Dayanand's great significance is not in the propounding of his religious philosophy, which, despite some fundamental departures, is based mainly on the Samkhya, Nyaya, the Vedas and some aspects of the main Hindu non-denominational scriptures such as the Bhagavadgita, the Yoga Sutras, the Six systems, and of course the Vedas which are his main prop. His greatest contribution lies in defining the ideals of relationship between parents and children, teacher and student, guru and disciple, the duties of householders and sannyasis, right conduct and the proper way to conduct oneself in the world. In this respect his writings have much of the idealism of the Ramayana, where too we find such directions of good conduct and the ways in which worldly duties should be discharged.

Evils For Men and Women

The evils the Swami enumerates for women are of six kinds, namely, drinking; the use of bhang (intoxiating hemp, incidentally as we have related, Dayanand himself fell into this bad habit), also the use of other such intoxicants; the company of evil persons; remaining away of the wife from her husband; going alone to have darshan of imposters and hypocrites [the indication is towards bad-charactered temple-priests, vicious persons in the garb of sadhus etc.] and sleeping or living in someone else's house [implying immorality]. The evils for men are also these [substituting 'wife' instead of 'husband'].

Education

Dayananda lays great stress on proper education, which to him is not merely acquiring knowledge, but building character also. Thus education should be comprehensive. The mother should teach the child the correct sounds of the various Hindu alphabets as soon as he begins to speak. He should be taught to speak in a sweet tone, and be encouraged to listen to the talks of wise men, to his mother and father and so forth. He should not be allowed to waste time in useless amusements, fighting, deriding others, greed, jealousy etc. When the child is five years old, he should be taught the devanagri script [Hindi], and also the scripts of other regional languages. He should be taught how to behave towards his parents, teachers, wise men, guests, people, family members, relations, sisters, brother and so forth; also reverence to god and acquiring education and following dharma.

The main duty of educating the child falls on the parents. There are three main persons who educate him - the mother, the father and the teacher. The mother ought to educate him from birth till he is five years old. The father from the sixth year to the eighth year, and from the ninth year onwards the boy [or girl] should attend school and study under the guidance of learned teachers, both men and women.

Dayanand is not in favour of pampering and doting on the child by parents and teachers. Instead, they should reprimand and punish them when occasion demands. He says: 'Those who reprimand the child are, as it were, giving them nectar with their own hands And those who pamper them are, so to say, making them drink poison and are spoiling them'. By doting on children, they develop faults and by punishing them they develop good qualities. But, he cautions the parents and teacher not to chide the boy with any revengeful attitude or hatred or because of jealousy. They should outwardly chide and reprimand him but in the hearts there should be love and kindness. This is salutary advice, and Dayanand's insistence on it at an age when the child can still be moulded, shows his far-sightedness. Many parents fail to mould their children when they can yet be moulded, and then when the boy's personality is hardened with the passage of years, they try to impose firmness. But then it is too late, and the parents have missed the bus.

The boy should be taught to abstain from theft, laxness, the use of intoxicants, useless speech, cruelty, jealousy, hatred, illusion etc., and to cultivate truthfulness. The lad should be told to keep his word always. Dayanand particularly cautions against arrogance and egotism in particular, as long before him Shankara did. Anger, cunning and guile also come in for his condemnation. Elders he says should be respected and given a seat higher than the one on which one sits. Another very sensible and useful observation of the Swami is that one should sit in an assembly or social gathering according to one's station, so that he is not made to vacate the seat when someone of greater importance comes. This is salutary advice, particularly in our country in which everything conforms to status and the high and low remains high and low whatever the function or occasion. Quite often one forgets this and is made to suffer the humiliation of having to get up and make way for a greater VIP than he thinks he is.

Dayananda also gives us tips about food. One should eat less than what his appetite is, abstain from meat, and eat what will keep him healthy, not what is merely tasty. He cautions people not to venture deep into the waters of a river or pond, perhaps a reflection of his own experience. Water, he says should be drunk after consecration. One who walks should also keep his gaze on the ground so that he avoids falling due to unevenness of the terrain - a useful hint even today for pedestrians who walk on our bumpy roads, littered with cow-dung and banana skins and holes dug (and left uncovered) for welcome arches for VIP's.

The Asharmas

Family Life

Dayananda goes on to describe the education and way of living of the grown-up youth. He follows the Hindu pattern of the four asharamas - student life, family life, and the later stages of a fort dweller and a hermit, which in our times are merely theoretical. Dayanand's views about marriage are revolutionary. He is liberal and insists on the mutual consent of the boy and the girl. He even believes in the meeting of the two and a frank talk between them in the presence of elderly respectable people. Much less sanctioning marriage of minors, Dayanand's view about the right age for marriage is rather unusual and more prevalent in western countries than in our own. The girl should be from sixteen years to twenty-four and the boy from twenty-five to forty-eight. The age difference, however, is bound to be considerable between the two in that case, particularly at the higher age limit [48 minus 24 i.e. 14].

Another rather out-of-the-ordinary view of his is that marriage should be in different sub-castes and the prospective couple should be living in places far away from each other. If the two have lived together in childhood have played and quarrelled, or have had love for each other, have known each other's qualities and faults, or have seen each other in the naked state; they should not marry. He gives various reasons for the girl and the boy living far away, for example those who have been familiar can never develop love for each other. Most of his arguments are based on the motto familiarity breeds contempt. If the married couple have their homes near, the wife will go away to her father's house on the slightest pretext. Thus Dayanand is all for arranged and intercaste marriages and certainly not in favour of local marriages. It must be said that from the medical point of view he is right, and there is much to support his contention. Though he mentions the eight kinds of marriages sanctioned by Manu, he rejects all except brahma-vivah. the nuptial ceremonies in the mandap [marriage pavilion] ought to end by ten in the night or at the most at midnight. This again simplifies the usual orthodox Hindu procedure, and is one of the gifts of the Arya Samaj. More and more Hindus are adopting this practice. The same is of course true for other practices, too, connected with birth and death ceremonies.He prohibits sexual intercourse from the time of conception for a year thereafter.