One translator of the Rigveda needed 20 English words for dharma
Dharma has no single equivalent in any Western language. It can mean law, duty, justice, order, custom or the nature of reality, depending on who is speaking and when. At root it describes whatever holds things up, from a person's conduct to society and the cosmos itself.
The word grows from the Sanskrit dhr-, to hold or support, a root related to the Latin firmus. In the Rigveda an older form, dhárman, meant something fixed like a pole or prop and, figuratively, a sustainer. The Vedic hymns picture the cosmos being held in place: the earth and sky pushed apart, the heavenly bodies kept separate, quaking mountains steadied. The historian Pandurang Vaman Kane counted at least fifty-six appearances of the term in those hymns.
Translators have struggled ever since. Grassmann's version of the Rigveda distinguishes seven meanings; Karl Friedrich Geldner's uses 20, from law and righteousness to quality and model. Monier-Williams's dictionary lists dozens more, and none captures the whole. In the third century BCE the Mauryan emperor Ashoka faced the same problem, rendering it in his Kandahar inscriptions with the Greek eusebeia, meaning piety, and an Aramaic word for truth or rectitude.
In Hinduism, dharma is behaviour in harmony with Ṛta, the order that makes life and the universe possible. It bundles duties, rights, laws, virtues and ethics into a righteous way of life that varies with a person's identity, gender and stage of life, which is why a farmer's dharma differs from a soldier's. It is one of the recognised aims of human life, and its opposite, adharma, covers whatever is unnatural, immoral or unlawful.
Other traditions bend the word differently. For Buddhists it names the Buddha's teaching and the true nature of reality that teaching points toward, and in philosophy it also labels individual phenomena. Jains use it for the teachings of the Tirthankaras on purification and moral change, and Sikhs for the path of righteousness and moral duty. Its meaning has shifted over thousands of years, from cosmic law in the earliest texts to the richer ethical ideas of the Upanishads and epics.
Source: Dharma
