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Stations and Stages of Life (Varṇa & Āśrama)
Four orders of society and four seasons of a life, each with its own appointed duty.
Classical Hindu texts organize social and personal life through two interlocking schemes: varṇa, four broad orders of society, each with characteristic duties; and āśrama, four successive stages of a life — the celibate student, the married householder, the retired forest-dweller, and the renunciant who has left all worldly ties to seek liberation. The framework is a normative ideal from the law-books; its relationship to the lived realities of caste over history is complex and much debated by scholars.
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