Is There Anything Called an Individual? Dharma, Mokṣa, and the Web We Are Born Into
I have been pondering over this for a while now – On why (it seems to me, happy to be corrected) every concept in the Indian Knowledge Systems — from karma to mokṣa — quietly assumes the collective, and what happens to a civilisation that forgets this.
Let me begin with a set of questions that sound simple and are not.
Is there anything called an individual? Is mokṣa an individual pursuit only? Would we have dharma at all if each of us lived alone, by ourselves, in a jungle? Would any concept from the Indian Knowledge Systems hold for the solitary individual — in the complete absence of the collective?
Sit with those questions for a moment before reaching for an answer, because the modern mind has a ready-made answer already loaded: of course the individual exists, of course my liberation is my own business, of course my rights are mine. The entire edifice of modern thought — its economics, its psychology, its politics — stands on the sovereign, separate individual as its foundation stone. My submission in this essay is that the foundation stone is a mirage, that our tradition knew this with great precision, and that nearly everything going wrong around us today can be traced to building on that mirage.
So let us state the position plainly at the outset and then test it from every angle we can find: each one of us is a piece of a collective whole. Not poetically. Actually.
The web begins at home
Take the smallest collective you know — a family. What is a family, really? It is a network, a living web of influence in which everyone is continuously shaping everyone else. Nothing needs to be announced for this shaping to happen. They say that over time husband and wife begin to look like each other. Whether or not you take that literally, every one of us has watched something like it: the borrowed phrases, the converging opinions, the moods that move through a household like weather.
And the influence does not stop at the level of speech and behaviour. There is influence at the level of thought itself. Thoughts and ideas do not have to be spoken to do their work — held strongly enough in one mind, they colour the minds around them. Anyone who has lived in a home where one person carries a long-nursed resentment, or a quiet steady devotion, knows exactly what I mean. The atmosphere knows, even when the words never come.
Climb one level subtler, to the language of the kośas, and the picture becomes sharper still. The subtle body of a spiritually elevated person is wider and more expansive than the ordinary, and this is why hundreds of people can come and sit in the presence of such a person and taste something of the peace he has achieved within himself. They have done none of his sādhanā. Yet they experience a fraction of its fruit, simply by sitting inside the field of it.
And what do we mean by that word, peace? We do not mean a pleasant mood. We mean harmony. We mean clarity. We mean the absence of confusion — the settled state of an antaḥkaraṇa no longer churned by the ṣaḍripus, the six inner enemies, and no longer knotted by the pañca kleśas, the five afflictions. Peace, in our tradition, is not an emotion. It is the natural condition of an instrument that has been cleaned. And notice what we have just observed: even this most inward of achievements radiates outward. The most private victory turns out to be a public good.
Born in debt
Our tradition does not merely observe the web of connection. It formalises it, and it does so at the very entry point of a human life. We say that every human being is born with the pañca ṛṇas — the five debts: to the ṛṣis who gave us knowledge, to the devas who sustain the cosmic order, to the pitṛs who gave us this body and this lineage, to our fellow human beings, and to the other living beings with whom we share this earth. The oldest Vedic statements name three of these debts — to the ṛṣis, the devas, and the pitṛs — and the tradition, in time, expanded them to five, in step with the five great daily sacrifices. And because we are born in debt, we are given the pañcamahāyajñas — those five great daily sacrifices — as the means of continual repayment.
Pause on the design of this. Before you have earned anything, achieved anything, or chosen anything, you are already declared a debtor five times over. The tradition’s very first statement about the individual is that he arrives owing. There is no fantasy here of the self-made man who owes nothing to anyone. The web of connections, relationships, and debts is not something you enter by contract. You are born into it, and the religious life is substantially the honest servicing of it.
Then consider the theory of karma. Almost the entirety of it rests on the collective — or at the very least on the interrelationship between people, and between people and other living beings. Every action lands somewhere, on someone. Every fruit ripens through a field of others. The pañca ṛṇas and karma are two descriptions of the same underlying truth: that there is no such thing as an action, a debt, or a destiny that is sealed off inside a single skin.
What it takes to make one adult
If the metaphysics feels distant, run the arithmetic instead. Take eighteen as the age at which we call someone an adult, and ask an honest question: how many people in a society are involved in one child reaching that age as a fully functional adult?
A place to stay. Food to eat. Education. Clothes. Medicine. Safety. Yes, the parents may be paying for all of it — but paying is not producing. All of it is possible only because the farmer is doing his job, the soldier is doing his job, the banker is doing his job, the teacher, the weaver, the mason, the doctor are doing theirs. One “individual” adult is the finished work of thousands of hands he will never see.
And now turn the picture around. The farmer also has children. The soldier also has children. So do the banker and the merchant. Every one of them needs, for their own children, the services of all the others. So even at the plainest social and economic level — before we say a single word about subtle bodies or cosmic debts — human life is a web of interconnections in which everyone is simultaneously provider and dependent. The individual is not the input to society. He is one of its outputs.
Communities, and the mental models they carry
Within a family, everyone influences everyone, but some people carry a larger influence than others — and that influence works across generations. A grandmother’s convictions can be visibly alive in a grandchild who never met her. The same pattern repeats at the next scale. Communities formed around shared work — merchant communities are a fine example, appearing across Bhārata under various names, formats, and traditions — come to share certain ideas, themes, and concepts: essentially, mental models that drive them. Merchant communities across the country, and even across nations, recognise something of themselves in one another.
And yet even these communities sit inside a larger rubric defined by geography, language, and custom, which is why the merchant communities of different states differ from each other even as they rhyme. The web is layered: family inside community, community inside region, region inside civilisation. At no layer do you find the sealed, self-contained individual. At every layer you find a person constituted by his memberships.
Test it against any collective you like. Students in a school, a college, a university — and students as a whole across the world. Teachers likewise. Lawyers, doctors, policemen, engineers. Do you not find that the mental models that drive individual decisions, shape worldviews, and spark action are formed by the collective a person belongs to and identifies with? And so also for the different states within a country, and the different countries within the world. The “individual” opinion is very often the collective’s opinion, spoken in the first person singular.
Mokṣa is not a private exit
Here the modern mind raises its strongest objection. Very well, it says — society is interdependent. But surely mokṣa, at least, is the individual’s own affair? The lone seeker, renouncing the world, winning his private liberation?
The tradition’s answer is subtle and devastating. Mokṣa is not a selfish pursuit for an individual ego, because mokṣa is precisely the total dissolution of the separate individual self into the infinite, non-dual reality. As Swami Sarvapriyananda puts it in his expositions of Advaita Vedānta, liberation means waking up from the illusion that you are an isolated, limited person competing with the world. The very “individual” who was supposed to be pursuing a private liberation is the illusion that liberation dissolves. You cannot keep the separate self and attain mokṣa, for mokṣa is the discovery — when the veils of māyā are removed — that the collective and the individual were never two.
There is a striking sūtra in Shiva Sutras that presses the point from another side: jñānaṁ bandhaḥ — knowledge is bondage. Knowledge here means the knowledge derived through the sensory organs, the knowledge acquired through ordinary experience. This knowledge is different in kind from supreme knowledge, which is not assembled out of sense-reports at all. Knowledge acquired through sensory perception is limited because it is shaped through and through by māyā — and chief among its fabrications is the perception of oneself as a bounded, separate unit looking out at a world of other bounded, separate units. The most basic thing the senses “know” — that I end at my skin — is exactly what the tradition asks us to outgrow.
Even the four puruṣārthas, which we rightly describe as the legitimate aims of an individual life, tell the same story when you look closely. Dharma is meaningless without others to act rightly towards. Artha is created, exchanged, and enjoyed inside an economy of others. Kāma, the whole domain of desire and delight, is relational to its core. And mokṣa, as we have just seen, is the realisation that the individual and the whole are one. The four aims are given to the individual, but every one of them exists and operates in the context of the collective. The same holds for the modern vocabulary too: whether we speak of individual rights or individual duties, both make sense only against the backdrop of a collective. A right is a claim on others; a duty is owed to others. Strip away the others and both words evaporate.
Any way you look at it — psychologically, physiologically, economically, karmically, metaphysically — it is impossible to escape the idea of the collective.
The powder keg and the unprepared mind
You may say: these are ideas from a different age, a different time. No. The opposite is true. We have a more interconnected world today than at any point in history, and the web has only grown tighter and faster. Some kid writing something in one corner of the world can kindle a revolution in another country. Ideas have always been powerful, and dangerous ideas have always been, well, dangerous. What has changed is that we have now empowered everyone in the world to light the powder keg.
And here is the part that ought to keep serious people awake at night. While the industrialised world was busy building the infrastructure that makes it possible for anyone to communicate anything to everyone, we entirely neglected — whether by design or by accident — the instrument that generates those thoughts and ideas in the first place: the mind, or more precisely the antaḥkaraṇa. People without viveka have been handed extraordinarily powerful tools.
Look for yourself: there is no mainstream curriculum anywhere in the world that works on developing the dharma lakṣaṇas (Dhriti, Kshama, Dama etc) in the young, in the integrated, telos-anchored sense our tradition intended. Surely, mainly will point to moral education etc but that is different. So the floodgates of information stand open: the true, the untrue, the partially true, the somewhat true, the neither-true-nor-untrue, who knows. And this flood is pouring into unprepared minds and working them up into a kind of intense, free-floating anger.
Understand what this anger is. It is also a transfer of energy across the web — the same web through which a sage’s peace radiates — except that what is being transferred now is negative energy. And anger energy will seek an outlet. It always does. The Gītā traced the trajectory long ago:
क्रोधाद्भवति संमोहः संमोहात्स्मृतिविभ्रमः ।
स्मृतिभ्रंशाद्बुद्धिनाशो बुद्धिनाशात्प्रणश्यति ॥
krodhād bhavati sammohaḥ sammohāt smṛti-vibhramaḥ | smṛti-bhraṁśād buddhi-nāśo buddhi-nāśāt praṇaśyati ||
From anger comes delusion. From delusion, the confounding of memory. From the ruin of memory, the destruction of the buddhi. And from the destruction of the buddhi, he perishes.
Śrī Kṛṣṇa is making it unmistakably clear: once the buddhi is destroyed, the final destruction is inevitable. So the thing we must protect, preserve, and develop — in ourselves and in our young — is the buddhi. We need viveka, and viveka arises from a combination of personal effort, parental guidance, a guru’s grace, and many other factors besides. Read that list again and notice what it means: even the individual buddhi is collectively developed. The individual welfare for which viveka is needed is itself a collective pursuit. Our ancestors understood this with complete clarity, and so they built community systems — gurukulas, paramparās, sampradāyas, sabhās — to implement that understanding at scale.
The enemies within, and who helps you fight them
The tradition names the inner obstacles with a precision the modern vocabulary of “issues” and “toxicity” cannot match. Patañjali lists the five afflictions:
अविद्यास्मितारागद्वेषाभिनिवेशाः क्लेशाः ॥
avidyā-asmitā-rāga-dveṣa-abhiniveśāḥ kleśāḥ ||
Ignorance, the sense of a separate “I”, attraction, aversion, and the clinging to bodily existence — these are the kleśas. The transition is not perfect, but you get the point! And the tradition is blunt about their behaviour: if these are not specifically worked upon, under suitable guidance, they do not politely wait. They grow stronger as life goes along. (Of course the work done in your past janma, the sadhana of your ancestors and parents helps).
Alongside the Kleshas stand the ṣaḍripus, the six enemies of the inner life: kāma, craving and intense passion that clouds judgement; krodha, the rage that erupts when desire is blocked; lobha, the greed that can never say enough; moha, the deluded infatuation with the world’s objects; mada, the arrogance born of power, beauty, or status; and mātsarya, the envy of another’s success or qualities. Acting under their influence generates negative karma and suffering; left unattended, they pull the mind steadily away from truth and self-knowledge.
Working on these is a lifelong process — it is never done until it is really, finally done. But here is the point that belongs to this essay: nobody fights these enemies alone. The very awareness of their existence, and the social expectation that one ought to be working on them, is itself a gift of the collective. And those who belong to any of Bhārata’s genuine spiritual traditions — the paramparās and sampradāyas — have an entire living community continuously discussing these enemies, writing about them, and helping people work on them under the guidance of ācāryas and gurus. Such people can escape the danger to a very great extent. The lone individual, armed with a few podcasts and his own untrained introspection, generally cannot. Even the war against the inner enemies is fought with an army.
The crab, the corporation, and mātsarya
And yet — after so many thousands of years of human history, with such a wealth of knowledge and guidance available in our own Knowledge Systems — we have still not escaped the idea of separateness. Worse, many people genuinely believe that putting someone else down is essential to one’s own climb.
There is a popular parable told about this, the so-called Indian crab story. A vendor transports baskets of crabs from different countries, and every basket is fitted with a tight lid to stop the creatures escaping — every basket except one, which stands open. A curious bystander asks why that basket needs no cover. Because those are the Indian crabs, the vendor replies. If any one of them tries to climb out, the others will reach up and pull it back down. The story is almost certainly apocryphal and rather unfair as a national label, since the mentality it describes is universal — but as a portrait of what envy does inside a collective, it is painfully exact.
Of all the ṣaḍripus, the one that shows up most prominently as a cause of social friction is mātsarya. And here is the strange thing: you can find mātsarya thriving even inside spiritual organisations — organisations whose entire stated purpose is to free people from the ṣaḍripus are sometimes among the most afflicted by this one.
Why should that be? Look at who joins. Type (A): These days a large share of the people entering spiritual organisations received their education in modern schools, in Bhārata or abroad, and then spent decades in senior leadership roles in various organizations, achieving great success in material and industrial terms — or straining to. Now, a lot of those places do have ethics of a kind: codes of conduct, compliance manuals, fiduciary duties. But these are rule-based instruments — the Western model of ethics — fixed prescriptions applied uniformly and policed from outside. Dharma is of a different order altogether: contextual, situational, alive to the person, the place, and the moment. Dharma may not be found in those places. And where dharma is not found, matsya nyāya prevails — the law of the fish, where the big swallow the small. The orgaization trains a person’s whole being for exactly that water: to compete, to fight for prominence, to play the games of intrigue, to humiliate rivals, to misunderstand others — for even hearing and perception depend on viveka — to bad-mouth colleagues, to manufacture stories. One also learns to follow the leader without actually following his vision. They are competencies. These are not character flaws in that world. Type (B): But truth be told, many of the same organizations also have real gems (people) who by divine grace, guru’s grace, parents’ blessings and community influence escape all these things, are able to work on themselves and come out unaffected. Usually these are people who have found their swadharma. But we are talking of the Type (A) people.
Take such a person — modern-schooled, modern org-forged, decorated with every material laurel — and place him in any organisation whatsoever, and he cannot help but carry those mental models in with him. The very habits that made him successful in the boardroom make him an instrument of friction in a spiritual or community setting. And when such a person watches someone else quietly begin to shine — someone who, from his own side, is simply following his svadharma — the mātsarya bhāva swells until it becomes a disease. Soon it reaches the point where the afflicted person says, in so many words: it is either me or him. This happens in every kind of organisation, all over the world — which is precisely why there is so often a chasm between an organisation’s stated vision and the lived reality of the people inside it. Any type of organisation you can think of. Not only spiritual ones.
I will add something here from my own life, because I have sat in the chair in question. Having been a top executive myself, I can tell you it is a very lonely place, and the windshield begins to blur very fast. Sometimes the person in that chair simply needs to speak with someone who is not weighed down by the responsibilities of it. CEOs are naturally drawn to calm, composed, stable, knowledgeable individuals with whom they can think aloud. And here is the uncomfortable truth: the people holding the exact title for that advisory role often do not possess the qualities the CEO is actually seeking. So he keeps scanning until he finds someone who is an energetic, intellectual, and spiritual match — and the moment he finds that person, everyone else who coveted the seat near him begins the familiar arithmetic of envy. Watch any corporation closely and you will see the whole court drama in miniature: who sits near the big boss, who lunches with him, who has his ear. It makes the CEO’s position harder still.
The quest for significance, and the missing svadharma
Dig beneath all this fighting for prominence and you find, at the very bottom, a quest for significance. And that quest burns hottest in individuals who have never spent the time and effort required to discover themselves. Such a person suffers twice over: he is falsely identified with a mirage, and he is rudderless, rootless, and directionless — because he has not found his svadharma. Not knowing what is genuinely his to do, he demands that some collective — his company, his community, his organisation — supply the significance he has not earned from within. No organisation can solve this problem for him. It is not that kind of problem.
And this, ultimately, is a consequence of the destruction of our ancient education system — a system that was consciously aligned with the puruṣārthas and with svabhāva and svadharma, designed to help each person discover what he is before deciding what he should do. Unless Bhārata can bring back the ideas of svabhāva and svadharma in a serious, large-scale way, we will not truly benefit from the Indian Knowledge Systems, however many conferences we hold in their honour.
For remember where this corpus came from. The texts we today call a knowledge system were not produced in isolated ancient research centres. They emerged from two sources. First, from our ṛṣis contemplating collective welfare in a state of supreme consciousness — a state in which phenomenal reality can be known by direct perception rather than inference. And second, from the sincere efforts of the elders of society who, with the guidance of those ṛṣis, jostled with the living problems of social friction and worked out how to create harmony, happiness, and wellbeing for all. Both springs are collective to the core. The knowledge was born from the collective, for the collective.
Anyone who is sincere about IKS, then, should want exactly what its creators wanted: that this knowledge help us create harmony, stability, and prosperity in society — and prosperity here is not defined in currency alone; our tradition counts wealth in eight forms, as the Aṣṭalakṣmī remind us.
The root of sukha, and the leader we are not producing
Cāṇakya compressed the entire political economy of wellbeing into a chain of sūtras: sukhasya mūlaṁ dharmaḥ — the root of happiness is dharma. Dharmasya mūlam arthaḥ — the root of dharma is artha, for a starving society cannot sustain righteousness. But the chain does not stop there, and this is where our trouble begins: the root of artha is rājyam, the state; and the root of the state is indriyajaya — the ruler’s victory over his own senses.
Follow the chain to its end and you arrive at an unsettling conclusion. The sukha of an entire people finally rests on the inner discipline of its leaders. And where, today, is such a leader being formed? There is hardly any place on earth where leaders are being deliberately groomed into dharmic shape — trained in indriyajaya, steeped in dharmaniṣṭhā, and then given the power to design, govern, and administer according to dharma. Without such determined, dharma-anchored leadership, it is very hard to bring real sukha to a people, no matter how loudly the word is used in manifestos.
So to achieve sukhasya mūlaṁ dharmaḥ, the design calls for two people at the summit of a society. The first is the ruler — the one who has won indriyajaya, victory over his own senses, and who therefore works for the welfare of the people through dharma. The word itself announces the job description: dhārayati iti dharmaḥ — dharma is that which upholds, sustains, holds together. The second is the sage, the guru — the one who has completely removed the veil of māyā, achieved self-realisation, and now works only for the collective good. And notice why he alone can be trusted with that role: he can work purely for the collective precisely because he has realised advaita. Having discovered that the separate self was never real, there is no private interest left in him to serve. His welfare and the world’s welfare have collapsed into a single thing — he is the living proof of the thesis of this essay.
I think we had a beautiful design. The details can change from age to age — the titles, the institutions, the outer forms. But these two elements would be needed in any age: one is the driver, the other is the navigator. The rājā drives the state; the ṛṣi reads the terrain. Remove the navigator, and the driver — however disciplined — is powerful and lost. Remove the driver, and the navigator’s vision has no wheels.
And what do many of us mean by sukha in the meantime? Be honest about the picture. Very little or no hard work. Nothing strenuous asked of the mind — light and easy mental tasks only. A Netflix subscription. The Swiggy or Zomato app. UPI connected to a bank account into which money somehow shows up by itself. Ola or Uber at the kerb. An air-conditioned apartment with the rent prepaid, and a car whose tank remains mysteriously full. Some of the prophets of AI are promising us exactly this, and more, coming soon. It is a vision of sukha with the human being carefully removed from it — comfort without effort, consumption without contribution, an “individual” serviced by invisible systems and owing nothing to anyone. It is, in other words, the precise inversion of the pañca ṛṇas with which we began. The tradition says you are born owing five debts. The app economy says you are born owed everything.
So what is the solution?
Go back to ancient times? Try to recreate the past? These are loaded questions, and I will not pretend to a neat answer that fits in a closing paragraph. All I will say is this: when you really understand a problem — patiently, honestly, all the way down — the solution slowly begins to emerge from that true understanding. And the understanding this essay has tried to build is simple to state and hard to absorb: there is no such thing as a self-made individual, there never was, and every concept our civilisation produced — from the five debts of birth to the final dissolution of mokṣa — was designed for beings who are pieces of a collective whole, by seers who could perceive that wholeness directly.
The individual is real enough as an address for effort — it is you who must do your sādhanā, you who must find your svadharma, you who must fight your ṣaḍripus. But the effort is fed by the collective, guided by the collective, and its fruit returns to the collective. Individual welfare is a collective pursuit, and collective welfare is an individual pursuit. Hold both ends of that sentence at once, and you are already thinking like a Bhāratīya again.
Hope this resonates with you.
Select References
Bhagavad Gītā 2.63 — verse beginning krodhād bhavati sammohaḥ, on the cascade from anger through delusion and the ruin of memory to the destruction of the buddhi.
Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 2.3 — avidyāsmitārāgadveṣābhiniveśāḥ kleśāḥ, the five afflictions.
Śiva Sūtra 1.2 — jñānaṁ bandhaḥ, on sensory knowledge as bondage. Discussed at advaitavedanta.in (Dakṣiṇāmūrti series).
Cāṇakya Sūtras — sukhasya mūlaṁ dharmaḥ; dharmasya mūlam arthaḥ; arthasya mūlaṁ rājyam; rājyasya mūlam indriyajayaḥ.
Swami Sarvapriyananda — expositions of Advaita Vedānta on liberation as the dissolution of the separate self. (Paraphrased from his public teachings; no single lecture cited.)
Michel Danino, “India’s Take on the Individual vs Collective,” Pragyata (pragyata.com).
The “Indian crab” parable — popular oral parable of crab mentality.
