Dharma

Chapter 11: Dharma for the Twenty-first Century

CHApTEr 11 Dharma for the Twenty-first Century Lately, the United States has become familiar with dharma within a suggestivemeaning-spectrum.JackKerouac’sDharmaBumsdescribed the heyday of mid-twentieth-century America’s bohemian sages or Ṛṣis. The TV situation comedy Dharma and Greg, now in reruns, is about a free-spirited woman in the person of Dharma (in fact, Dharmā was Aśoka’s mother’s name!) with a husband as straight as Rāma or Manu.The television series Lost continues to depict the ominous dystopian “DHARMA (Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications) Initiative.” And The Dhamma Brothers documentary film now portrays the experiment of bringing Buddhist meditation sessions to prisoners in an Alabama Correctional Facility as a technique of introspection, inner peace, anger management, and harmony. This says nothing about the classical Indian dharma texts and teachings that are making their way into college classrooms.What are we to make of dharma as it reaches these and other vistas at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Here we return to some of the questions raised in chapter 1. Let us reframe them around this new question, and return especially to the topics of dharma in narration, women’s dharma, and dharma through the lenses of two religious traditions. Dharma in Narration Wehaveseenthatcertaintexts,suchastheAśokanedicts,dharmasūtras, and Laws of Manu are quite declarative about dharma. As instruments of public policy, even if they nuance the concept and leave it a challenge to define, they identify themselves with it and do not make it hard to spot. On the other hand, since we took up the Ambaṭṭha Sutta in chapter 4, it would have been possible to ask of all our classical Dharma for the Twenty-first Century 165 narratives,where is the dharma in this text? Although the term appears often enough to keep us from losing track of it, the Sanskrit epics and the Buddhacarita are, like the Buddhist Suttas, illustrative of dharma in ways that go beyond the term’s appearances.With the Buddhacarita we had to rediscover that the text is about dharma, since so many had missed the point. The Rāmāyaṇa makes it easier to trace the concept through the narration,since it links dharma from the start to the question of the hero’s perfection. But still it begins with the question. Yet it is the Mahābhārata that makes the concept the most enigmatic. At the end, even Vyāsa admits a kind of authorly anxiety that his main point will be missed. Having, out of “desire for dharma,” “strung (or bound) together this Bhārata” (implying a completed book) so that it could be proclaimed in different worlds, he told his son, who would be one of its disseminators, a verse that could be recited at dawn to obtain the text’s fullest fruit, the realization of brahman: Thousands of mothers and fathers,and hundreds of sons and wives, experiencing saṃsāra, go.And others will go.There are a thousand situations of joy and a hundred situations of fear. They affect the ignorant daily,but not the wise.With uplifted arms I cry this aloud, but no one hears me. Wealth and Pleasure are from dharma. For what purpose is it not served? For the sake of neither pleasure nor fear nor greed should one ever abandon dharma, even for the sake of living. Dharma is eternal, but happiness and suffering are not eternal; the soul is eternal but its cause is not eternal. (18.5.47–50) Just before this the Mahābhārata reiterates a famous claim that it also makes much earlier about itself: “Whatever is here may be found elsewhere ; what is not here does not exist anywhere” (1.56.33). The claim implies that the limits of the text are coextensive with the limits of what can be known and said of the universe, and would not be limited to any place or time, land or century. Now the Mahābhārata’s ambiguous treatment of dharma as universal yet multifaceted and opaque has inspired one author to call it “the post–9/11 epic” for a globalized century to stumble toward new moral ideas as it steps into its newfound rubble. In the Greek epics, when a hero goes awry, he gets on with it, and if the gods are involved we largely forget about it since they are no longer anyone’s gods. But [3...