How to Live
the ethic — what it asks of a life
Marry, and have children.
There is no monasticism and no celibate ideal — a Zoroastrian who does not marry has failed at something. The demographic irony is severe: the community that made reproduction a duty now has among the lowest fertility rates recorded anywhere, and its own religious obligation is the measure by which it is failing.
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Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.
Humata, hukhta, huvarshta — the oldest three-word ethics on record: every choice enlists you on one side of the war between truth and the lie.
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Do not defile the elements.
Water, earth, fire and air are creations under the care of divine beings, and polluting them is a religious offence rather than a policy failure. Modern Zoroastrians point at this with some justification when environmentalism is discussed, and it is also what makes disposing of their own dead so difficult.
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Work, plant, breed, irrigate.
The texts say that whoever sows grain sows righteousness, and that the earth is most joyful where a man builds a house with fire in it and a wife and children in it. Agriculture is a religious act because it extends the good creation. Idleness is a sin and asceticism is not a virtue.
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A contract has a god in it.
Mithra's name is the word for covenant, and to break one is to injure him. The Mihr Yasht says he ruins the house and the country of the man who lies to a contract, and it specifies that a contract with a follower of the lie binds just as tightly as one with the faithful — the obligation does not depend on who you made it with.
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Feed people at your own table.
The gahambar is a duty to eat with the whole community, contributing what you can afford, with the poor at the same table. The institutional afterlife of this is remarkable: Parsi trusts have funded hospitals, schools, housing colonies and famine relief on a scale wildly disproportionate to a population that has never exceeded about 130,000.
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