Inheritance

Thai (หนุมาน) iconography of
Hanuman (हनुमान्)
From the Ramakien (รามเกียรติ์)

Inheritance |
Friday – May 22, 2026

Inheritance is one fairly controversial subject, especially in the wake of multiculturalism... The fact is of course that the issue or matter of inheritance, depending on your view, tends to vary across cultures: in some cultures there is indeed and has indeed been, at least for some time, a practice of dividing up the inheritance across each eligible member, in a "fair" or egalitarian way, but in many cultures this is simply not the practice today nor was it in the past.

    First of all, let us understand the matter of inheritance from a purely Western and action oriented point of view: in the West, the political objective of egalitarianism makes a lot of claims for itself, but it is true though, that Christendom has a practice of dividing the inheritance between men and women equally, and to that extend it would perhaps be quite right to invoke the Bible, but the problem is of course that the Bible merely refers to the inheritance of the Celestial paradise (New Testament) and makes no real or substantive claims about the material inheritance on Earth, and the fact is that for most of history, it was the case, even in the West, that men inherited a larger portion of the fathers estate, for instance, mostly because men have been deemed more action oriented and more capable and suited for the corporeal domain, read "Gender Roles" and "Feminism – mini series", something that is almost entirely lost on the moderns; so essentially, what we are dealing with here is really a spiritual conflict, where the humanists and the egalitarians have inserted themselves into the theology of Christian inheritance, and unless the Old Testament should apply, within the context of the West, all of these civil codes have been allowed, for the most part without resistance, to claim Christian morality and even Christian doctrine.

    What I am not attempting to do here is to argue in favor or against a certain and defined inheritance practice, and certainty I wish not to engage in the politics of the subject at hand, but I do believe that I should afford to expose the doctrinal atrophy involved in this matter, something that I have done with the subject of marriage for instance, read more about marriage here. I should also state that when it comes to the issue of inheritance there is no one way in which which this subject is broached, and I do not intend to come of as too "causal" about this rather serious issue that indeed affects most people at one point or another, and this is also why I should keep separate, read "Prejudice", the issue of legal or judicial (political) inheritance and inheritance according to the great tradition, as that tradition tends to be expressed in the context of some culture – really how traditions are shaped by the parochialism of the original tribe, read "What Is the 'Anthropological Distance'?". Further, it is also the case, seemingly at any rate, that I as well as most other people tend to assume that inheritance only concerns the children of the diseased father, but this is also not the case; from a traditional and historical point of view, inheritance is and was something that concerned the tribe or the society, but in our days of individualism and singular expression, it would seem that most people only contain inheritance within the walls of the "home"; the word "home" here referring to the modern conception of "home" as being the small world contained within the boundaries of the personalized Euclidean room as defined by "preference", read "The Problem of Borders". Whatever goes on within the confines of this small or smaller world appears to be growing in dissonance compared to the world at large, which is interesting considering the topic at hand, and this is perhaps, I am merely speculating here, the reason why people are so fabulous and outrageous at the same time whenever the subject of money is concerned, and really if anything can make men grow into monsters over night is is surely the ugly politics of money, read "Gold".

    All of these Western confusions and infantile disorders aside, you may ask: what about Islam and the other major metaphysical traditions? In accordance with Islamic jurisprudence Fiqh (فِقْه), men should inherent twice the amount of women: in other words, between the brother and the sister, it would be in accordance not with secular laws, who prescribe something else, that the brother, the son concerned, should inherent two thirds, while the sister, the daughter concerned, should inherent one third; of course, the math can tend to differ if there are more than two children concerned, but the general rule is that the son always inherits more than the daughter, for the son is tasked with the up-keeping of the daughter, and a similar situation is also true whenever there is a wife, presumably the mother, involved, and it gets further complicated still if there are multiple wives involved, but in these situations the rule is that the son, or sons, concerned should receive more than anyone else, for similar reasons, read "Polygamy" and "Polygamy as an Alternative to Divorce". A similar practice used to exist within Hinduism (ॐ), Hindustani Paganism to be more precise, but the case of Hinduism is more complex and would involve a study of each major branch within this tradition, as there is no one Hinduism and no one spiritual authority to speak of, a typical characteristic of the East; I should also mention that Hinduism, again Hindustani Paganism, has fallen victim to the schisms and intrigues of politics for some time now, read "Temporal Power", and this has certainly affected in a very adverse way the entirety of the tradition, which is why the modern expression of Hindu inheritance laws should be dismissed, and besides these inheritance laws are Hindu in name only. In this connection to the other major metaphysical traditions, I should mention as well, something I touched upon in passing above, that from an action oriented and Western point of view, inheritance is mostly understood as something that takes place actively (positivism) and is often considered something that has to be fought over, this happens quite frequently actually, but in the East, inheritance is something quite negative and passive, and there are very few men ready to battle over the material residues of a life, but then again this is precisely what life has been rendered under the material order: nothing but papers and certificates, numbers and volumes, truly this is what once made up a life, nothing else.

Reginald Drax – May 22, 2026.