Dharmaधर्म

Dharma (Sanskrit धर्म; Pāli dhamma) is the most important and most untranslatable idea in Indian thought. Its root, dhṛ, means “to hold, support, sustain”, and in its widest sense dharma is that which holds the world together: the order of nature, of society and of the moral life, and the conduct by which each being upholds that order. It can mean law, duty, custom, virtue, righteousness, religion, justice and the essential nature of a thing, depending on context. In the Hindu traditions, dharma is the first of the four aims of human life and the subject of a vast literature of law and ethics. For Buddhists, the Dhamma is the teaching of the Buddha — the truth about suffering and its end — and, in philosophy, the dhammas are the momentary elements of which all experience is made. For Jains, dharma is both the moral law and, strangely, a physical substance: the medium of motion. The word runs through every Indian language today, and through the national flag.

Origins: from ṛta to dharma

The word appears already in the The Ṛg Veda, usually as dharman, “support” or “foundation” — the gods “fix” the heavens and the earth by their dharman. But in the hymns the dominant idea of cosmic order is ṛta: the order that makes the sun rise and the rivers flow, of which Varuṇa and Mitra are the guardians. Over the Vedic period, dharma gradually took over the role of ṛta, while shifting its centre of gravity. Where ṛta was an order of the cosmos to which ritual conformed, dharma became more and more the order of action: what people must do to sustain the world. In the ritual texts (brāhmaṇas), the sacrifice holds up the universe; to perform it rightly is dharma.

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad gives a famous early definition. In the beginning, it says, the world was Brahman alone, and it was not powerful enough; so it created the classes of society; and still it was not complete; so it created dharma: “There is nothing higher than dharma. So a weak man overcomes a strong man by dharma, just as if by a king. Dharma is truth. So people say of a man who speaks the truth that he speaks dharma, and of a man who speaks dharma that he speaks the truth” (1.4.14). Already dharma is a power above kings, identical with truth.

Dharma in the Hindu traditions

The Dharmaśāstras

From about the sixth century BCE, a body of texts called Dharmasūtras and then Dharmaśāstras (treatises on dharma) set out the rules of right conduct in detail: ritual duties, purification, diet, marriage, inheritance, crime and punishment, the duties of kings, penances for sins. The most famous is the Mānava Dharmaśāstra or Laws of Manu (Manusmṛti, c. 2nd century BCE–2nd century CE), followed by those of Yājñavalkya, Nārada and Parāśara. These texts recognise four sources of dharma, in descending authority: the Veda (śruti); the tradition of those who know the Veda (smṛti); the conduct of good people (sadācāra); and, last, what is pleasing to oneself (ātmatuṣṭi) — conscience.

Varṇāśrama-dharma

The Dharmaśāstras make dharma relative to one’s place in society. Each person’s duties depend on their varṇa — the four classes of Brahmin (priest and teacher), Kṣatriya (warrior and ruler), Vaiśya (farmer and merchant) and Śūdra (servant) — and on their āśrama, or stage of life: student (brahmacarya), householder (gṛhastha), forest-dweller (vānaprastha) and renunciant (saṃnyāsa). This system, varṇāśrama-dharma, is the heart of classical Hindu social theory. It was always an ideal more than a description — real society was organised into thousands of local endogamous groups, jātis — but it gave religious sanction to hierarchy, and above all to the exclusion and oppression of those outside or at the bottom of the system, the people once called “untouchable”, who today call themselves Dalits. The critique of this dharma by B. R. Ambedkar, who publicly burned the Manusmṛti in 1927, is one of the great moral arguments of modern India.

Svadharma

The most influential and controversial formulation is the idea of svadharma, “one’s own dharma”. Its classic statement is in the The Bhagavad Gītā. On the battlefield of Kurukṣetra, the warrior Arjuna refuses to fight his kinsmen. Kṛṣṇa answers that as a Kṣatriya his duty is to fight a righteous war; to abandon it would be shameful and sinful:

Better one’s own dharma, though imperfectly performed, than the dharma of another well performed. Better is death in one’s own dharma; the dharma of another is fraught with danger. (3.35, repeated at 18.47)

Read one way, this is a conservative doctrine: stay in the station of your birth. Read another way — as Gandhi, Tilak and Aurobindo read it — it is a doctrine of authenticity: find the work that is truly yours and do it without attachment to the results. The tension between these readings runs through all modern debate about the Gītā.

Sādhāraṇa-dharma: duties for all

Alongside the duties of class and stage of life, the texts list sādhāraṇa-dharma, “common dharma”, binding on everyone. Manu gives ten: steadfastness, forgiveness, self-control, not stealing, purity, control of the senses, wisdom, learning, truthfulness and absence of anger. The Mahābhārata and the Yoga Sūtras list similar virtues, headed by ahiṃsā — non-violence. “Non-violence is the highest dharma” (ahiṃsā paramo dharmaḥ) is one of the most quoted lines of the The Mahābhārata. These universal duties stand in permanent tension with the particular duties of caste and role; much Indian ethics is the attempt to reconcile them.

The four aims of life

Classical Hinduism names four puruṣārthas, aims of human life: dharma (righteousness), artha (wealth and power), kāma (pleasure and love) and mokṣa (liberation). Each has its own science: the Dharmaśāstras, Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, Vātsyāyana’s Kāmasūtra, and the philosophical schools. The first three, the trivarga, belong to life in the world; dharma regulates the other two, so that wealth and pleasure are pursued rightly. Mokṣa, liberation from the cycle of rebirth (Saṃsāra), transcends them all — and some schools hold that the liberated person is beyond dharma itself.

Dharma is subtle

The great epic, the Mahābhārata, is in a sense a vast inquiry into dharma, and its conclusion is that dharma is subtle (sūkṣma) — so subtle that even the wise disagree. “The truth of dharma is hidden in a cave,” says Yudhiṣṭhira. Bhīṣma keeps his vow of celibacy and enables catastrophe; Yudhiṣṭhira obeys the warrior’s code that forbids refusing a challenge and gambles away his wife; the Pāṇḍavas win their righteous war only by breaking its rules. When Draupadī is dragged into the assembly hall and asks whether her husband had the right to stake her, the elders answer that dharma is subtle and fall silent. The epic also contains the doctrine of āpad-dharma, “dharma in emergencies”, which permits in extremity what is otherwise forbidden — the sage Viśvāmitra, starving in a famine, steals dog-meat from an outcaste and argues that preserving life is the higher duty.

Dharma and the king

In Indian political thought the king is the protector of dharma, and his chief instrument is daṇḍa, the rod of punishment. “If the king did not tirelessly inflict punishment on those deserving it, the stronger would roast the weaker like fish on a spit,” says Manu (7.20) — the “law of the fishes” (mātsya-nyāya), the big fish eating the small, is the state of nature without dharma. Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra makes the same argument in a more hard-headed spirit. The Buddhist emperor Aśoka (r. c. 268–232 BCE) proclaimed a new politics of dhamma in rock edicts across his empire: non-violence, tolerance of all sects, care for animals and the poor, and “conquest by dhamma” rather than by war, after his remorse at the slaughter of Kaliṅga.

Dharma in the philosophical schools

The Mīmāṃsā school, the most rigorous interpreters of the Veda, opens its root text with the words “Now, therefore, the inquiry into dharma” (athāto dharma-jijñāsā) and defines dharma as “that which is indicated by Vedic injunction as leading to the good”. For Mīmāṃsā, dharma cannot be known by perception or reason, only by the eternal Veda; and its content is primarily ritual. The Vaiśeṣika school defined dharma as “that from which comes prosperity and the highest good”. The Nyāya and Vedānta schools, especially Ādi Śaṅkara, subordinated dharma to knowledge: ritual action and moral duty purify the mind, but only knowledge of Brahman liberates.

Dhamma in Buddhism

For Buddhists, dhamma has three main meanings. First, it is the teaching of the Gautama Buddha — the Four Noble Truths and the path to the end of suffering — one of the “Three Jewels” in which every Buddhist takes refuge: the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Saṅgha (community). The Buddha’s first sermon at Sārnāth is called “setting in motion the wheel of dhamma” (Dhammacakkappavattana). The Buddha said that whoever sees dependent origination sees the dhamma, and whoever sees the dhamma sees him. Second, it is the truth or law the teaching describes — the way things are. Third, in the philosophical analysis called Abhidhamma, dhammas (plural) are the ultimate constituents of experience: momentary events of matter and mind into which persons and things can be analysed. Buddhism rejected the class-based dharma of the Brahmins; the Buddha taught that a person is noble not by birth but by conduct. See Buddhism.

Dharma in Jainism

In Jainism, dharma is the moral teaching of the tīrthaṅkaras, centred on non-violence. But Jain metaphysics also uses the word for one of its six eternal substances: dharma is the medium of motion, a pervasive substance that allows souls and matter to move, as water allows fish to swim; its counterpart adharma is the medium of rest. See Jainism.

Modern meanings

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, dharma became the usual word for “religion” in Indian languages, and Hindus began to describe their religion as sanātana dharma, “the eternal dharma”. Reformers reinterpreted it in universal terms. Mahatma Gandhi made truth and non-violence the essence of dharma, and saw in the Gītā a gospel of selfless action. Swami Vivekananda preached a dharma of service to humanity. Ambedkar rejected the Hindu dharma of caste and in 1956 led hundreds of thousands of Dalits to embrace the Buddha’s Dhamma, which he presented as a religion of reason, equality and fraternity.

The Constitution of India (1950) is secular, but the word survives in the motto of the Supreme Court, yato dharmas tato jayaḥ, “where there is dharma, there is victory”, taken from the Mahābhārata, and the Aśokan Dharma-cakra sits at the centre of the national flag.

Comparisons

Dharma has been compared with the Greek logos and dikē, the Chinese dao and li, the Stoic idea of natural law, and the Western idea of duty as Kant described it. All comparisons fail somewhere. Unlike Kant’s duty, Hindu dharma is mostly not universal but relative to one’s station; unlike the Stoic natural law, it is revealed by scripture rather than reason; unlike dao, it is primarily a matter of action rather than of spontaneity. The closest analogue may be the Stoic idea of acting well in one’s role — the theme of the Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius — which the Gītā resembles in its teaching of detached performance of duty.

Dharma in conversation

When someone faces a genuine moral dilemma, the Mahābhārata’s verdict is the honest one: dharmasya tattvaṃ nihitaṃ guhāyām — “the truth of dharma is hidden in a cave”. And when the Gītā’s “better one’s own dharma imperfectly done” is quoted, it is worth asking which reading is meant — stay in your station, or be true to your own nature.