Gary Dean
Every failure of a dharma turns out to be the dark twin of a strength. The bond that holds a group together is the fence that shuts others out; the authority that can free people is the authority that can rule them; the practice that liberates is the cage. Failure is not a flaw in dharma. It is the strength, over-extended.
In the Buddhist-majority country of Myanmar, a monk named Ashin Wirathu spent years preaching. He wore the saffron robe. He had taken the vows. And what he preached, to large and adoring crowds, was hatred of his Muslim neighbours, the Rohingya, in terms so incendiary that he came to be seen, not entirely unfairly, as the Burmese face of a coming slaughter. When that slaughter came, when soldiers and mobs drove more than a million Rohingya from their homes, burning villages and killing as they went, the man in the robe had helped lay the moral groundwork, in the name of protecting the faith.
Buddhism, in the Western imagination, is the gentle dharma, the one with no crusades, the religion of loving-kindness and the breath and the patient smile. And here is a Buddhist monk, sincere, learned, devout, using that very tradition to bless an ethnic cleansing. The first instinct, the comforting one, is to say: well, he is not a real Buddhist. Real Buddhism would never. But that instinct, we are going to see, is a trap, and refusing it is where this essay has to begin.
We have spent five essays in something close to admiration. We have watched how dharmas hold us together, how they answer the deepest human needs, how they get so far inside us that they feel like truth itself. We have mostly been sympathetic witnesses. We cannot stay sympathetic any longer, because a sympathetic account that never looked at the wreckage would be a lie, and you would be right not to trust it. If dharmas do everything the last five essays said they do, why is so much of history’s cruelty signed in their name? So this is the hard essay, the one where we look straight at that harm, done sincerely, century after century, by people every bit as certain of their own goodness as we are of ours.
Why “that’s not real Buddhism” Is a Cop-Out
Start by closing the comforting exit, because almost everyone reaches for it and it leads nowhere.
When a Buddhist monk incites genocide, or a Christian blesses a slave ship, or any tradition is turned to cruelty, the reflex is to declare that the perpetrators have betrayed the true faith, that real Buddhism or real Christianity is the peaceful thing and the violence is a corruption from outside. Philosophers have a name for this move. They call it the No True Scotsman fallacy, after the imaginary patriot who insists that no true Scotsman would do some disgraceful thing, and who, when shown a Scotsman who did exactly that, simply replies that no true Scotsman would. The trick is that you protect your ideal by redefining anyone who violates it as not really a member.
Scholars at Harvard’s Religious Literacy Project put the correction bluntly: religions are internally diverse, and a tradition deep enough and old enough to contain a saint is deep enough to contain a butcher, with both sincerely drawing on the same scriptures and the same authority. The peace-preaching monk and the hate-preaching monk are both authentically Buddhist. To wave the second away as fake is not analysis; it is loyalty dressed up as argument, a way of refusing to see. So I am going to hold to an uncomfortable rule for the rest of this essay. The failures of a dharma are not betrayals of its pure essence. They are expressions of its real potential, as genuine as its glories, and they grow from the very same roots.
The Dark Twin
Here is the thesis that organises everything that follows, and it is the idea the rest of this series stands on.
Go back over the last five essays and list what makes a dharma powerful. A strong, identity-shaping sense of who “we” are. Costly, hard-to-fake commitment that binds people tightly together. A transcendent authority that outranks any mere person or law. Deep in-group trust. And an installation machinery, the ritual and habit and repetition, that drives all of this below conscious thought until it feels like simple reality. Every one of those is a genuine strength. Every one of them is exactly why dharmas work.
Now notice that not one of them has any moral content of its own. A strong “we” is a wonderful thing right up until you ask what happens to “them.” Costly commitment binds the just community and the death cult with equal strength. A transcendent authority can chastise a tyrant or crown him. Deep trust inside the group is the same psychological fact as deep suspicion of those outside it. And the installation machinery, as we saw last time, will groove cruelty into the bone exactly as faithfully as it grooves kindness. The features and the failures are not two separate lists. They are one list, seen from two sides. Every failure of a dharma is the dark twin of one of its strengths, which is why no dharma is safe, and why the failures keep coming back no matter how often we are scandalised by them. Let us walk through five of these twins.
The Fence Becomes a Wall
The first and deepest failure is the one we have been circling since the very beginning, the hard edge around the warm circle.
A dharma works by turning a crowd of strangers into an “us.” That is its genius, the thing that lets it hold a group together across a scale no troop of apes could manage. But an “us” is defined by its boundary, and a boundary has an outside. The same bonding that makes you cherish your own people is, as a matter of evolved psychology, the very mechanism that primes you to fear and distrust the people beyond the line. Researchers call it parochial altruism: we are built to make sacrifices for the in-group and to brace ourselves against the out-group, and the two are a single instinct, not two. Turned up, fed on fear, and pointed at a hated minority, that ordinary instinct becomes the engine of the pogrom, the crusade, the inquisition, and the cleansing. The fence that holds the community together becomes the wall behind which the community does its killing. Wirathu’s monstrousness was not foreign to his dharma. It was his dharma’s in-group warmth with the sign flipped, aimed outward at the people who had been defined as not-us. The scholar Mark Juergensmeyer, surveying religious violence across every major tradition, found the same grim pattern everywhere: there is no faith so peaceful that it cannot be turned, by someone sincere, into a reason to kill.
I do not want to leave this at despair, because there is one genuinely hopeful thing buried in the research. It is not obvious that the lethal version of the boundary is hardwired. The primatologist Richard Wrangham points out that our chimpanzee cousins, who kill each other at rates much like ours, show none of the self-sacrificing battlefield heroism that human war runs on, and that the readiness to die for the group against another group looks more like something cultures install than something genes demand. And in a famous experiment at a summer camp called Robbers Cave, psychologists took two groups of boys they had deliberately turned into bitter rivals and dissolved the hostility almost completely, simply by giving them a shared problem that neither group could solve alone. The fence, in other words, can be moved. The line around “us” is not fixed at the tribe; it has been pushed outward again and again across history, and there is no law of nature that says it cannot be pushed further. Hold on to that. It is the thin thread of hope that the last essay in this series will try to pull.
The Authority That Frees Becomes the Authority That Rules
The second twin lives in the very thing that lets a dharma stand above mere power: its claim to a higher authority.
Remember where morality seems to have started. In the small forager bands of the deep past, the moral sense worked, as Christopher Boehm argued, as a levelling device, a way for the many to gang up on the would-be bully and keep any one person from lording it over the rest. Morality began, on this story, as a weapon of the weak against the strong. And then, when societies grew and stratified and some people came to rule over others, that same moral authority was captured and turned inside out, made into a justification for the very domination it had once resisted. This is the double face of dharma and power, and you cannot understand the history of religion without it.
On one face, the dharma sanctifies the ruler. The Hindu doctrine of caste, wedded to the idea of karma, could tell the man born into the lowest station that he had earned it cosmically, by his conduct in a previous life, and that his suffering was therefore just. Kings across the world have ruled by divine right. Marx had a hard phrase for this function, religion as “the opium of the people,” the drug that makes an unjust order feel bearable and even holy. The Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci saw the subtler version: the deepest power is not the soldier who forces you but the worldview, often religious, that makes the existing arrangement feel natural, inevitable, and right, so that you consent to your own place in it without anyone having to raise a hand. And whoever controls the dharma controls something even more basic, the power to say what counts as orthodox and what as heresy, who is inside and who is to be cast out. In the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, it is the power of legitimate naming, and it is one of the most jealously guarded prizes there is.
But there is the other face, and it is the reason this is a real fight and not just a swindle. The very same higher authority that can crown a king can also condemn him. Once you have said that there is a justice above the throne, you have handed every prophet and reformer a place to stand. The Hebrew prophets used it to denounce their own corrupt rulers. We watched this face at work in the third essay: the same machinery that let the Samin of Java quietly refuse an extractive authority is the machinery that caste used to sanctify one. The Indian reformer Bhimrao Ambedkar, leading half a million Dalits out of Hinduism and into a reconstructed Buddhism, performed the most surgical version of this move imaginable. To turn the dharma against the caste oppression he had suffered, he deliberately cut out the doctrine of karma, the exact teaching that had been used to justify that oppression. The authority that the powerful seize to sanctify themselves is the same authority the powerless seize to indict them. It is just that the powerful usually own the institutions, so the sanctifying face is the default and the liberating face is the harder, rarer, more dangerous achievement.
And even the liberating face is not as clean as it looks, which is the unsettling lesson the philosopher Michel Foucault pressed hardest. Power, he argued, is not only the boot that holds you down; it is also productive, busy making the very kind of person you become. The confessional, the spiritual director, the meditation hall, the programme of self-improvement: these do not merely restrain people, they actively shape selves, train desires, and produce a particular sort of disciplined soul. So when a dharma frees you from one regime, it tends to install another in its place, a fresh set of rules about how to watch and govern yourself. There is no escape into a dharma-free clearing where the self runs wild and unsupervised, because the self is itself something a dharma builds. The real question is never power against freedom. It is always which regime of self-making you are living inside, and whether you chose it or were simply born into it.
The Cage: Who Holds the Key
The third twin is the way a dharma, which promises a path to the good life, can become a prison, and nowhere is this clearer than in the two arenas of gender and money.
Consider gender first, because dharmas encode it early and the record is bleak. Across tradition after tradition, the codified mainstream has placed women under men and called it the order of things. The Hindu lawbook of Manu states flatly that a woman must never be independent, passing from the control of her father to her husband to her sons. An early Buddhist rule made every nun, however senior, subordinate to every monk, however junior. The Confucian “three obediences” bound a woman to obey father, then husband, then son. The household codes of the Abrahamic scriptures lock women into submission. In each case the subordination is handed the highest possible warrant, cosmic or scriptural, so that a human arrangement of power gets to wear the costume of eternal truth.
And yet the very same traditions carry, inside themselves, the materials of revolt. The oldest collection of women’s poetry in India is a set of verses by Buddhist nuns celebrating their own awakening. The Hindu women-saints of the devotional tradition, Mirabai and Akka Mahadevi, walked out of their marriages and their assigned roles, using love of God as the one pretext their society could not deny them. The same Christian scripture that tells wives to submit also declares that in Christ there is “neither male nor female.” In our own time the scholar Amina Wadud rereads the Qur’an from a woman’s standpoint and argues that its true principle is equality, and that the patriarchy is the accretion, not the core. This is the pattern, and it is worth stating as a rule: a dharma in itself neither frees women nor cages them. It is the contested ground on which that fight is waged, and the same scripture hands down both the chains and the keys. What decides which one you get is not the text. It is who holds the power to read it.
I owe one honest qualification here, because the word “cage” carries my own values inside it. The yardstick I have been using, that subordinating women is a failure and freeing them a success, is itself a fairly modern and broadly liberal standard, and I should not pretend it floats above all dharmas as neutral fact. Many women, including many who had every chance to choose otherwise, have described lives inside traditional roles not as a prison but as a place of meaning, dignity, and chosen devotion. A fair reckoning has to hold two things at once. It must register that self-understanding honestly, rather than sneering at it from a comfortable distance, and it must still name the documented, systematic ways these systems have stripped women of autonomy and authority and called the result the will of heaven. Both of those are true, and the strain between them is exactly the kind of thing the final essays will have to face.
Money tells the same double story. Dharmas have blessed economic orders and damned them, often in the same breath. The caste system assigned each person their economic place by sacred duty. In the West, as the philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, the old Protestant idea that worldly success was a sign of God’s favour, once God fell away, slowly curdled into the modern faith in meritocracy: the conviction that the winner deserves to win and, more cruelly, that the loser deserves to lose. That is a secular dharma doing the oldest dirty job in the book, re-sanctifying inequality after the gods have gone home, telling the poor their poverty is a verdict on their worth. But dharmas have also been the sharpest critics of economic cruelty. David Graeber spent his career as an anthropologist showing how the language of debt and the language of sin grew up entangled, and how debt has been the supreme tool for making the exploited feel that their suffering is their own fault. Against that, he set the older and almost forgotten intuition that the truly sacred act was never repaying a debt but cancelling it, the clean slate, the jubilee. The dharma that tells you to accept your lot and the dharma that tells you to tear up the ledger are written in the same hand.
The Fire Goes Out
The fourth twin turns the danger inward. Not every failure of a dharma involves a victim. Some of the most insidious are the ones where the dharma quietly rots from the inside while everyone keeps going through the motions, and these failures wear a friendly face, which is exactly what makes them so hard to see.
The first is the hollowing. The sociologist Max Weber described how the white-hot insight of a founder, the living fire of a Buddha or a Christ or a prophet, gets slowly cooled and boxed up over the generations into something manageable: the teaching codified into texts, the experience replaced by a ritual, the personal charisma succeeded by a bureaucracy. The form survives, perfectly preserved, long after the thing it was built to carry has died inside it. You can kneel in a tradition that has become pure habit, recite words that mean nothing to anyone in the room, and mistake the husk for the kernel. At the scale of a single person this rot has a name too: spiritual bypassing, the use of lofty spiritual ideas to dodge one’s actual messy human problems, the serene meditator who is really just fleeing his own anger and calling the flight enlightenment. In each case the practice continues while its purpose silently inverts.
The second self-corruption is stranger, because the dharma’s own success causes it. Doing good, it turns out, can license doing bad. Psychologists have documented what they call moral licensing: having established our virtue in one act, we feel quietly entitled to cut a corner in the next, as though we had banked moral credit and were now free to spend it. A dharma generates moral capital by the ton, and that capital becomes a permit. The community certain of its own righteousness is the community best able to excuse its own cruelty, because surely we, the good people, could not really be the ones doing wrong. And the very commitment-signalling that binds a group can run away into a purity spiral, an escalating contest to be the most devout and the most orthodox, until the dharma turns inward and begins devouring its own insufficiently faithful. Here the failure is not that anyone abandoned the dharma. It is that they took it too seriously in the wrong direction, and let their goodness become their alibi.
The Mirror: Dharma in the Yoga Studio
The fifth twin is the gentlest-looking and closest to home. Remember where we began this whole series: with the word “dharma” on the front of a yoga studio, a soft and pleasant Western thing, vaguely Eastern, vaguely spiritual. It is time to look at that studio squarely, because it is a failure mode too, the failure of how a dharma travels across a line of power.
Let me be careful, because the obvious accusation is the wrong one. The problem is not that the West borrowed from the East. Cultures have always borrowed, and dharmas have always lived and grown precisely by crossing borders and mixing; there were Greek kings on the frontier of India two thousand years ago who put the wheel of the dharma on their coins. Borrowing is not theft. The trouble is in the terms. When a powerful culture takes from a culture it once colonised, strips away the demanding ethical and communal core, keeps only the soothing technique, and sells it back as a product, something has gone wrong that the innocent word “sharing” does not cover. That deep structure has a name, coined by the scholar Edward Said: Orientalism, the long habit of the West constructing the East as an exotic, mysterious, faintly unreal Other, a screen onto which to project whatever the West was hungry for. The meditation app that promises stress relief with none of the inconvenient teaching about selflessness and the renunciation of craving, the mindfulness reduced to a productivity hack for the very economy it was once meant to question, has been called, sharply, “McMindfulness.” It keeps the calm and discards the challenge. It takes the part that comforts and leaves behind the part that would change you.
The appropriation goes deeper than products, all the way down into the categories themselves. The tidy nouns we reach for, “Buddhism,” “Hinduism,” and the very idea of a list of “world religions,” are to a surprising degree nineteenth-century European inventions. They carve up other people’s lives in ways those people did not always recognise, built on Christian assumptions about what a religion is even supposed to be. The West did not only borrow the practices. It manufactured the containers through which we now perceive “Eastern religion” in the first place, and then forgot they were manufactured. So when we sort the world’s dharmas into their neat boxes, we are often handling tools originally forged as instruments of empire.
And now the sting I cannot avoid, because the non-privileging eye has to turn back on itself. This very project, a secular dharma assembled in a Western language out of traditions from elsewhere, is a prime suspect in its own investigation. When I lift a “universal core” out of Buddhism and set its Asian cosmology aside as cultural packaging, I am doing the exact move an appropriator would do, and saying the exact thing an appropriator would say to justify it. Whether that is honest translation or quiet theft is not settled by my good intentions. It turns on power, on reciprocity, on whether I keep the demanding parts or only the pleasant ones, and on whether I am willing to be changed by what I borrow or only to consume it. I do not get to exempt myself from this essay. No one does.
The Wolf in the Flock
Every failure we have walked through so far shares one feature, and it is the feature that makes them so disturbing: they are sincere. The fence-builder loves his people, the priest who crowns the king believes in the crown, the keeper of the cage thinks he is preserving order, and even the appropriator, myself included, mostly means well. The dark twins need no villain. Ordinary devotion, turned a few degrees, does the damage by itself.
But a dharma is not only vulnerable to its sincere believers. The very machinery that makes it work, the deep trust it manufactures and the benefit of the doubt it extends to anyone who performs the right devotions, is a standing invitation to a figure who is not sincere at all. Recall the costly, hard-to-fake signals that, back in the second essay, sorted the committed from the casual and welded a group together. That filter was built to keep out the free-rider, the one who wants the warmth of belonging without paying for it. It works against almost everyone. It does not work against the rare person who can perform every signal flawlessly and feel nothing behind it.
Such people exist, in roughly predictable numbers. The condition even has a clinical literature: what the psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley called a “mask of sanity,” and what the psychologist Robert Hare spent a career charting – somewhere around one person in a hundred in whom the ordinary equipment of conscience, empathy, fear, and remorse is, from the beginning, muted close to silence. For someone so built, the devotions are a costume and the trust of others is a resource, and a dharma is very nearly the perfect hunting ground, because it produces trust in bulk and hands it to whoever wears the robe convincingly. This is the guru who preys on his disciples, the venerated elder unmasked after thirty years, the holy man whose followers cannot credit the charges precisely because he played the part so well. He does not over-extend a strength. He wears it.
Here the deep past speaks straight to the present. The forager bands of the second essay had a remedy for exactly this figure: the intimidator who could not be shamed was watched, levelled, and in the last resort removed, because in a camp of thirty there is nowhere for a predator to hide. What the small band could do, the mega-society cannot. The very anonymity that broke the old morality, the sea of strangers a dharma was built to cross, is also the condition under which the predator flourishes, because the transparency that once exposed him cannot reach across a congregation of thousands or a corporation of tens of thousands. We built dharmas so that strangers could trust strangers, and in the same stroke we built the ideal cover for the stranger who should never be trusted. And this quietly undoes the comfort the first half of this essay seemed to offer: the sincere butcher may be more troubling than the fake one, but it does not follow that sincerity is a test we can lean on. Sincerity is the very thing the predator counterfeits, and a dharma’s demand for visible devotion rewards the most fluent counterfeiter in the room.
No Dharma Is Safe
Stand back now and look at these twins together, because they tell a single and rather severe truth.
The bond that holds a community together is the fence that shuts the stranger out. The authority that lets a prophet shame a tyrant is the authority that lets a priest crown one. The path that promises a good life is the cage that can trap half of humanity inside an assigned role. The very fire that gives a dharma life is the fire that gutters out into empty form, or flares up into a righteousness that licenses cruelty. The exchange that lets dharmas grow is the extraction that strip-mines a conquered people’s wisdom for a product. In every case the failure is not a foreign contamination that a purer practice could avoid. It is the strength itself, running past its limit. And even the predator who games a dharma from outside confirms the rule rather than breaking it. That means the comforting dream, the dream of finding the one good dharma that does not fail, is an illusion. There is no such dharma. The tendency to fail is the standing price of a dharma being powerful enough to do anything at all.
This is bleak, but it is also clarifying, because it finally kills a question we should never have been asking and forces on us the one we have been postponing. “Is it a dharma?” was never the same question as “is it good?” A thing can be fully, authentically a dharma, comprehensive and binding and deep, and be an instrument of horror. So we cannot rest in the comfortable pluralism that says every path is one more lovely flower in the garden. Some of these flowers are poison. If failure is intrinsic, then the only question left is not “which dharma is pure,” because none is, but “which dharma fails least, and recovers best, and by what standard could we possibly say.” That is the question of judgement, the one this whole series has been walking toward, and we can no longer walk around it.
But there is one more complication, and it sets up everything that remains. Every dharma we have put on trial in this essay, every caste order and household code and crusading faith, was built long ago, for a world that no longer exists: the world of the village, the empire, the kinship clan, the agrarian field. That world is gone. For hundreds of millions of people now, the old gods have fallen silent, and the village has been replaced by the restless, rootless, screen-lit anonymity of the modern city and the internet. So the question is about to become double. Not only how we are to judge dharmas, but what becomes of dharma itself, now, in an age that has misplaced the foundations every previous dharma was built on.
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 - 7.1 Failure Modes — the four failure clusters, the No-True-Scotsman refusal, and the thesis that failure-proneness is intrinsic. The spine of this essay. - 7.3 Dharma & Power — the double face: morality as anti-domination captured to sanctify domination; Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Ambedkar. - 6.4 Gender & Dharma — the subordinating mainstream and the liberating counter-current; the same scripture as chains and keys. - 6.3 Economics, Work & Inequality — dharma as justifier, constraint, and critic of economic order; meritocracy and Graeber on debt. - 7.2 Cultural Adaptation & Appropriation — Orientalism, “McMindfulness,” and the reflexive indictment of secular translation. - 5.5 Psychopaths & the Exploiter Limit-Case — the insincere predator who games a dharma’s trust; the free-rider that costly signalling and Boehm’s reverse-dominance evolved to catch, and the one type built to beat the filter.
Key works
- On authentic failure: the No-True-Scotsman / internal-diversity argument (Harvard Religious Literacy Project), and Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God — sacred violence across every tradition; with the Wirathu / Rohingya case.
- Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox (2019), and Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment — the lethal boundary as cultural and movable.
- On a dharma’s self-corruption: Max Weber on the routinization of charisma; John Welwood on “spiritual bypassing”; and Benoît Monin & Dale Miller on moral licensing.
- Michel Foucault on productive and pastoral power — why even a liberating dharma installs a new regime of self-governance.
- Christopher Boehm on morality as anti-domination; Karl Marx (“the opium of the people”); Antonio Gramsci on hegemony; Pierre Bourdieu on the “power of legitimate naming”; and B. R. Ambedkar’s Navayāna Buddhism.
- On the predator who games a dharma: Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity (1941), and Robert Hare, Without Conscience (1993) — psychopathy as a low-frequency human type with conscience and empathy constitutionally muted; with Boehm (above) on the band’s levelling of the intimidator the mega-society can no longer watch.
- On gender: the Manusmṛti, the garudhammas, and the Confucian ‘three obediences’ (Ban Zhao); the Therīgāthā; the Bhakti poets Mīrābāī and Akka Mahādēvi; Galatians 3:28; Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman; and Rita Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy.
- On economics: Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit; David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years; and Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
- On appropriation: Edward Said, Orientalism; Jeremy Carrette & Richard King, Selling Spirituality; and the colonial construction of the very category “world religions.”
