Gary Dean
Dharma: A word almost no one can really define, without a lot of hand-waving, and almost everyone uses anyway. At its root it means something very plain, “to hold”; the interesting thing is how far this plain idea reaches.
The word is everywhere, once you start to notice it. There is a yoga studio in nearly every city called Dharma-something, its name set in a tasteful sans-serif over a lotus. Jack Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums. A science-fiction series built a whole mystery around a sinister research outfit called the Dharma Initiative, and nobody in the audience needed the word explained, because we all carry a vague sense of what it conjures: something Eastern, something spiritual, something to do with inner peace and good intentions and possibly incense. The word arrived in English wearing oriental robes. It sounds like a soft gong in a quiet room.
But now try to say what it means – not the mood it gives off, but the actual meaning. Most of us, pressed, manage something like “your destiny,” or “doing the right thing,” or “Buddhist stuff”; and then the fog rolls in. The word is one that you can use comfortably for years without ever once being able to define. For me, that is a strange thing for a word to be, and it is exactly what made me want to chase it down. Because a word that everyone gestures at and no one can pin is usually hiding something, and dharma, it turns out, is hiding quite a lot.
This series is a record of my search. I say at the outset that I went into this with the same haze that you possibly have.
“That Which Holds”
Strip a word back far enough and you reach the moment before it meant anything abstract, back when it still meant a physical thing you could do with your hands. For dharma, that moment is the Sanskrit root dhṛ, and what it means is plain and sturdy: to hold, to support, to sustain, to keep from falling. Philologists trace it back further, to a root in Proto-Indo-European (the reconstructed ancestor of languages from Hindi to English) that carried the same sense of holding firm. You can hear the family resemblance in an unexpected cousin: the Latin firmus, “stable, strong,” which comes down into English as the word firm. Strip away three thousand years of religion and philosophy, and dharma means, more or less, that which holds.
I would ask that you sit with that for a moment, because it reframes the whole picture. The word we imagine as wispy and otherworldly is, at its root, very much a load-bearing word: the word for a prop, a support, the beam that keeps the roof up. In the oldest Vedic texts, it names something close to the order of the cosmos itself, the deep structure that holds reality together and keeps it from collapsing back into chaos. From there the meaning broadens, the way meanings do, until it covers the order of society, and then the conduct of a single person, and eventually the specific teaching of the Buddha. A linguist would call this semantic broadening, the same ordinary process by which “dog” went from naming one breed to naming them all. But the metaphor underneath never changes. Whether it is holding up the stars, holding together a community, or holding a single life steady, dharma is the thing that does the holding.
It is worth tracing that journey in full, because the word’s wanderings are a lesson in their own right. Dharma begins as a prop or a support; it grows to touch the cosmic order named by the older Vedic word ṛta; it narrows again to the duty owed by a particular person in a particular role; and it becomes, with a capital letter, the Buddha’s teaching, the Dhamma. In one Jain usage it even names a literal physical substance, the invisible medium that makes motion possible. Carried east and then west, it turns into “Buddhism, the Dharma” on a paperback spine, and then, in our own century, into the “secular dharma” of writers who keep the practice and quietly drop the metaphysics. Each of those shifts was a real event in the life of the word: lawful in its mechanics, unpredictable in its direction, three thousand years of meaning on the move. A word that has travelled that far is not going to sit still for a tidy one-line definition, and perhaps we can stop asking it to.
And here is why that matters for everything ahead. If a dharma is “that which holds,” then the question “what is a dharma?” becomes a question about a function, not a faith. We are no longer asking which mystical doctrine is true. We are asking: what holds a human life together? What keeps a person, or a people, from falling apart under the weight of fear, conflict, temptation, and sheer confusion about how to live? Every human group, it turns out, grows something to do that holding. We are going to spend eight essays looking at the astonishing variety of those somethings. But they are all, in the end, answers to the same structural problem: the problem of what holds.
There Is No The Dharma
The second surprise undoes the way the word reached us. In English we tend to say “the Dharma,” with a definite article and a capital D, as though it named one specific thing, usually the teachings of Buddhism. That usage is real, but it is also late, narrow, and mostly a Western convenience. Go back to the traditions that actually grew the word, and the tidy singular dissolves into bewildering plurality.
In classical Indian thought there is svadharma, your own dharma, the right way of living that belongs specifically to your role and station and stage of life. The duty of a soldier is to fight; the duty of a monk is to refrain; and these are not two applications of one rule but two genuinely different dharmas, each correct for the person whose life it holds. Push deeper, into the technical Buddhist philosophy called Abhidharma, and the word splits again: there, “dharmas” in the plural are the tiniest momentary flickers of experience, the atoms of mind and matter out of which a passing moment is built. One word is being asked to mean cosmic order, and a person’s specific duty, and the fleeting particles of consciousness, all at once. No single neat definition can stretch across all of that without tearing.
This is not a flaw in my research; it is the central fact. There is no single The Dharma, in the way there is a single Mount Everest. There are dharmas, plural: many of them, taking many forms, suited to many different lives and worlds. And the moment you accept that, a door opens that this whole series walks through. If a dharma is simply a culture’s worked-out answer to “how should we live, and what holds us together while we do,” then dharmas are not the property of the East, or of religion, or of antiquity. A secular philosophy can be a dharma. A people’s unwritten code can be a dharma. So, for that matter, can the great monotheisms, and the ethics of a profession, and the half-conscious creed of a subculture. None of them sits automatically above the others. That refusal to rank them in advance (to treat the secular and the sacred, the written and the spoken, as equally real candidates) is the stance this series takes, and it falls out directly from the plurality the word has carried all along.
Why Everyone Has (at least) One
If dharmas are this varied, and nobody coordinated them, why do they turn up everywhere? Why does every human society, left to itself for long enough, grow some comprehensive account of how to live? You might expect, given how different cultures look on the surface, that some peoples would simply do without. None do. And the reason is one of the most robust findings in the science of human behaviour.
Start with the problem every group has to solve. Together, people accomplish vastly more than they manage alone, but every act of cooperation leaves an opening: the cheat, the free-rider, the person who pockets the benefit and dodges the cost. A group with no defence against exploitation gets eaten from the inside. Our species’ answer, shaped over a very long time through both genes and culture, was a thick toolkit for holding cooperation together: reciprocity, reputation, gratitude, guilt, a keen eye for unfairness, and a powerful instinct to learn and enforce the local rules. Morality, in this light, is not a coat of paint over a selfish animal; it is the social technology that lets the animal cooperate at scale without being destroyed by its own cheats.
And we have been at it for an extraordinarily long time. For something like fifty million years our ancestors lived in social groups, which means that for fifty million years the most important and most dangerous feature of any individual’s world was other members of the same species: allies to be kept, rivals to be handled, cheats to be caught before they bled the group dry. The physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis argues that this endless social pressure pressed a kind of “social suite” into the human grain: a reliable bundle of tendencies toward cooperation, friendship, in-group loyalty, and learning from one another. It surfaces in every society precisely because it was shaped long before any of those societies existed. A dharma, on this reading, is never written onto a blank slate. It is a culture’s particular way of organising, naming, and fine-tuning a set of social instincts the species already arrived with.
The evidence that this is universal is genuinely striking. The anthropologist Donald Brown assembled a catalogue of “human universals” (features found in every documented society with no known exceptions), and reciprocity, fairness, and a sense of right and wrong sit squarely on it. More recently the researcher Oliver Scott Curry tested the idea directly, analysing the ethical codes of sixty different societies, and found the same seven cooperative rules surfacing again and again: help your family, help your group, return favours, be brave, defer to legitimate authority, divide things fairly, and respect others’ property. He found not a single culture that ran the rules in reverse. The content of morality varies enormously; the cooperative spine does not.
The trick to holding “universal” and “wildly varied” together at once comes from biology. Niko Tinbergen, who studied animal behaviour, taught that among the questions you can ask about any trait, two stand sharply apart: what is it for, and how is it built? The evolutionist David Sloan Wilson applies exactly that split to morality, and it resolves our puzzle cleanly. The function of a dharma is nearly always the same: sustain cooperation, hold the group together. But the mechanism that delivers that function can be almost anything: a sense of duty, a fear of divine punishment, a code of honour, the Indian idea of dharma, the southern African idea of Ubuntu. One job, many tools. That is precisely why dharma-shaped frameworks keep getting reinvented by people who never met: they are local solutions to a problem every human community faces.
You can even watch the same impulse surface at the scale of the cosmos. Many great civilisations, often independently, reached for a grand idea of order, a single principle fusing the heavens, society, and right conduct. India had ṛta, the cosmic order that dharma applies to human life. Ancient Egypt had ma’at, truth and balance set against chaos, weighed against your heart after death. The Zoroastrians of Persia had asha, so close a linguistic cousin of ṛta that the two words descend from a shared ancestor. The Greeks had logos, the rational order of things; the Chinese had the Tao, the Way; the Romans and the Christians after them had natural law. The cosmologies could hardly be more different. The intuition underneath (that reality has a grain, and that the good life means going with it rather than against it) is the same one, recurring, that the very word dharma was built from. That which holds, written across the sky.
Those grand orders are not all the same kind of thing, though, and one difference among them turns out to matter a great deal for where this series is heading. Most of them (ṛta, ma’at, the Tao, natural law) treat the order as something discovered, a structure already woven into reality that we are obliged to find and obey. The Greeks, characteristically, also kept a word for the opposite idea: nomos, the order that is made, the conventions and laws a society agrees on and could have arranged otherwise. Dharma sits in a revealing spot between the two. The Indian tradition split the job in half: ṛta names the impersonal cosmic order out there, while dharma names its application down here, in a particular human life with its particular duties. That two-storey design is the quiet reason dharma travels so well. Because the lived, this-worldly layer had already been carved away from the cosmology, you can keep the dharma (the practice of living well, the compassion, the discipline, the holding) while setting the metaphysical upper storey gently to one side. You cannot do that nearly so easily with ma’at, who is a goddess, or with natural law, which is woven into the mind of God. Dharma comes pre-loosened. That is a large part of why, of all these ancient ordering words, it is the one that ports most comfortably into a secular age, and why a phrase like “secular dharma” is not the contradiction it first appears to be.
Custom, Law, and the Things a Dharma is Not
By now you may be feeling a reasonable suspicion. If a dharma can be a religion or a philosophy or a people’s unwritten code, and if the impulse behind it is universal, then hasn’t the word swollen up to mean simply “human values”? A word that means everything means nothing. If I am going to keep using dharma as the load-bearing term of this series, I owe you a boundary: some way of saying what is a dharma and what merely looks like one.
The boundary, it turns out, is not about content. There is no single belief or rule you can point to and say that is what makes it a dharma. It is about a combination of features, and the cleanest version I found runs to four. The first is comprehensiveness: a dharma governs a whole life, or a whole domain of life, rather than a single slice of behaviour. It has something to say about work, speech, money, family, authority, suffering, and death; it is an architecture, not a single rule. The second is internalisation: a dharma binds you from the inside, by conviction and identity rather than from the outside by force. It also works to remake you, telling you not just what to do but who to become, and offering the practices (habits, disciplines, rituals) for getting you there. The third is an orientation toward the good: it is about how one ought to live, not merely about what is useful or profitable. The classical Indian tradition itself drew a sharp line between dharma, the ethical path, and artha, the business of getting and keeping worldly advantage. And the fourth, the one that will matter most once we meet dharmas being built on purpose, is reflective self-awareness: a dharma can be held up and known as a path, something a person or a people can name, examine, and deliberately choose or reform, rather than merely absorbing it as the way things obviously are.
Run the everyday impostors against those four features and you can see why they fall short. Custom (the way a village does things) supplies rules, but it is usually inherited without reflection and carries no transformative aim; it tells you what is done, not what is good and why. Law is comprehensive and powerful, but it binds the wrong way: from the outside, by coercion, enforceable by punishment and abolishable by a vote. Repeal a statute and it is simply gone; a dharma is not undone so easily, because it lives in conviction rather than on a statute book. Etiquette governs only the polished surface of conduct (which fork, which form of address) and asks nothing of your soul. The hardest case is ideology, which, like a dharma, is comprehensive and fuses values with a story about the world. What usually separates them is purpose: an ideology is built to serve power and mobilise people politically, while a dharma centres on the transformation of the person and the reduction of suffering. A dharma also carries that distinctive layer of inner practice (meditation, prayer, training) that an ideology can do without. The line is real, but I will be honest that it is the blurriest of the four, and a dharma can curdle into an ideology when it is captured by power. We will watch that happen in a later essay.
You may have noticed that this test has soft edges, and it is better to admit that than to pretend otherwise. Membership in a category like this is a matter of degree rather than a clean yes or no. Just as a robin is somehow a more obvious bird than a penguin or an ostrich, some dharmas are textbook cases and others sit out near the blurry rim. Buddhism, Stoicism, and Ubuntu carry all four features in full, and nobody hesitates to call them dharmas. But what about environmentalism, with its values, its disciplines of consumption, its story about humanity and nature, and its converts who genuinely reorganise their lives around it? What about the ethos of a demanding profession, medicine or the military, that tells its members who to become and drills them until they are it? What about a subculture like punk, with its code, its fierce identity, and its refusals? Run the four features over each of these and you will find them scoring two or three out of four, hovering right at the threshold. I do not think there is a hidden fact that settles such cases, and chasing one would lead us away from what matters. The features are a tool for seeing family resemblance, not a border guard issuing passports. What they let us do is compare: to notice that a profession, a religion, and a peasant movement can be doing recognisably the same work, holding a life together in recognisably the same way, even when one of them would never dream of calling itself a dharma.
A Definition is a Tool, Not a Truth
I have just handed you a four-part definition, and I want to immediately complicate it, because the most interesting thing I learned in defining dharma is something about definition itself.
Words like this one resist being pinned, and not by accident. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point with the humble word game. Try to find the single feature common to all games: board games, ball games, solitaire, a child spinning in a circle, the Olympics. Competition cannot be the common thread, because solitaire has none; skill cannot be it, because snakes and ladders needs none; fun cannot be it, because the professional has come to dread the game he plays for a living. There is no single feature that runs the whole length. Instead there is, in his phrase, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”: a family resemblance. Such a concept is held together not like a single thread but like a rope: its strength comes from many short fibres twisted together, no one of which runs end to end. Dharma is a rope, not a thread. That is why the honest question its researchers learned to ask was never “what is dharma” (a demand for the one true essence) but “what makes something a dharma,” a question about family resemblance.
There is a further twist, and it runs through everything that follows. The philosopher W. B. Gallie noticed that certain words (justice, democracy, art) are not just vague but essentially contested: the argument about what they really mean is not a problem to be solved but a permanent feature of the concepts themselves. People will still be disagreeing about the true meaning of justice in a thousand years, and that endless disagreement is not a failure of definition; it is part of what the word is. Dharma belongs in that company. So when I offer you my four features, I am not claiming to have dug up the buried essence of dharma and held it to the light. I am offering a tool: a deliberately sharpened version of a fuzzy word, cut to a particular purpose, which is to let us compare very different ways of living without collapsing them into one. A definition, on this view, is less like a true statement and more like a map, useful precisely because it leaves things out, and judged not by whether it is correct but by whether it takes you where you need to go.
This is, quietly, the method of the whole undertaking. Faced with a drifting, contested, three-thousand-year-old word, the tempting move is to plant a flag and declare what dharma really means. The honest move, the one I will try to keep faith with, is to map its uses instead: to lay out many dharmas, with their contexts and their tensions intact, and resist flattening them into a single official version. Hold the plurality; disclose the choice; never mistake your convenient map for the shape of the world. It is a caution worth carrying. It will matter enormously when, near the end of this journey, we ask whether a machine could be taught human ethics at all, or whether teaching it would simply crush the plural into a single average and call the result the truth.
Two Questions I’m Leaving Open
If you have been reading closely, two objections are probably forming, and rather than answer them now I am going to name them and deliberately leave them standing, because they are the twin destinations this whole series is walking toward.
The first is about authority. I have defined a dharma as something that binds you from the inside, by conviction rather than by force, but I have also said a dharma need not rest on any god. So a sharp question follows: without a divine lawgiver behind it, can a dharma really bind you at all? Or is a godless dharma just a set of personal preferences wearing the costume of duty? It is the oldest question in ethics. Plato was already turning it over in a dialogue called the Euthyphro two and a half thousand years ago, and the trap he set there has never been cleanly escaped. Ask yourself whether something is good because the gods command it, or whether the gods command it because it is already good. Take the first path and morality turns arbitrary: if a god could make cruelty good simply by ordering it, then “good” means nothing grander than “what we were told.” Take the second path and the gods quietly drop out of the foundation, because the goodness was already there for them to recognise. Either way, divine command turns out not to be the bedrock it advertises itself as. I think there is a real answer, and that it is more surprising than either the believer or the cynic expects, but it has to be earned, and we will not be ready to face it properly until we reach the modern, secular, god-haunted world several essays from now.
The second is about judgement. If dharmas are genuinely plural, and none sits automatically above the others, then are they all equally good? When a dharma is cruel, or cages half its people, or feeds a death camp, am I really reduced to shrugging that it is simply their way? Here I will give you one promissory note now, because the worry is serious enough that I do not want it festering for eight essays: plural is not the same as anything goes. To say there is no single true dharma is not to say that every dharma is as good as every other, any more than admitting there are many good languages means every sentence is true. There is a floor, and some dharmas fall through it. But building that floor honestly, without smuggling my own culture’s furniture in and calling it the universe, is delicate work, and it belongs at the end of the road, not here.
The Most Ordinary Thing In the World
So what did I find, going to look for the meaning under the fog?
I found that the word we treat as exotic is, at its root, the plainest word imaginable: that which holds. I found that there is no single Dharma but a teeming plurality of dharmas, secular and sacred alike, none of them granted the high ground in advance. I found that every human society grows one, because every human society faces the same problem of how to cooperate without being torn apart, and a dharma is the characteristic human solution. And I found that “dharma” is best treated not as an essence to be uncovered but as a tool to be used: a map we draw for a purpose, holding the plurality open rather than freezing it shut.
Which means the thing we have been taught to see as faraway and faintly mystical is, in fact, the most ordinary thing in the world. You are standing inside a dharma right now, some inherited, half-examined account of what matters, how to treat people, and what a good life looks like, whether or not you have ever given it a name. Almost everyone is. The interesting question was never whether you have a dharma. It is which one – or which ones – where it came from, how it got inside you, and whether it deserves to keep you.
We have a working definition and a plural, unprivileged field to explore. The very next question is the obvious one: if dharmas are made rather than handed down from the sky, where do they actually come from? What is it about being human that makes us build these things, over and over, wherever we appear? To answer that, we have to go back, past the philosophers and past the scriptures, to the first crowded cities and the deep evolutionary past that shaped the creatures who built them.
Sources & Further Reading
This essay is built from the project’s research notes, which carry the full inline citations. Listed here: the notes it draws on, and the key works behind them.
Research Notes
- 1.1 Core Etymology — √dhṛ “to hold,” the Proto-Indo-European root, the firmus/firm cognate, ṛta, and the semantic broadening over three millennia. The spine of the opening.
- 1.2 Universal Patterns — why dharma-shaped frameworks recur independently: the cooperation-without-exploitation problem, and Tinbergen’s universal-function / plural-mechanism distinction.
- 1.3 Boundary & Definition — the four-feature test and the contrasts with custom, law, etiquette, ideology, and artha; dharma as a family-resemblance, essentially contested concept.
- 1.4 Cross-cultural Cognates — ṛta, ma’at, asha, logos, Tao, and natural law as the cosmic-scale recurrence of “that which holds.”
- 3.3 The Grounding Problem — the planted question of whether a godless dharma can bind (paid off in Part 7).
- 3.4 Relativism vs. Universalism — the planted question of whether some dharmas are better than others (paid off in Part 8).
- Companion essay:
defining-definition.md— definition as a family-resemblance, power-laden, drifting tool; “map, not territory.”
Key Works
- Manfred Mayrhofer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen (1992) — the standard authority for the √dhṛ → Proto-Indo-European derivation (consulted via Wiktionary).
- Oliver Scott Curry, “Morality as Cooperation” — the seven cooperative moral rules found across sixty societies with no counter-examples.
- Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (2019) — the “social suite” of evolved social tendencies (cooperation, friendship, in-group bias, social learning).
- Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (1991) — reciprocity, fairness, and ethical patterning as features present in every documented culture.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953) — “game,” family resemblance, and the rope-not-thread model of meaning.
- W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts” (1956) — why words like justice, democracy, and dharma sustain permanent, internal disagreement.
- Plato, Euthyphro — the ancient form of the “can ethics stand without a divine command?” question (developed in Part 7).
- Isaiah Berlin on value pluralism, and Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen on the capabilities approach — pluralism with a floor, against relativism (developed in Part 8).
