Gary Dean
A relational web, a rational fortress, a sung land, a commanding covenant: four ways of living that disagree about almost everything, and rhyme underneath. Including, if you have the nerve to look, your own.
Picture four people, in four worlds, each answering the same question.
An elder in a southern African village is asked what makes a good person, and she does not start with the person at all. She starts with everyone else. A human being, she says, becomes human only through other human beings; you are a person because, and only because, you belong to a people.
A Roman emperor sits in a campaign tent on a freezing frontier, writing to himself by lamplight, reminding himself that the empire he commands, the body he inhabits, and the very next breath he takes are not finally his to keep, and that the only thing that is truly his, the only thing worth guarding, is the quality of his own choices.
An old man in the Australian desert walks a path his ancestors walked, singing as he goes, because the song is the map and the law and the history all at once, and the land beneath his feet is not scenery but scripture, sung into being and sung into order.
And somewhere in the ancient Near East, a person sets out, quite deliberately, to walk a way: to live every hour, the meals and the washing and the buying and the burying, according to a path laid down in a covenant between a people and their God.
Four answers. They look nothing alike. The first dissolves the self into the community; the second builds a fortress around it. The third writes the law into the ground; the fourth receives it from the sky. And yet, as we will see, they rhyme. This essay is a tour of that strangeness, the real and irreducible variety of human dharmas, and the stubborn family likeness that runs underneath them all.
How Far Can They Get?
We have come some distance already. We found that dharma means, at root, “that which holds,” and that there is no single one of them but many. We saw why every society grows one, under the pressure of holding strangers together. And we watched a single dharma up close, in the teak forests of Java, built little more than a century ago by people we could name.
The Samin were one. Now I want to pull back and show you the range, because the plurality this series keeps insisting on is not an abstraction. It is a real and sometimes vertiginous fact about the human world. So we are going to visit four dharmas that grew up far apart, look at each on its own terms, and only then ask what, if anything, holds across them. Watch, as we go, where each one draws its circle of care, who it gathers in and who it leaves outside.
I am going to end the tour with the one many of you were raised inside, the family of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ethics, and I want to be honest about why. The whole wager of this series is that we can look at dharmas without privileging any of them, including our own. That is easy to say about somebody else’s tradition and hard to do about the water you were swimming in before you could see it. So the Abrahamic covenant comes last, as the real test of whether the non-privileging eye can be turned around to look at itself.
Ubuntu: the Self Is a “We”
Start in southern Africa, with a single sentence in the Nguni languages: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. “A person is a person through other persons.” In its travelling English form it became “I am because we are,” and behind that gentle slogan sits one of the most radical claims any dharma makes, a claim not about how you should behave but about what you fundamentally are.
In the world most of my readers grew up in, the individual comes first. You are a self, complete and bounded, and then you enter into relationships, take on duties, join groups. Descartes gave that world its motto: I think, therefore I am. The lone mind, alone, is the bedrock. Ubuntu turns this inside out. On the account given by the philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti, personhood is not something you are issued at birth; it is something you achieve, and you achieve it only by taking your place in a community and discharging what you owe it. You can be a living, breathing member of the species and still not yet be, in the full sense, a person, because personhood is a moral accomplishment, grown in the soil of relationship. The self is downstream of the “we.”
It is tempting to hear in this the simple erasure of the individual, the single person swallowed whole by the group, and that misreading is worth heading off, because Ubuntu’s own thinkers are alert to it. The philosopher Kwame Gyekye pushed back against the most radical version, the one that would make the community the entire substance of the person, insisting that a fully realised human being is also a chooser and a reasoner, a bearer of conscience who can and sometimes must stand against the group when the group has gone wrong. Ubuntu at its best does not abolish the individual; it denies that the individual comes first. There is a real difference between saying you are nothing but your relationships and saying you become yourself through them, and the more careful readings of Ubuntu mean the second.
This is not just a warm sentiment, and it is not vague. The philosopher Thaddeus Metz has sharpened it into a precise moral theory: an action is right insofar as it honours relationships in which people recognise themselves in one another and act in solidarity. And it has done real public work. When apartheid ended and South Africa had to decide what to do with the torturers and killers of the old regime, it did not reach mainly for the courtroom and the prison. Under Desmond Tutu, it built a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an attempt to heal a fractured community by bringing the truth into the open and folding even perpetrators back into the moral world, rather than simply exacting retribution. And when the new Constitutional Court struck down the death penalty, it did so partly in the name of Ubuntu, holding that a state which kills its own betrays the recognition of shared humanity on which a decent society rests. A maxim from a village proverb became a principle of constitutional law.
I have to add the shadow, because every dharma in this essay has one, and Ubuntu’s is instructive. The warm picture of timeless African togetherness is, in part, a story told later, and it can be put to ugly uses: a demand for “harmony” can be a demand for silence, a way of shaming the dissenter and protecting the powerful. And there is a bitter irony on the record. The same post-apartheid South Africa that wrote Ubuntu into its highest law has seen waves of murderous violence against migrants from other African countries, the supposed brothers and sisters of the human family attacked as unwanted strangers. The web that includes can also exclude. We have met this before, the hard edge around the warm circle, and we will meet it again. Hold the thought.
The Stoics: The Fortress Inside
Now travel back, to the Greek and Roman world, for a dharma that will feel oddly modern, because it is one of the most nearly secular the ancient world produced.
Two of its greatest teachers could hardly have been further apart in station. Epictetus was born a slave, and taught, after he was freed, that no master could touch the one thing that mattered. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man on Earth, the emperor of Rome, and spent his private nights reminding himself of exactly the same thing. That a slave and an emperor could practise one and the same discipline, and arrive at one and the same freedom, tells you most of what Stoicism is.
Its core is a single, bracing distinction that Epictetus put at the very front of his handbook: some things are up to us, and some things are not. Our opinions, our intentions, our own choices and responses are ours. Almost everything else, our bodies, our reputations, our wealth, the behaviour of other people, the turn of events, is not finally in our control. The whole of wisdom, the Stoics taught, is to draw that line clearly and then to invest your hopes and your sense of yourself only on the inner side of it. Want what is up to you, accept what is not, and no tyrant, no accident, no loss can reach the citadel of your character. Virtue, the excellence of your own choosing self, is the only true good; everything else is, at most, raw material to be used well or badly.
Underneath the ethics sat a picture of the cosmos as fundamentally rational, ordered by what the Greeks called the logos, a reason running through all things, which a human being could align with by living “according to nature.” But notice how lightly that metaphysics sits on the practice. You do not have to believe in a particular god to draw Epictetus’s line between the controllable and the uncontrollable and to reorder your life around it. Which is exactly why Stoicism has come roaring back in our own anxious, secular century, repackaged in a thousand books and apps for people who would never set foot in a temple. It is a dharma that travels with almost no metaphysical luggage, a portable fortress for the self.
There is a further turn, and it points outward in a way you might not expect from a philosophy of the inner citadel. If reason runs through all things, then it runs through all people, and every human being, slave or emperor or stranger on the far frontier, shares in the same logos and the same fundamental worth. The Stoics drew the obvious conclusion and called themselves citizens of the world, members of a single community of rational beings that takes no account of city or tribe or birth. Marcus, ruling an empire built on conquest, reminded himself nonetheless that he owed the foreigner the same basic regard he owed his own kin. It is worth holding that beside the others on this tour: where Ubuntu binds you tightly to a particular people and the Dreaming to a particular country, the Stoic stretches the circle to its widest possible edge, the whole of humanity at once. The same impulse to draw a circle of care, and wildly different ideas about where to draw it.
It has its own failure mode, of course. Push the acceptance of “what is not up to us” too far and the fortress becomes a retreat: a counsel of passivity that can shade into indifference toward injustice you might actually be able to change. And there is a question worth asking of any philosophy that says externals do not matter: it is a good deal easier to believe that wealth and status are indifferent when, like Marcus, you already have all of both. A dharma can be true and still be more comfortable for some to hold than others.
The Dreaming: The Law In the Land
Now go to Australia, and to a dharma so old and so unlike the others that it stretches the very category, the Aboriginal tradition the English language clumsily calls the Dreaming.
Begin by throwing away three things you might think a serious ethical tradition needs. There is no scripture, because there is no writing. There is no founder, no Buddha or Christ or Confucius at the origin. And there is no separate “code,” no list of commandments you could copy onto a page. Instead there is the Tjukurrpa, a word that means, all at once, the ancestral past, the present reality, the moral law, and the structure of the world. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, reaching for a way to translate it, coined the word “everywhen”: a time that is not back then but always, in which the acts of the ancestral beings that shaped the land are not history but a living present that still holds the law in place.
And where is this law written, if not in a book? In the land itself, and in the songs that cross it. The famous songlines are paths through the country, and to sing the song in order is to recite the features of the landscape in order, and woven into the same performance are the law, the genealogy, the ethics, and the map. The land is the scripture, and you read it by walking and singing. It is dharma as total order, ethics and cosmos and geography and identity fused into one thing, and carried entirely in voice, movement, and place.
If you are tempted to think that something so unwritten must be vague or quick to drift, the evidence says otherwise, and it is astonishing. Researchers gathered Aboriginal stories from twenty-one places around the Australian coast, all describing a time when the sea stood lower and the shore lay further out. They are not myths in the dismissive sense. They are memories, of the coastlines that drowned when the last ice age ended, which means they have been carried, by mouth, accurately enough to still match the geology, for something between seven and thirteen thousand years. Oral does not mean fragile. High fidelity across hundreds of generations turns out to be an achievement of careful cultural machinery, not a gift of the written word.
Two features recur across these indigenous traditions that are worth carrying forward. The first is what some call kincentricity: the moral circle is not drawn around human beings alone but extends to the living world, so that the river, the animal, and the plant are not resources but relatives, owed the same reciprocity you owe your kin. The botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, writing from the Potawatomi tradition, calls humans “the younger brothers of Creation,” the ones with the most to learn. The second is the long time-horizon: the Haudenosaunee of North America, who ran an entire constitution orally for centuries, are famous for the principle that every serious decision must be weighed for its effects seven generations downstream. Place, kin, and the unborn are all inside the circle of care.
There is one more difference here, and it runs deeper than it first appears. The scholar Vine Deloria Jr drew a line between two fundamentally different kinds of dharma: religions of time and religions of space. The Axial and Abrahamic traditions, and arguably the secular outlook as well, are religions of time. They tell a universal story that runs from a beginning toward an end, and because the story does not depend on any particular patch of ground, it can be packed up and carried anywhere, preached on any continent. The Dreaming is a religion of space. It is this land, these rocks, that waterhole, and the law is written into the country itself, which means you cannot lift it off and carry it elsewhere without destroying it. That portability we take for granted in the great missionary faiths is not a universal feature of dharmas at all. Some of them are bolted to the earth, and mean nothing the moment you remove them from it.
The honest caution here is a subtle one. It is dangerously easy for outsiders, especially guilty modern ones, to turn indigenous peoples into a fantasy of the noble ecological saint, the human who lived in perfect harmony with nature, as a stick to beat our own civilisation with. The anthropologist Shepard Krech showed how much that image is a projection, and how indigenous peoples, like all peoples, in fact shaped and sometimes depleted their environments. The real lesson is more useful than the fantasy: these traditions encode genuinely powerful wisdom about living within limits, and they do so without their holders having to be angels. We can learn from a dharma, as one of its own custodians warned, without going around in borrowed feathers, pretending to own or to become it.
The Covenant: Looking At Your Own
Now the hardest stop on the tour, the one I promised would test whether the non-privileging eye can turn around. For most readers in the Western world, the tradition you absorbed before you could choose, whether or not you still believe a word of it, is one of the three faiths that trace themselves to Abraham. And the reflex bred into the modern mind is to file these under a different and opposite heading from “dharma”: under religion, the thing of belief and faith and the supernatural, as against ethics or philosophy or a way of life. I want to argue that this reflex is mistaken, and that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are, on this project’s terms, dharmas like any other.
The clinching evidence is sitting in their own vocabulary, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Halakha, the word for the whole body of Jewish practice, comes from a root meaning “to walk,” and it is best translated not as “law” but as “the way to walk.” Sharia, in Islam, literally means “the path to water.” And the very first Christians, before anyone called them Christians, called themselves followers of “the Way.” The same image, in all three, of a path one walks: which is precisely the image buried in the word dharma itself, and in its cousin mārga, the Sanskrit word for a road or path. These traditions describe themselves, in their own oldest language, exactly as a dharma does, as a path you walk rather than merely a creed you affirm.
And that is not just etymology. The modern assumption that religion is essentially belief, a set of propositions you hold in your head, is a peculiar and recent one, shaped largely by Protestant Christianity. Judaism and Islam do not fit it well at all, because they are overwhelmingly traditions of practice: comprehensive orders covering food, law, marriage, money, the shape of the day and the shape of the year. When an observant Jew keeps kosher, or a Muslim pauses to pray five times between dawn and night, what is mainly happening is not a proposition being affirmed but a day being shaped. That is the very definition of a dharma as we built it: a whole way of living, not a checklist of opinions. In this sense the great Abrahamic faiths are more dharma-like, not less, than the “religion equals belief” picture allows.
What genuinely sets them apart is the kind of ground they stand on. The Indic, Chinese, and indigenous dharmas tend to align you with an impersonal order, the ṛta or the Tao or the law in the land. The Abrahamic dharmas instead rest on a covenant: a binding, personal, historical relationship between a people and a God who commands, promises, and remembers. The order is not a structure to be discerned but a Person to be answered. That is a real difference, and it brings real consequences, including the hard question we have already met of whether ethics that rests on God’s command can survive God’s departure, a question we are saving for later.
Two more things deserve saying, because they cut against lazy stereotypes. First, Islam carries inside its own law a list of the law’s higher purposes, the maqasid, which the medieval thinker al-Ghazali summed up as the protection of religion, life, intellect, lineage, and property. That is a floor of protected human goods, built into the tradition centuries ago, and it looks remarkably like the lists of basic human capabilities that modern secular philosophers have proposed as a universal minimum. Second, Christianity contains two strands in tension. One, the Pauline strand, makes love the whole of ethics, declaring that “love is the fulfilling of the law,” and can seem to dissolve detailed path-walking into a single inner disposition. But alongside it runs another, the natural-law tradition that Thomas Aquinas built by marrying Christian faith to Aristotle, in which the core of morality is available to human reason reflecting on human nature, with no special revelation required. That strand is the direct ancestor of the secular, nature-grounded ethics this series leans on. The supposed opposite of secular dharma turns out to contain one of its grandparents.
And these are living traditions, not fossils, which is the thing the secular eye is most tempted to miss. The very maqasid, the higher purposes of the law, are what reformers reach for when they argue that a cruel or patriarchal reading has lost sight of what the law was for: movements such as Sisters in Islam contest extremist interpretations not by walking away from the tradition but by appealing further into it. Both Islam and Judaism carry centuries of fierce internal argument, and both shelter mystical, inward streams, Sufism and Kabbalah, every bit as contemplative as anything in Buddhism. A dharma is not its most rigid and frightened version. It is a quiet failure of the non-privileging eye to define other people’s traditions by their fundamentalists while defining our own by its philosophers.
Here is the reflexive sting, and I will not soften it. If the Abrahamic paths are dharmas, then so is whatever I am doing here. “Secular dharma” is not a neutral throne above the others from which I get to rank them. It is one more path among the paths, with its own commitments and its own blind spots, walking alongside the covenant and the Dreaming and the rest, not floating above them. The non-privileging stance, taken seriously, privileges me least of all.
What Rhymes
So we have our four, and they really are profoundly different. Set them side by side and they disagree about the deepest things there are. They disagree about what a person even is: a node in a living web, or a self-contained citadel of choice. They disagree about time: a line running from creation to judgment, or an “everywhen” in which the ancestral past is permanently present. They disagree about the ground of it all: an impersonal order you align with, a commanding God you answer to, a land you belong to. This is not a trivial diversity that melts away on inspection. It goes all the way down. Anyone who tells you the world’s wisdom traditions are “all really saying the same thing” has not looked hard at what they actually say.
And yet. Stand back far enough and the family resemblance is just as undeniable as the difference. Every one of these dharmas carries some version of the oldest rule we know, the call to treat others as you would be treated, whether it is extended to the village, the cosmopolis, the more-than-human world, or the covenant community. Every one of them binds an “us,” turning a crowd of strangers into a people who can trust one another. Every one of them forms character through practice and habit, not just through assent, which is why all four are things you do and not merely things you think. And every one of them treats the moral order as continuous with the order of reality itself, so that to live rightly is to come into tune with the way things truly are.
That is the shape we keep arriving at, and it is worth naming clearly because the rest of the series leans on it. The variety is real, thick, and not to be flattened, and underneath it runs a thin band of shared human concern that no functioning dharma seems to do without. Difference all the way down, and kinship all the way down, at the same time. Later, when we have to ask the dangerous question of whether some dharmas are simply better than others, that thin shared band is going to be the only honest place to stand. For now it is enough to have seen, with our own eyes, that the plurality is genuine and the rhyme is genuine, and that both facts are true together.
Made of the Same Need
So what does the world of dharmas show us, taken whole?
It shows that human beings, facing the one problem of how to live well together, have built answers of breathtaking variety, and that the variety is not noise to be filtered out but the very thing to be understood. A relational web in southern Africa, a fortress of the will in imperial Rome, a sung and walked law in the Australian desert, a covenant in the Near East: four solutions to one need, each fully itself, each unmistakably a member of the same family.
But I have been describing these dharmas from the outside, as an observer strolling through a gallery, comparing the exhibits. That is not how anyone actually lives inside one. From the inside, your dharma does not feel like one option among four. It does not feel chosen, or built, or cultural at all. It feels like simply the truth, like the plain shape of reality, as obvious and unremarkable as the ground being solid and the sky being up. The elder does not experience “a relational ontology of personhood.” She experiences the plain fact that a person needs other people. That is the real power of a working dharma, and it is also its deepest mystery. How does a made thing get so far inside a human being that it stops feeling made? How does a path you were simply born onto come to feel like the only ground there is?
To answer that, we have to stop looking at what dharmas say and start looking at what they do to the people who hold them, how they get under the skin, into the habits, and down into the nervous system itself. We have to ask not what a dharma teaches, but how it installs.
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 - 4.2 Ubuntu — relational/achieved personhood, Metz’s moral theory, the TRC and S v Makwanyane, and the romanticisation/xenophobia critique. - 4.3 Indigenous Oral Dharmas — the Dreaming/Tjukurrpa, songlines, oral fidelity, kincentricity, Seven Generations, place-boundedness, and the “Ecological Indian” caution. - 4.4 Abrahamic Ethics as Dharmic Frameworks — the way/path test (halakha, sharia, “the Way”), orthopraxy, covenant, the maqasid, caritas, and Aquinas’s natural law; the non-privileging demands. - 1.4 Cross-cultural Cognates — the impersonal cosmic orders (ṛta, Tao, the Stoic logos) against which covenant grounding is set.
Key Works
- Ifeanyi Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought” (1984), with Kwame Gyekye’s moderate-communitarian reply, and Thaddeus Metz, “Toward an African Moral Theory” (2007) — achieved personhood, the place of individual choice, and the formalised ubuntu principle.
- S v Makwanyane (1995) — Ubuntu as a foundational constitutional value; with Bernard Matolino & Wenceslaus Kwindingwi, “The End of Ubuntu” (2013), for the critique.
- Epictetus, Enchiridion, and Marcus Aurelius, Meditations — the dichotomy of control, virtue as the only good, and living “according to nature.”
- W. E. H. Stanner, “The Dreaming” (1953); Patrick Nunn & Nicholas Reid on 7,000–13,000-year-old coastal memories (2016); the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace and the Seven Generations principle; Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red (1973), on “religions of space” vs “religions of time.”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), on kincentricity; with Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian (1999), as the corrective.
- On the Abrahamic path-idiom and grounding: the etymologies of halakha and sharia; al-Ghazali’s maqasid al-shariah; Paul on love fulfilling the law (Romans 13:10); and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, on natural law and synderesis.
