Articles/Essays/Notes

An anarchist in Bali, a 15,000-document knowledgebase, a 40-year question: how this unlikely dharma series was built, sourced and written.

Dharma means 'that which holds', not destiny or doctrine. Tracing its Sanskrit root shows why every society builds an ethics to hold itself together.

How did dharma arise? When cities outgrew face-to-face morality, humans engineered explicit codes—and the Axial sages answered, not revealed, that need.

An illiterate Javanese farmer built a dharma from scratch in 1890. A century on, his heirs set feet in cement to defend the same principles.

Five dharmas—Ubuntu, Stoicism, Aboriginal Dreaming, Sumarah and the Abrahamic covenant—disagree on nearly everything, yet rhyme underneath.

A dharma feels like truth because it was grooved into gut, habit and brain wiring, below the reach of the self that could doubt it.

Every strength of a dharma has a dark twin: the fence that unites also excludes, the authority that frees also rules. No dharma escapes its own failures.

'Spiritual but not religious' isn't dharma's absence but its search — without gods, without ritual, against an attention economy built to fight it.

Dharmas were built, not found. Gary Dean asks what happens when we build them on purpose—for a warming planet, for AI, and for ourselves.

What is a dharma? A concise definition, four defining features, and two tests for judging whether a way of living holds without crushing.

Gary Dean's two-part test for judging dharmas: holding without crushing, and staying revisable by those they bind—applied to real cases and objections.

Youtube censorship, bizarre, odd

Explore dharma's Sanskrit roots and its evolution into an adaptive ethical framework—still relevant for secular life, ethics and modern culture.

A review of Batchelor's After Buddhism: sharp philological demolition and vivid history, but a secular dharma left without institutions to sustain it.

Gary Dean: Perth-born, Indonesian citizen since 1996. Founder of Okusi group, exploring prosociality, Indonesian business, and open technology.