Dharma

DHARMA. - This Sanskrit word, etymologically connected with the Latin firmu-s, is one of the richest in meanings: statute, custom, law, duty, virtue. The Indian d. comprises human and divine laws, sanctions more duties than rights, and although it emanates from the Vedic priestly schools, it draws not only on revelation (śruti) but also on tradition (smṛti). The collections of rules on the duties and rights of priests, kings, heads of families, and ascetics served as a norm for the brahmins (v. BRĀHMANA) for decisions in matters of sacred and profane law as long as the administration of justice was entrusted to them. They became codes of law with the institution of tribunals. To the oldest collections, in aphoristic prose, such as that of the school of Āpastamba (āpastambiya-dharmaśūtra, of the 5th or 4th century B.C.) the name sūtra, aphorisms, is usually given, while the collections in verse are usually called śāstra, treatises.

But the two names are often used as synonyms. In the meaning of "righteousness," d. is part of the triad: virtue, utility and love (d., artha, kāma), considered the three elements of human happiness and therefore the goal of life. To the exposition of the religious and moral duties of the Indo-Aryans (d.-śāstra) there correspond accordingly treatises on the manner of acquiring and preserving wealth (artha-śāstra), and on the art of love (kāma-śāstra). The best known are: the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya (kautilya-arthāśāstra, ca. 300 B.C.), which is for the most part a treatise on politics for the use of the king, like Machiavelli's The Prince, and the Kāmaśūtra or Kāmaśāstra of Mallanāga Vātsyāyana (ca. 4th century A.D.). Naturally political treatises admit only the morality that agrees with utility, and for this reason it is repudiated as false by the Buddhists. In Buddhism the d. (Pāli: dhamma) is part of another triad, to which the neophyte appeals in his profession of faith: the Buddha, the doctrine, the monastic community (buddha, dhamma, aṅga). Here d. means "the Buddhist doctrine." D. is also a god, personification of Justice, who in the Mahābhārata appears three times: in book I (114, 1-3) to unite miraculously with Kunti and beget Yudhiṣṭhira, the eldest of the Pāṇḍu brothers, of whom Paṇḍu is the putative father; in book III (114, 18-19) to promise the Pāṇḍavas that their stay in the capital of the Maṭṣya will remain unknown, and in book XVII, 3, in the form of a dog, to accompany Yudhiṣṭhira to Indra's heaven, on whose threshold he resumes his divine form and praises the constancy of his son, ready to renounce heaven rather than be separated from the faithful dog, to whom Indra forbids access to the celestial worlds.

Ferdinando Belloni Filippi