Hindu Ethics: A historical and critical essay

The subject of Hindu ethics is intimately connected with the Hindu religious teachings and principles. A study of these ethical principles, therefore, entails the laborious task of tracing them out from the religious literature of India from the earliest times. John McKenzie, in the present work, Hindu Ethics, has tried to study the various phases of Hindu ethical thought as are discernible from the main philosophical and theological systems of India. In this historical and critical essay, McKenzie has covered this vast subject with a view to giving a general conspectus of Hindu intellectual and speculative thought as it is connected with the subject of morality. McKenzie has divided the work into three Books and an Epilogue in which he has discussed the Hindu and the Christian ethic. Book I, deals with the beginning of ethical thought as discernible in the Vedas and the Sutra literature. It has been divided into three chapters, Beginning of Ethical Thought in the Rig Veda, Magic and Religion, and Dharma. Book II, concerns with the ethics propounded in the philosophies and theologies as embodied in the Upanishads, the Buddhist and the Jain systems, in the Bhagavadgita, the Six-systems of Philosophy, the Bhakti movement and in modern Hindu thought. In Book III, entitled the Weightier Elements of Hindu Ethics, McKenzie has discussed the outstanding features of Hindu ethical thought, the doctrines of Karma and the Transmigration, Hindu asceticism and the bearing these have had on the ethical thinking of the Hindus, alongwith a chapter, the Positive Contribution of Hinduism to Ethical Thought. McKenzie’s work should be of great value to the student of religion and ethics and, in particular, to the Western student of ethics and comparative religions.