When you enter society you are born into a caste
 and this is very understandable in a community
 where you don't have a generalized system of education
 you don't go to school
 and therefore you learn
 what to do in life from your parents and your family
 so if you grow up
 as a carpenter's son it never occurs to you to do anything else but carpentry
 why would you? You might become a better carpenter than your father
 but still that would be the natural thing to do
 it's only when one is exposed to school
 and then the people begin to talk about well what do you want to be in life
 that people get the idea that they might be anything so if the
 if this sort of way of life is natural to you
 you don't find it particularly objectionable of course
 all kinds of weird complications and rituals and prohibitions grow up in the
 course of time
 that can make this system very cumbersome as it has been until quite
 recently in India
 then what happens is this
 you go through an evolution
 in your development
 in this community which has first of all
 the stage called Brahmacharya, studentship or apprenticeship
 after that you enter the stage
 of Grihasta, meaning householder
 and a householder has two duties
 one is called Artha
 A R T H A and the other
 Kama K A M A. Artha
 means the duties of citizenship partaking
 in the political life of the community
 Kama K A M A
 means the cultivation of the senses
 of aesthetic and sensual beauty
 and therefore Kama includes the art
 of love, the arts of beautification
 of dress, of cooking and all that kind of thing
 so that the Kama Sutra is the
 scripture about love. Kama in a sense means
 passion and is the great Hindu manual
 of how to behave sexually
 it's a book that every child ought to read on gaining
 puberty so that he would get some sense
 of how to make love without being a mere baboon
 then there is also the Artha Shastra
 and that is the scripture about rulers
 and the way of the Kshatriya
 caste. Now
 so you've got these stages now Brahmacharya which is studentship
 Artha and Kama they go together
 and they constitute the duties of Grihastha
 of a householder. Beyond that there is the duty of
 Dharma D H A R M A
 and Dharma has many many meanings in Sanskrit
 it can mean something like law
 or justice could even mean slightly
 righteousness but not as we have come to
 understand that word in common speech today
 perhaps rightness would be better than righteousness
 but Dharma has a primary meaning of method
 so when we speak of the Dharma of the Buddha, the Buddha's doctrine it is the
 Buddha's method
 not law
 so a citizen also has to conform to Dharma
 and that is to say to ritual
 and ethical and moral game rules
 for the community
 but now when in the course of time
 he has established his household he has taught his oldest son
 to take over the
 governorship of the household
 the father, or for that matter mother
 may enter into a new stage of life altogether
 which is not Grihastha but is called
 Vanaprastha and that means
 forest dweller as distinct from
 householder. Now you see what's happened
 we've gone full cycle
 we came out of the forest as a hunter
 we settled in a community and
 indulged in what is called in Sanskrit Loka Sangraha
 Sangraha means upholding Loka
 the world, upholding the world game
 and that is everybody's Dharma or duty
 Dharma can also be translated duty and Svadharma
 SVA in front of Dharma means your own
 duty or better your own function
 which we would translate into English as vocation
 so everybody's caste work
 is his Svadharma and of course these castes are subdivided into various other
 kinds of specializations
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