Papa and Punya

Papa and punya are best read as quantities rather than as verdicts. An act leaves a residue on the person who does it, and the residue ripens, in this life or in a later one. Nothing in that description requires a judge; it is the karmic mechanism doing the work, and the vocabulary belongs to that mechanism rather than to a court.

The legal literature nonetheless produced something that behaves very like a code. Dharmasastra uses pataka for a sin and mahapataka for the gravest class, and the Laws of Manu name five great sins: killing a brahmin, drinking liquor, stealing a brahmin's gold, violating the bed of one's teacher, and associating with anyone who has done these things. Below them sits a much longer class of secondary offences, the upapatakas, and the texts sort them with care.

The remedy is prayaschitta, expiation, and it is administered as a tariff. Particular fasts, recitations, gifts, austerities and pilgrimages discharge particular offences, graded to what was done and to who did it. The lunar fast, the candrayana, in which the day's food is reduced and increased with the waning and waxing of the moon, is among the best known of the prescribed penances. What such a rite restores is standing, ritual and social, and the point of the literature is the matching of remedy to offence rather than any appeal to mercy.

The system is explicitly caste-inflected and does not conceal it. The weight of an act varies with the varna of the person committing it and of the person against whom it is committed, and the five great sins are themselves framed around offences involving brahmins. That is a fact about the texts and it belongs in any account of them.

Beside the expiatory system there runs an entirely different account of how papa is cleared, and Hinduism has never required a reader to choose between the two.

The Bhagavad Gita closes its argument by setting the tariff aside. Krishna tells Arjuna to abandon all duties and take refuge in him alone, and undertakes to free him from all papas, telling him not to grieve. Read against eleven chapters of Manu, that is not a graded remedy at all. It is a transfer of the whole problem to somebody else, and the bhakti literature that follows takes it up: the Bhagavata Purana tells of Ajamila, a man whose life had been thoroughly disreputable, who at the point of death called out the name of his son, which happened to be a name of Vishnu, and was released on the strength of the utterance.

The two registers coexist. Pilgrimage, gift and vow accumulate punya in one; devotion and surrender clear papa in the other; and the argument over how much of the work belongs to the devotee and how much to God is live in the theistic schools, which the atlas tracks in its entry on grace and self-effort in Vaishnavism.

What the pair together do not amount to is sin in the Abrahamic sense. There is no single lawgiver whose command has been broken, even in the devotional register, where the language is of refuge and dependence rather than of acquittal. And the mechanism itself, though shared with Buddhism and Jainism, is understood differently by each: Jain teaching treats karmic residue as a material substance adhering to the soul, and Buddhism denies there is an enduring self for the residue to adhere to at all.