Dharma

• 1. Introduction

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  Dharma is one of the most consequential concepts in human thought, and yet it resists every attempt at a clean definition. Karl Friedrich Geldner, translating the Rigveda, needed 20 different English words just to capture the range of meanings dharma carries in that single ancient text: law, justice, righteousness, order, duty, custom, quality, model. His predecessor Grassmann found seven distinct meanings in the same hymns. No other term in Sanskrit has forced translators to work this hard.

  The word itself comes from the Sanskrit root dhr-, meaning to hold or to support. From that root grows a vast tree. Dharma is the law that holds the cosmos together, the duty that holds a family together, the virtue that holds a person together. Its antonym is adharma: that which undermines, corrupts, and unmakes.

  What makes dharma so hard to pin down is not imprecision but depth. This documentary will trace dharma from its earliest appearance in the hymns of the Rigveda, through the great Sanskrit epics, into the distinct frameworks of Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and finally into a modern nation's flag.

• 2. The Root and the Word

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  The Sanskrit root dhr- connects dharma to the Latin firmus, meaning firm or stable. Both words grow from the same ancient soil. In the Rigveda, the earliest layer of dharma's textual history, the word appears as an n-stem with meanings built around physical firmness: prods, poles, things that hold other things in place. From there it expands outward into metaphor.

  Pandurang Vaman Kane, author of the History of Dharmashastra, counted the word dharma appearing at least fifty-six times in the hymns of the Rigveda alone. According to the scholar Brereton, the related form dharman occurs sixty-three times in that same text, alongside related compounds such as satyadharman, which appears six times, and dharmakrt, which appears once.

  The Rigveda's hymns picture the deities, primarily Indra, holding the earth and sun apart, stabilising quaking mountains, delivering order from disorder. The verbal root underlying all these actions is the same root that gives us dharma. Law, in this conception, is not a human invention imposed on nature. It is the principle by which nature itself holds together.

  When the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka translated dharma into Greek in the 3rd century BCE, he chose the word eusebeia, meaning piety, spiritual maturity, or godliness. That choice appears in the Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription, discovered in Afghanistan in the mid-20th century from the year 258 BCE. Eusebeia in Hellenistic Greek carried obligations toward parents, siblings, children, spouses, and strangers alongside its religious dimension. The inscription suggests that dharma, at least twenty-three centuries ago, already encompassed that full social and relational range.

• 3. Dharma Across the Hindu Traditions

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  The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, in hymn 1.4.14, places dharma above every other principle: "Nothing is higher than dharma. The weak overcomes the stronger by dharma, as over a king. Truly that dharma is the Truth." The equation of dharma with satya, or truth, appears throughout the Upanishads as dharma develops from a cosmic principle into a moral and regulatory force.

  The scholar Van Buitenen described dharma in Hinduism as neither act nor result but the natural laws that guide action and prevent chaos. It is an innate characteristic of every being. For a bee, dharma is to make honey. For a river, to flow. For the sun, to radiate light. In terms of human beings, dharma encompasses service, interconnectedness, and the proper execution of one's role in a larger order.

  Hindu texts distinguish several layers within dharma. Sanatana dharma refers to eternal and unchanging principles. Svadharma is an individual's personal duty. Apad dharma governs conduct in times of adversity. Yuga dharma is the dharma appropriate to a particular age or epoch, and it may change when that age concludes. The term varnasrama dharma describes duties tied to both one's social position and one's stage of life.

  Patanjali's Yoga Sutras organised dharma into two practical categories: yamas, which are restraints, and niyamas, which are observances. The five yamas include abstaining from injury to living creatures, falsehood, theft, sexual infidelity, and the expectation of gifts. The five niyamas include cleanliness, contentment, meditation, the study of historical knowledge, and devoting all actions to a supreme teacher. Patanjali clarified that context qualifies these rules. A fisherman must injure a fish, but he must attempt to do so with the least possible trauma and must avoid injuring any other creature in the process.

• 4. Dharma in the Epics

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  Dasharatha, king of Ayodhya, honors a promise to his queen Kaikeyi by sending his son Rama into exile. The promise costs him everything. But the Ramayana presents this as dharma: the upholding of a sworn word even when the personal cost is immense.

  The Mahabharata takes a different approach to the same question. Near the end of the epic, the god Yama takes the form of a dog and accompanies Yudhishthira toward paradise. When Yudhishthira is told he cannot enter with such an animal, he refuses to abandon his companion. Dharma, having tested him, then praises him for passing. The dog was dharma all along.

  The scholar Daniel Ingalls observed that the true appeal of the Mahabharata lies not in its metaphysical passages but in its moral situations. Each dilemma in the epic typically generates three responses. Bhima represents brute force and egoism. Yudhishthira appeals to piety, social virtue, and tradition. Arjuna falls between the two, and Ingalls argued that Arjuna symbolically reveals the finest moral qualities of a human being.

  The epics also explore dharma at the level of inner life. They discuss free will against destiny, noting that the strong and prosperous naturally embrace free will while those facing grief lean toward destiny. Vatsyayana, writing in the 4th century, extended dharma's reach further still. He argued that dharma resides not only in actions but in words spoken or written, and in thought. Adharma of the mind, in his framework, includes ill will, covetousness, and the denial that morality exists at all. Dharma of the mind includes compassion, disinterestedness, and faith in others.

• 5. Buddhism and the Dhamma

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  Buddhism inherited the Hindu understanding of dharma as cosmic law and then built something new on top of it. The Pali form of the word, dhamma, came to mean specifically the teachings of the Buddha, known across Asia as Buddhadharma. These teachings include the fundamental discourses on the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, as distinct from the parables and poems.

  In Theravada Buddhism, the path to ultimate realisation of the dhamma moves through three stages: pariyatti, or learning the theory contained in the suttas of the Pali canon; patipatti, or putting that theory into practice; and pativedha, the moment when a practitioner penetrates the dhamma through direct experience and realises its truth.

  Dharma is one of the Three Jewels of Buddhism, alongside the Buddha and the Sangha, the community of practitioners. Different Buddhist schools interpret dharma differently. Some regard it as an ultimate truth beyond the three realms and the wheel of becoming. Others, who view the Buddha as an enlightened human being rather than a cosmic figure, understand the dharma as the essence of what Tibetan sources describe as the eighty-four thousand different aspects of teaching that the Buddha gave to different people according to their individual propensities.

  Chan Buddhism uses dharma in a specific sense related to transmission: the passing of authentic doctrine and understanding from teacher to student, recognised formally as dharma transmission. Buddhist philosophy also uses the term dhamma in a technical sense to mean specific phenomena, what scholars call Buddhist atomism, the irreducible constituents of experience.

• 6. Jainism and the Dharma of Motion

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  In Jainism, dharma carries meanings found nowhere else in Indian philosophy. The Tattvartha Sutra, a major Jain text, lists ten righteous virtues under the heading dasa dharma: forbearance, modesty, straightforwardness, purity, truthfulness, self-restraint, austerity, renunciation, non-attachment, and celibacy. The Jain teacher Acarya Amrtacandra wrote that a right believer should constantly meditate on these virtues, beginning with supreme modesty, in order to protect the self from contrary dispositions.

  Jain ontology introduces the term dharmastikaya, which refers not to moral conduct but to the principle of motion itself. In the Jain theory of six dravya, or substances that constitute reality, existence is divided into jiva (soul) and ajiva (non-soul). The ajiva category contains five sub-categories: inert matter, space, time, the principle of motion (dharmastikaya), and the principle of rest (adharmastikaya). Using dharma to name a physical ontological category, the enabling condition for movement through space, is peculiar to Jainism. Neither Buddhism nor the schools of Hinduism employ the term this way.

  The Naladiyar, a Jain text of the post-Sangam period, and the ancient Tamil text the Tirukkural both emphasise aram, the Tamil equivalent of dharma, as a foundational concern. The Tirukkural, probably of Jain or Hindu origin, is structured around three subjects: aram (dharma), porul (artha, or material welfare), and inpam (kama, or pleasure). Yet the text is described as completely and exclusively based on aram among these three.

• 7. The Symbol on the Flag

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  In 1947, India chose to place the Ashoka Chakra at the center of its national flag. The Ashoka Chakra is a depiction of the dharmachakra, the wheel of dharma. The wheel has spun through Indian civilisation for more than three millennia, from the Rigveda's picture of cosmic order through every philosophical school, every epic, every royal inscription.

  The same Emperor Ashoka who rendered dharma as eusebeia in Greek and as qshyta (truth, rectitude) in Aramaic on the Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription is the Ashoka whose chakra now turns at the heart of a twenty-first century republic's flag. The Sanskrit word dharma has also completed a different kind of journey: it is now a widely accepted loanword in English, included in many modern unabridged English dictionaries.

  The scholar Paul Horsch observed that dharma and Rta, the Vedic principle of cosmic truth, are parallel concepts. Rta governs the cosmic plane; dharma governs the moral and social sphere. Over time, Day proposed, Rta may have been absorbed into the more expansive concept of dharma as Indian thought developed. The credo dharmo dharayati praja, meaning dharma is that which holds and provides support to the social construct, captures something the word has always implied. From the Sanskrit root that means to hold or to support, dharma still performs the function its name describes.