Dharma

Dharma is one of the most semantically rich terms in Indian philosophy. The Sanskrit root means to hold or to support, and the philosophical use covers cosmic order, religious duty, social role, moral law, and the nature of things — the totality of what holds the world together. Different Indian traditions develop the concept in different directions, and the disagreements among them can largely be read as disagreements over what dharma is and how it is known.

In the Vedic and Brahmanical tradition, dharma is closely connected with ritual and with the duties of one's varna (social station) and ashrama (stage of life). In Buddhist usage, dharma (Pali: dhamma) names the Buddha's teaching, the truth he taught, and the basic constituents of phenomenal experience. In Jain philosophy, dharma is one of the fundamental categories of reality. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana treat dharma as the central practical question of how to live rightly under conditions where competing duties cannot all be honored.

The Mahabharata and Ramayana treat dharma as the central practical question of how to live rightly under conditions where competing duties cannot all be honored. The Mahabharata in particular makes the conflict of dharmas — the duty to one's family against the duty to truth, the duty to caste against the duty to friendship — the engine of its narrative. The Bhagavad Gita, embedded in the Mahabharata, presents Arjuna's crisis on the eve of battle as the paradigmatic case: one's dharma may require what one's heart resists.

In Buddhist usage, dharma takes on additional senses. The Buddha's teaching is the Dharma; the basic constituents of phenomenal experience are dharmas (in the plural); the truth of how things are is dharma. The Pali word dhamma covers all of these. Twentieth-century Indian philosophy under Gandhi and others recovered dharma as a category of political and moral philosophy, with Gandhi's satyagraha — truth-force — explicitly grounded in his interpretation of the Gita.