Articles/Essays/Notes

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.

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.

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

A journalist on compassion fatigue after Indonesia's 2004 tsunami and years of disasters—empathy, exhaustion and self-preservation.

Milgram's obedience experiment examined: collective morality, war crimes, and how individual freedom clashes with bureaucratic authority.