Abstract
Religious traditions routinely issue ethical directives on economic conduct, and financial stability is widely acknowledged to support spiritual life. This article advances a position more specific and stronger than either observation: within the Akṣara-Puruṣottama Darśana, ārthika vyavahāra—the conduct of one’s transactions, earnings, expenditures, and stewardship of resources—is positioned not merely as ethically regulated or prudentially wise, but as a site at which the aspirant enacts devotion (bhakti) and, thereby, cultivates a means to liberation (mokṣa). Rightly ordered financial conduct, undertaken under the instruction of the Akṣarabrahman guru, is itself a form of spiritual practice (sādhana).
The article proceeds by internal exegesis, treating the question doctrinally. It draws principally on the Satsaṅgadīkṣā, a contemporary scripture authored by Mahant Swami Maharaj, read alongside Bhagavān Svāminārāyaṇa’s Vacanāmṛta, the Svāminārāyaṇa-siddhānta-sudhā, the Darśana’s commentarial literature, and biographical accounts of the guṇātīta gurus.
After situating artha among the puruṣārthas and confronting the tradition’s own renunciatory, “artha-as-hindrance” passages, the article shows that these texts diagnose a danger rather than prescribe asceticism. Vairāgya is cultivated not by forgoing wealth but by the realization (jñāna) of the supremacy of Bhagavān’s form, which displaces worldly attachment even amid its engagement. On this basis it develops three distinct but mutually reinforcing relationships between financial conduct and spiritual life. The constitutive relationship establishes that vyavahāra undertaken with spiritual convictions and in obedience to the guru becomes bhaktirūpa pravṛtti and converges on the guru’s identity as the complete vessel of Parabrahman. The enabling relationship examines how financial stability secures the time, resources, and morally permissible scope that devotional life requires, while remaining contingent on circumstance. Finally, the formative relationship traces how apt conduct exercises and consolidates spiritual virtues, including viveka, restraint, truthfulness, niṣkāma-sevā, and non-attachment, while inapt conduct erodes them. The article concludes that the boundary between worldly and spiritual life within this Darśana is less a partition than a porous field, in which a bounded domain of worldly conduct is reconstituted as a site for the enactment of spiritual practice (sādhana).