The Hindu Concept of Self-refinement: Implicit yet Meaningful

Abstract

The article suggests that self-refinement is a significant meta-concept in the Hindu world because it undergirds so much of Hindu thought and behaviour. Unlike purity/pollution or auspiciousness/inauspiciousness, self-refinement has not garnered the same degree of scholarly attention—perhaps because it has not been explicitly lexicalised in Sanskrit. However, this article contends that together with the concepts mentioned above, a focus on self-refinement is essential for understanding and appreciating Hindu cultural reality in all its complexity. The ethnographic foundations for this essay derive from fieldwork done among Odia Hindus living in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in Odisha, eastern India. The article explores the process of maturing in this community, describing it as a cultural process in which rituals of refinement and of daily life refine and polish the raw human being to create the person, a cultural artifact. It also examines the ways in which Odia Hindu women refine themselves through cultivating self-control and exercising self-discipline, thereby transforming their ‘natural’ sakti into a kind of dharmik sakti (moral authority). Finally, the article looks at aging and the cultural practices that old people are encouraged to adopt in order to successfully disengage from the world in preparation for the final disengagement of death—and again, these practices emphasise the significance of self-discipline and self-refinement within the Hindu worldview.

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