ABSTRACT

In Hindu traditions, the term dharma suggests one’s duty and way of life, especially the duties associated with one’s caste status. These duties may be considered divinely ordained, and connected to a natural law of how things should be, so that dharma also indicates a righteous order throughout the cosmos. Thus, the gods of Hindu mythology seek to maintain order or dharma, while the anti-gods threaten this order, although ultimately repeatedly fail to upset it. Buddhism re-interpreted the concept for the Jewel of the BuddhaDharma. One aspect of the Dharma’s significance is that it is the truth of how things are, but instead of indicating a cosmic order which should be maintained by religious practice, it indicates the patterns of conditioned existence, the understanding of how to transcend that unhappy order, and the realisation achieved as a result. The Dharma is thus the Buddhist teachings, the spiritual path and the truths indicated by that path. Another Buddhist meaning of the word dharma, which is quite distinct from the connotations of the Dharma Jewel of the Buddha’s teachings, is that of the many elemental basic processes of existence, the real but ever-changing components underlying the compounded realities which we experience. Books in English have established a convention of using

a small letter ‘d’ for talking about such dharmas. The classification and analysis of these dharmas and what kind of reality they may or may not have became an important part of Buddhist philosophy, which we will introduce briefly below. The Dharma is the second sacred Jewel in Buddhism to which

adherents go for Refuge. As we have seen above, the Dharma-body may be equated with the Buddha, and, in Maha-ya-na, the Dharmabody of the Buddha (dharmaka-ya) comes to indicate the ultimate Enlightened state. But in the sense of the spiritual path, the Dharma is considered necessary as a vehicle and to uphold the spiritual practitioner, but not always equated with the final goal. Thus, an early analogy was the Dharma as a raft (e.g., in the Majjhima Nika-ya’s Alagaddu-pama Sutta MN 22), allowing the spiritual practitioner to cross from the near shore of existence and reach the other shore of Enlightenment (nirva-n.a). When the other shore is arrived at, the raft of the Dharma can be put aside.