Gary Dean
These essays were assembled in an unusual way, by an unlikely person, in an unlikely place. So before starting, you are owed an open account of all three; not as credentials, but as disclosures: where the work comes from, who helped make it, and – most importantly – how it was actually built.
Most books that refer to the word ‘dharma’ come from one of two places: a monastery, or a university, or something in that vicinity. A teacher hands down a lineage received from their own teacher, or a scholar maps the territory from a careful distance. This one comes from neither. It was written by a life-long anarchist, raised in the most isolated city on Earth, on the Indonesian island of Bali, by a naturalised Indonesian. It was built with decades of accumulated reading and hard experience, along with a handful of friends scattered across three continents, and, latterly, dozens of different large language models.
A preface is normally a throat-clearing, the part most sensible readers skip on the way to chapter one. I request that you not skip this one; I have made it longer than is fashionable on purpose. The essays that follow make fairly bold arguments about where our worldviews and ethics come from, and they reach it by a route unusual enough to require explanation. I think you can weigh a conclusion better when you can see how it was reached, who helped reach it, and what was standing behind the person doing this reaching.
So this preface does three things, in a deliberate order of importance. First and at greatest length, it explains how the essays were actually made: the method, the sources, the machine, and the disciplines meant to keep all three honest. Second, it credits the people and the ideas that made the work possible, because none of it was done alone. Third, and most warily, it sketches the peculiar life that produced the particular lens these essays are seen through.
A note on two words
By dharma I mean something deliberately broad. Not the Buddhist teaching with a capital D, but a way of living, a path one walks: what other traditions have called a dao, or simply the Way, and what we might equally meet in the unspoken code of a profession or a subculture. A dharma, in my usage, is whatever holds a life or a people together by answering how to live. I write it in the plural, dharmas, on purpose, because there is no single Dharma, only many, none ranked above the rest before we look. What marks a dharma off from mere unexamined custom is that it can be held up and known as a path: named, questioned, chosen, reformed, even built from scratch. That capacity is available, not required, since most dharmas are absorbed half-consciously and never feel chosen at all.
The Impetus
Ideas are social before they are anything else. They do not emerge from a vacuum.
The nearest impetus for these essays was a five-day retreat in the south of England in February 2018. It was the first of six such gatherings, held over two years in England, the Netherlands and Belgium, that together made up a long course entitled Secular Dharma. The course was run by Bodhi College, an organisation founded by Stephen Batchelor and others, to study the earliest Buddhist teachings without the later machinery of religion, and with Stephen as one of its principal teachers. I had come mainly because of his book After Buddhism, which does something I had been waiting most of my life for a book to do: it treats the Buddha not as the founder of a faith but as a sharp, practical ethicist, and recasts his teaching as a set of tasks or skills to be done rather than a set of truths to be believed. For someone who had spent decades allergic to belief, that was an open door.
But the lasting thing the retreats gave me was not the teaching, but rather people; two in particular I will highlight. In that course I first met Rupert Bozeat and Elfie Klinger. The three of us kept talking long after the formal programme ended, always online, across the distance between our countries. I guess we were a sangha in the loosest possible sense of that word: not a congregation, just a small standing conversation that went on for years. Somewhere along the way we began recording the conversations and putting them on a YouTube channel, under the deliberately unsure title ‘a secular dharma?’, question mark included. We made around fifty of them. They were never polished and were never going to find a wide audience, but they were the laboratory where a great deal of what is in these essays was first said out loud, argued with, and knocked into better shape. The whole endeavour to define dharma at all, which is the question this series spends eight essays chasing, was continued inside these meetings.
Around that small core sits a wider circle I owe a great deal to. The secular-dharma world I had wandered into turned out to be a small, busy network with several centres of gravity rather than one. One publishing node is the [Tuwhiri Project](https://tuwhiri.org, a New Zealand house devoted to exactly this kind of post-religious, ethically serious work, with its publisher, Ramsey Margolis. Around Tuwhiri sit others working the same ground from different angles: the Secular Buddhist Network and Mike Slott, whose Mindful Solidarity ties contemplative practice back to politics; Winton Higgins, behind the After Buddhism workbook; and a scatter of newsletters and reading groups, all trying to keep wisdom traditions alive without asking anyone to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
I will not dress any of these people or organisations as the source of my argument, which is mine to answer for and is set out plainly further on; what they gave me was readers, counter-arguments, and the sense that the work was not merely eccentric. I am an unsociable person by temperament, and I have not always been an easy member of any of these circles.
The bottom line is that I did not arrive at these ideas alone.
The Shape of the Lens
Now the warier part: the life behind the lens. I include it because a reader has a right to know the biases built into a writer, and mine are not the standard-issue ones. But I will keep it short, and keep it tied to the only thing that matters here, which is how it shaped the way I see.
I was born in 1957 in Perth, Western Australia, which is, by most measures, the most isolated major city on this planet. It is closer to Jakarta than to Sydney. A child on the western rim of Australia faces, geographically and then imaginatively, not east toward the rest of the country but north, across the Indian Ocean, toward the vast and crowded archipelago of maritime Southeast Asia. The cultural gravity of my childhood pulled toward Asia long before I really understood why.
Parts of that childhood were genuinely wonderful. A working-class upbringing in the northern suburbs of Perth came with a kind of unsupervised freedom that has all but vanished since: miles of bushland and wetland to roam, the run of a whole small world, the sort of thing almost no child I know is granted now. But I did not fit the place. The Perth of that era thought of itself as a distant outpost of the British Empire, and I was an odd, contrary, differently wired boy who could not see the appeal; I left home very young and spent years drifting around the country with a backpack and little else. What all of it left me with was a permanent, low-grade suspicion of inherited authority and received belief, which hardened, from my early teens, into actual politics: some years as an activist with the Communist Party of Australia, and a longer time among anarchist groups. That is not a youthful embarrassment I have outgrown. As the essays will show, it is a thread that runs straight into the argument, because the anarchist intuition that people are perfectly capable of ordering their own affairs from the bottom up turns out, once you take the biology seriously, to be less a political fantasy than a plain observation about a cooperative animal.
Between that and Indonesia lies a long Australian working life I will pass over, save for the one strand that bears on this book: somewhere in it I taught myself to program, and spent a decade (an anarchist building the Australian Labor Party’s computerised campaign and polling systems; yes, the irony).
In 1996 I moved – migrated, actually – to Indonesia, and I have lived here ever since. I am now an Indonesian citizen, and I make my living running a corporate-services firm (yes, another irony) and, increasingly, building the knowledgebases these essays draw on. Three decades inside Indonesian society did the deepest work on the lens. It is worth saying plainly that I do not write about dharma as a Westerner reaching for the exotic East. I live in a country whose language and cosmology are saturated with Sanskrit, where dharma is an ordinary, slightly worn loanword rather than a sacred mystery, and where the deep Indic substratum beneath a nominally Muslim surface is never very far from view. The word is furniture to me, not incense.
That immersion had a particular shape, and it holds the oldest root of this whole series. In my student years my Asian Studies lecturer at Murdoch, Paul Stange, a scholar of Javanese mysticism, introduced me to Sumarah: a quiet Javanese movement that calls itself not a religion but a philosophy of life, a practice of surrender with no fixed guru, no creed, and no demand that you believe anything at all. I practised its meditation for years. It was bound up, inevitably, with elements of traditional Javanese culture I did not always share, but it gave me something I had no name for at the time, a working example of a contemplative and ethical path carried inside a culture rather than a church. This was, I can see now, my first secular dharma, met fully two decades before I ever sat down in a Bodhi College retreat; and I am no detached observer of it, even building the movement’s English-language website back in 1998. It planted early the suspicion this series later argues out loud: that a dharma is far harder to prise away from its culture than from its gods.
You are owed the worse along with the better. My personal life has been large and disorderly by any conventional measure: more marriages than is decent, children scattered across three countries, the ordinary share of estrangements and an extraordinary share of complications. Between 2012 and 2015 I lost a son, and then a partner, within a few years of one another, and it was during and after that stretch that a long, idle interest in dharma turned into something closer to a need. I will not pretend to know whether grief sharpened the search or merely cleared the time for it. But I would be misrepresenting the work if I let you picture it arriving out of serenity. It came, like most things worth having, out of a fair amount of mess.
The One Idea
If I had to compress what these essays argue into a single sentence, it would be this: a dharma is not a revelation but a technology, an evolved cultural technology, worked out by a particular kind of social animal to solve a particular and permanent problem.
The main problem is cooperation. Human beings get far more done together than apart, but every cooperative group has a weak spot: the cheat, the free-rider, the one who takes the benefit and skips the cost. A species that found a way to hold cooperation together against its own parasites would inherit the earth, and ours, more or less, did. We evolved, slowly and through both our genes and our cultures, a thick toolkit for the job: reciprocity, reputation, gratitude, guilt, a sharp eye for unfairness, and a powerful instinct to learn and enforce the local rules. A dharma, on this reading, is simply a culture’s particular, elaborated version of that toolkit, its worked-out answer to the questions of how to live together and what holds the group steady while it does. Religious or secular, written or unwritten, Eastern or Western, they are all running the same evolved programme on different cultural hardware.
This is not an idea I invented, so let me name the people I took it from, because they are the real intellectual furniture of the series. The frame leans on the human behavioural biology of Robert Sapolsky; on Christopher Boehm’s account of how foraging bands actively hold their own equality in place; on Sarah Hrdy’s argument that cooperative child-rearing was the cradle of human kindness; on David Sloan Wilson’s case for selection acting on groups and not only individuals; and, reaching back more than a century, on the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, whose Mutual Aid argued, against the social Darwinists of his day, that cooperation is as natural a force in evolution as competition. Set Batchelor’s secular dharma beside Graeber’s anthropology of mutual aid, with all of that biology underneath, and the two stop looking like neighbours and start looking like the same thing said in two vocabularies. That convergence is the engine of the whole series. Everything else is the working-out.
I should flag, here and once, that this is a particular and partial lens, and the essays lean the way it leans: secular, evolutionary, broadly Western and academic, even where the subject matter is none of those things. I have tried to show, in each essay, where that slant is doing the work, and to go looking for the voices the lens tends to miss. But I am not a neutral instrument, and I should not be read as one.
Show the Workings
This is the part I most want the reader to understand, because it is the part that should earn or lose your trust.
For about forty years I have been a magpie. Books, articles, transcripts, talks, my own scribbled notes: a great unsorted pile of material about anthropology, biology, religion and the human animal, accumulated long before I had any clear idea what it was for. It was a jumbled pile of ‘found things’ that I thought one day could be fitted together to become coherent montages.
Around seven years ago, when the first genuinely useful large language models appeared, I finally found the use. I began turning the pile into something you could question, using an AI technique called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. The idea is simple: Instead of asking an AI to answer out of the fog of its training and hoping it invents nothing, you keep a corpus of real, sourced documents to one side; when a question comes in, the system first retrieves the most relevant passages from that corpus, and only then asks the model to compose an answer from those specific passages. The machine does not get to make things up. It is made to show you where each thing came from.
That pile is now a knowledgebase of over 14,000 curated documents, spanning anthropology in its widest sense, which I file under the unglamorous name of “applied anthropology”; secular dharma is one room inside that larger house. Nor is the collection all my own hoarding: an important part of it was supplied by Irfan Kortschak, an Indonesia-based anthropologist who assisted with finding relevant source texts, as well as his own written works. It is the same body of material that the secular-dharma conversations were folded into, transcribed and cleaned, so that the talks Rupert and Elfie and I recorded are now themselves part of the searchable corpus.
The essays were built from that corpus in two deliberate, separated stages, and the separation is the whole point. In the first stage I did not write essays at all. For each question worth asking about dharma, I did the research and produced a single, heavily sourced research note: a piece of pure evidence-gathering whose only job was to establish what could defensibly be said, and to attach a source to every claim. The notes are not graceful. They are not meant to be. They are the working, and a claim that could not be sourced did not earn a place in them. Only in the second stage, and only once the notes existed, were the essays written from the notes. The prose you are about to read therefore stands on a body of evidence assembled before a word of it was composed, which is the exact reverse of the usual essayist’s habit of reaching for a supporting quotation once the argument has already been decided.
The discipline underneath all of this is sourcing, and I have come to picture it through an unlikely model. The classical Islamic scholars, faced with deciding which reported sayings (hadith) of the Prophet could be trusted, built an exacting science around the isnad, the chain of transmission: a report was only as sound as the unbroken, named chain of people who had passed it down, and a claim with a broken or doubtful chain was flagged or thrown out. I am no Islamic scholar, but I have spent enough years in a Muslim country to have absorbed the instinct, and it is precisely the instinct this project runs on. Every substantive claim in these essays traces back, through the research notes, to a source you could in principle go and check for yourself. The chains are preserved at the end of each essay. You are not asked to trust me. You are asked to follow the links.
Now the part that might make some readers uneasy, so I will be plain about it: Yes, I used artificial intelligence to assist in making these essays; but no, the machine did not write them! The division of labour runs like this: The AI is a research assistant of formidable speed and no judgement: it retrieves, it drafts, it checks a citation against its source, it tells me when a chain is broken. What it cannot do is decide what is true, what matters, or what is worth saying, and those are the only decisions that turn evidence into an essay. I have argued with it, overruled it, and caught it being confidently wrong more times than I can count, and every claim it surfaced was verified against a real source before it was let stand. The voice, the judgement, the errors and the responsibility are mine. The result is more carefully sourced than I could ever have managed alone, and I would far rather tell you exactly how it was made than pretend to a purity that no working writer now has.
There is one last strangeness worth naming, because it sits at the centre of the whole undertaking. The corpus is both my instrument and, increasingly, my subject. The final essay in this series asks whether a machine could be taught human ethics at all, and what would be lost in the teaching. I am, in a small and literal way, already running that experiment, feeding a particular, plural, deeply human tradition into a machine and watching what it makes of it. I am not a neutral observer of that question; I’m standing inside it!
What this is, and isn’t
This is not scripture, and it is not a manual. I am not a teacher in any lineage, I have no authority to confer, and there is no practice waiting at the end of these essays that I am quietly selling. Nor is it a work of academic anthropology, though it leans on a great deal of it: the sourcing is real, but the voice is a personal one, and I have written for an intelligent general reader rather than for a sub-field. What it is, is one person’s attempt to look hard and straight at a single enormous question, which is what these things called dharmas are, where they come from, and how they are created, and to do it with the working on show.
The one commitment that runs through every essay, and the one I would ask you to hold onto, is a refusal to rank the dharmas in advance. Secular and sacred, written and unwritten, the great world religions and the unspoken code of a single profession or subculture: this series treats them all as real candidates for the same description, and declines to hand any of them the high ground before the looking is done.
This refusal is not woolly relativism, and I will try to show why some dharmas genuinely fall through the floor. But it is the starting posture, and it falls out of the most basic fact about the word, which is that there was never a single the dharma to begin with. There are only dharmas – plural – and the first essay begins exactly there, with a word that almost no one can define and almost everyone uses anyway.
So: that is where all this comes from, who helped make it, and how it was built. The throat-clearing is over. Let’s get on with it….
Sources & Further Reading
This preface draws on the project’s Part-0 research notes, which carry the full inline citations. Listed here: the notes behind it, and the people and works named above.
Research Notes
- 0.1 Life & Formation – Perth origins, the migration to Indonesia and citizenship, the temperament, and the personal history sketched here.
- 0.2 Politics & Anarchism – the Communist Party and anarchist years, and the “anarchism as plain natural history” thread.
- 0.3 The Sangha & the Retreat – Bodhi College, the 2018 retreats, Stephen Batchelor, and the ‘a secular dharma?’ conversations with Rupert Bozeat and Elfie Klinger.
- 0.4 Network &
Publishing – the secular-dharma publishing network: the Tuwhiri
Project, the Secular Buddhist Network and Mike Slott’s Mindful
Solidarity, Winton Higgins, and the lapsed
seculardharma.net, with Margolis as one node. - 0.5 The Thesis – dharma as evolved cultural technology, and the convergence of Batchelor and Graeber.
- 0.6 The Knowledgebase as Method – the forty-year collection, the RAG knowledgebase, and the two-stage method.
- 0.7 Influences & Acknowledgments – the real network behind the essays and the knowledgebase, set in proportion: Irfan Kortschak’s source-texts, Paul Stange and Java’s Sumarah movement, the Bodhi College teachers and the wider cohort, and the Tuwhiri / Secular Buddhist Network cluster with Margolis as one node.
Key Works
- Paul Stange, The Logic of Rasa in Java (1984) – the scholarship on Java’s Sumarah movement behind the preface’s account of the author’s earliest secular-dharma analogue.
- David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) – the anthropology of self-organising mutual aid that converges with secular dharma.
- Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) – cooperation as a natural force in evolution.
- Robert Sapolsky, Behave (2017) – the human behavioural biology that underpins the frame.
- Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (2015) – the dharma as task-based ethics rather than belief; the book behind the retreat.
- Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest (1999); Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others (2009); David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life (2019) – the evolution of cooperation, egalitarianism, and prosociality.
