Dictionary of all Scriptures & Myths

SUDRA, THE FOURTH CASTE

A symbol of the physical-nature of man, or the human physical body.

“One occupation only the Lord prescribed to the Sudra, to serve meekly even these other three castes." - Laws of Manu, I. 91.

The physical and sense-nature of the outermost vehicle of the soul is for activity and experience only, in entire subordination to the desires, the mind and the will (the other castes), which rule it both for their own contentment and its preservation.

"The idea that we have disengaged from the facts and confirmed by reasoning is that our body is an instrument of action, and of action only." - H. BERGSON, Matter and Memory, p. 299.

"If the urge of the body did not exist, we should have no governments, no politics, no cities, factories, ships, railway lines, and standing armies. If you ask yourself why human beings should be brigaded as they are, why we have legislators, commerce, industry, and the like, the answer is, that it is because we have bodies; if we had no bodies we should have none of these things, nor should we want them. It is the struggle to maintain our individual bodily organization that has driven us to adopt first one expedient and then another for facilitating the work; all discovery, all progress, all mental activity even, springs from this humble root. It created the family, the tribe, the nation, forced us to combine for common ends in ways that otherwise we never should have done, and has thus produced all the higher intellectual and social results, all the refinement, culture, and spiritual life that we enjoy together to-day. I say that whatever your spirit may be, and it is probably greater far than you yet know, this is the way in which it has learned to manifest." - R. J. CAMPBELL, Serm., Through Death to Life.

See Also

ANUBIS
ARTIFICER
BIRTH (second)
CASTES
CLASSES
HESTIA
MARRIAGE (castes)
MATTER
NEPHTHYS
SIGYN