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CASTE AND THE FOUR LIFE-STAGES powers and devotion to worship; the slightest failure can entail disaster. Like a mistress, charming and generous if faithfully and exclusively served, but balcful, wrathful, terrific, if not duly paid her whole requirement, the god blossoms like a flower, yielding sweetness, fragrance, and fruit abundantly for the devotee of perfect concentration, but otherwise is touchy and revengeful. India's static, departmentalized, and mutually cooperative hierarchy of the crafts and professions, that is to say, demands and inculcates the most extreme one-sidedness. There is to be no choice, no floundering around, no sowing of wild oats. From the very first breath of life, the individual's energies are mastered, trained into channels, and co-ordinated to the general work of the superindividual who is the holy society itself.
This depersonalizing principle of specialization is pressed even further by the subdivision of the ideal life-course of the individual into four stages (aśrama). The first stage, that of the pupil (anter'āsin), is ruled exclusively by obedience and submission. The pupil, cager to receive, under the niagic spell of the spiritual teacher, the whole charge, the total transference, of the divine knowledge and magic craft of his vocation, seeks to be nothing but the sacred vessel into which that precious essence flows. Symbolically, by the spiritual umbilical cord of the "sacred thread" with which he is solemnly invested, he is linked to his guru as to the one and only, all-sufficient human embodiment and source (for him) of superhuman spiritual nourishment. Strict chastity (brahmacarya) is enjoined; and if through any experience with the other sex he violates this interdict, thereby breaking the continuity of the life-generating, lifebegetting intimacy and identification with the guru, the most severe and complex punishments descend upon him. This is the period for Sraddhā (blind faith in the master-technician who knows the path), and fuśrūșă (the will and desire to "hear" (śru) and to learn by heart; to hear, to obey, and to conform).
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