Dharma and adharma

Overview

Recall questions on the meaning of dharma in the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita, adharma, the decline and restoration of dharma, the purusharthas, punya, svadharma and sadharana dharma, whether dharma is the same as ethics, and whether it is too relative to guide.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Why is dharma so hard to translate?

   Model answer

   Because the English words available each capture only part of it. Duty catches the obligation but loses the cosmic dimension; law catches the bindingness but suggests a legislator; religion catches the sacredness but imports a Western category; righteousness catches the moral quality but sounds merely personal; order and nature catch the idea that things have a proper way of being but lose the sense that a person can fail to meet it. Dharma covers all of these at once. The root sense is holding or supporting, and the term names whatever sustains a thing in being what it is, from the cosmos down to an individual life.

2. 2

   What does the Mahabharata establish about the meaning of dharma?

   Model answer

   In its long discourse on duty during the book of peace, the epic derives the word from the idea of upholding and defines dharma as that which holds creatures together and prevents them falling apart. Elsewhere in the epic the test is put in terms of welfare: what supports and sustains the well-being of living beings is dharma. Two things follow. Dharma is not an arbitrary list of commands but whatever actually keeps the world and society standing. And because welfare is the criterion, the definition supplies a standard by which particular customs can be criticised, which is why reformers appeal to it.

3. 3

   Why is dharma described as important for the world and not only for people?

   Model answer

   Because Hindu thought does not confine order to human society. The Vedic idea of rita, the regularity by which the seasons turn and the sun rises, is dharma's ancestor, and dharma inherits the sense that the same principle that keeps the cosmos coherent also keeps a household or a kingdom coherent. On this view moral failure is not merely wrong but destabilising, since the human world is continuous with the natural one. Hindus therefore commonly speak of dharma as something that is maintained or damaged rather than merely obeyed or broken.

4. 4

   What is adharma?

   Model answer

   Adharma is the absence or opposite of dharma: conduct and conditions that pull things apart rather than holding them together. It covers deliberate wrongdoing such as violence, theft, falsehood and betrayal, but also the failure to do what one's position requires, so neglect is as much adharma as offence. On the larger scale it names a state of affairs in which duty is generally disregarded, rulers are unjust, the learned are ignored and the social order breaks down. Hindu cosmology treats this as something that recurs rather than as an accident, which is why it comes with an account of restoration.

5. 5

   In Hindu cosmology, how does dharma decline and how is it restored?

   Model answer

   Time is understood as cyclical rather than linear. A great age, the mahayuga, is made up of four successive ages of decreasing length and decreasing virtue: in the first, dharma is said to stand firm on all four legs, and it loses one in each age that follows, so that in the present and worst age it stands on one alone, and life is short, the mind is weak and duty is widely abandoned. When the cycle is exhausted the worst age gives way to a new first age with dharma fully restored, and only at the end of a kalpa, a day of Brahma lasting about a thousand such cycles, is the world dissolved before a new creation. Within a cycle, restoration also happens through divine intervention. The scheme allows Hindus to acknowledge that the world is in a bad state without concluding that it is ending, since decline is built into the design.

6. 6

   What does the Bhagavad Gita establish about how dharma is restored?

   Model answer

   Krishna tells Arjuna that although both of them have passed through many births, he alone remembers them; and that although he is unborn and imperishable and the lord of beings, he comes into existence through his own power. He then states the condition and the purpose: whenever dharma weakens and adharma rises, he brings himself into being, and he does so age after age, to protect the good, to deal with those who do harm and to establish dharma firmly again. The passage is the classical basis of the doctrine of avatara, and it makes restoration an act of divine descent rather than a natural swing of the cycle.

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