⁂ Concepts · Ethics · No. 114
Dharma

1936: an address prevented, and printed.

Dharma

The sustaining order of things, and the conduct it requires of a particular person in a particular position.

Theme
Ethics and character
Tradition
Indian
Term
धर्म · dharma
Term fixed
c. 700 BC

In plain terms

Dharma is usually translated as duty, and that is the least misleading single word available. It is still not close.

The root means to hold or sustain. Dharma is what holds things together - at the largest scale the order of the cosmos, at the middle scale the arrangement of a society, and at the smallest scale what this person in this position is required to do.

What makes it foreign to European ethics is that the three levels are supposed to be one thing. Doing your part is not merely obeying a rule; it is participating in what keeps the world in order. And the requirement is specific rather than universal: what is required of you depends on who you are, which is either the doctrine's great strength or its central problem, depending on who is asked.

As a philosopher would put it

The Dharmaśāstra literature articulates varṇāśramadharma - duty according to social class and stage of life - alongside sādhāraṇadharma, general duties binding on everyone, such as non-injury, truthfulness and restraint. The relation between the two is the tradition's central ethical problem.

The Bhagavad Gītā poses it in its sharpest form. Arjuna refuses to fight and gives recognisably ethical reasons; Krṣṇa's answer is that his own dharma as a warrior binds, that it is better to do one's own duty imperfectly than another's well, and that action should be performed without attachment to its fruits.

Buddhist dhamma shifts the term substantially: it names the teaching, and in the plural the elementary constituents of experience, with the ethical content reorganised around intention and consequence for suffering rather than around station. The Mīmāṃsā school makes dharma what the Veda enjoins, knowable only through scripture - a position that removes it from independent moral reasoning altogether.

Where you meet it

B. R. Ambedkar was born into a Mahar family, a caste treated as untouchable. He took doctorates at Columbia and the London School of Economics, chaired the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution, and spent his life arguing that the graded inequality of caste was not incidental to the tradition but written into its account of dharma.

Annihilation of Caste, written in 1936 as an address he was then prevented from delivering, argues that reform is impossible while the scriptures prescribing varna retain authority, and that appeals to a purer original dharma cannot work because the texts say what they say.

In 1956, weeks before his death, he converted to Buddhism with several hundred thousand followers at Nagpur, and formulated twenty-two vows explicitly rejecting the Hindu deities and the caste order. It is the most consequential rejection of station-based dharma ever made - and it was made by moving to another tradition that uses the same word for something else.

What is actually disputed

Whether dharma can be separated from the social order it prescribed.

Modern defenders argue that the general duties are the core and the class-specific ones a historical accretion, so that dharma survives detached from varna. Ambedkar's argument is that this is wishful: the texts that carry the authority are the texts that prescribe the hierarchy, and a tradition cannot keep the first while discarding the second by preference.

Gandhi took the other side of that exchange, defending an idealised varna while opposing untouchability, and their disagreement is among the most consequential in modern Indian thought.

A second and older problem is internal. If dharma is what the Veda enjoins, as Mīmāṃsā holds, then it is not accessible to moral argument at all. And the Gītā's answer to Arjuna - that station overrides his own moral perception - is precisely what troubles readers who otherwise find the text persuasive.

Commonly confused with

  • duty in the Kantian sense Kantian duty is universal and derived from reason. Dharma is specific to person and position, and derived from order.
  • Karma c. 700 BC Karma is the causal relation between acts and consequences. Dharma is what one ought to do, and one can be discussed without the other.
  • Buddhist dhamma The same word doing substantially different work - the teaching, and the constituents of experience. Assuming it is the Hindu concept is the commonest error about both.

Defined against

  • Autonomy A duty determined by one's station and one determined by one's own reason are incompatible accounts of where obligation comes from

Philosophers

  • Yajnavalkya The Upaniṣadic setting where the term is philosophical
  • Shankara Dharma within a non-dual framework
  • Ramanujacharya Dharma retained with a personal deity and real selves
  • Buddha Where dhamma becomes the teaching rather than the station
  • Mahavira The Jain reorganisation around non-injury

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Duty 1785 · Karma c. 700 BC · Ahiṃsā c. 500 BC · Mokṣa c. 800 · Virtue c. 340 BC

The word runs from Vedic ṛta through the Dharmaśāstra literature to the Buddhist dhamma, changing substantially at each stage; treating it as one concept across all of them is the standard error.