Dharmaśāstra

What it asks

Dharma is not a single rule and not a single virtue. It is what upholds - what a person, a family, a community or an order is sustained by - and what it requires depends on who is asking.

A student, a householder, a renouncer; a ruler, a merchant, a priest. Each has a svadharma, an obligation proper to their station and stage of life, and the same act can be required of one and forbidden to another. That is not relativism; it is the claim that obligation is indexed to position, which any theory with role-obligations has to accommodate somehow.

The resulting field is neither ethics nor jurisprudence as those are usually divided. It is closer to both together, and it reasons like neither.

The recurring problems

How the sources rank. Four are recognised: revealed texts, remembered tradition, the practice of the good, and finally what satisfies one's own conscience. They conflict, and an elaborate hermeneutics developed to order them - much of it borrowed from Mīmāṃsā, which had built its techniques for interpreting ritual injunctions.

Conflict of obligations. A person occupies several roles at once and their duties collide. The literature works through such cases in detail and does not always resolve them, which is a mark of seriousness rather than of failure.

Adversity. A separate doctrine covers what is permitted when normal conduct becomes impossible - a formal treatment of emergency that runs alongside the ordinary rules rather than suspending them.

Universal against particular duty. Alongside station-specific obligation there are duties said to hold for everyone - non-injury, truthfulness, restraint. How the two levels relate is the tradition's central theoretical difficulty.

How it developed

The genre begins with the sūtra literature, terse aphoristic works on conduct, and develops into the verse treatises of which the Manusmṛti is the best known and the most misrepresented outside India.

Its method was shaped decisively by Mīmāṃsā. That school had developed rigorous techniques for determining what a text enjoins, how apparent contradictions are resolved and what force different kinds of statement carry, and dharmaśāstra applied them to conduct.

The most productive period is commentarial. From roughly the ninth century, scholars produced commentaries and topical digests that reconciled sources, and it is in these rather than in the root texts that the reasoning is most sophisticated. Two competing schools of inheritance law developed from that work and remained legally significant into the modern period.

British colonial administration then treated these texts as a code to be applied, which they had never been - a flexible, plural and heavily contextual literature was flattened into statute, and the resulting system was called Hindu law. Much of what is popularly attributed to dharmaśāstra dates from that transformation rather than from the tradition.

The positions within it

The schools that shaped it belong to the Schools section. Mīmāṃsā supplied the interpretive method. Nyāya supplied the standards of argument. The Mitākṣarā and Dāyabhāga traditions divide over inheritance and property.

The tradition also contains its own critics. Both Buddhist and Jain thought rejected the ritual and social ordering the literature assumes while retaining much of its moral vocabulary.

Where it stands now

As a living legal system it ended with codification. As a body of moral philosophy it is being read seriously again, and comparatively.

Its interest for philosophy is that it is a fully developed ethics organised around role and position rather than around a universal principle or a general theory of the good - which is what virtue ethics is sometimes accused of lacking and what several contemporary accounts of role obligation are attempting to build.