into the forest

And comes back

He’s found out who he is

And he sure as who he was told he was

But as hunting cultures settled into agrarian patterns of life

What do they do?

They build a village

And around the village they set up a stockade

Which is known as the Pale

And the village is always of course standing at crossroads

And there you get in an agrarian society a division of labor

And the division of labor comprises four

In Medieval Europe we call them Lord spiritual

Lords temporal

Commons

And Serves

In India they are

Brahmins

Chatria

That means fighter

Vaicher

Merchants

Traders

Chutara

Labour’s

So, you’ve got the priests

The warriors

The merchants

And the laborers

Division of labor

The four Sections of town

So, the four basic casts

So, when you are born you are born into a caste

And your duty as a Grehasta or householder

Is to fulfill your caste function

And to bring up a family

When you’ve done that

You go back to the forest

Back to the hunting culture

And you drop your role

And you become nobody

A shaman again

So a Hindu calls one who does this

Ashramana which is of course the same word as Shaman

And the Chinese called him a Shia

A Shaman is an immortal

Why immortal?

Because it’s only the role that’s mortal

The big front

The persona

The one who you really are

The common man that is to say the man who is common to us all

Which you could call the son of man

That’s the real self

That’s the guy who’s putting on the big act

And of course, he has no name

Nobody can put a finger on him

Because

You can’t touch the tip of the finger with the tip of the finger