Dharma

Chapter 3: Vedic Dhárman and Dharma

CHApTEr 3 Vedic Dhárman and Dharma The Rigveda is India’s oldest textual source and the fountainhead of Hinduism. It introduces the term dhárman, a precursor to dharma. Beginning with the Rigveda this chapter will explore the earliest meanings of dhárman and dharma in the larger Veda or full Vedic “canon,” taking the discussion down roughly to the time of theAśokan watershed. The term dhárman is far more common and loaded with meanings in the Rigveda than the terms dhárman and dharma are in subsequent Vedic texts, where they seem stripped of their Rigvedic depth and begin, in sparse and intermittent passages, to take on a few of the specialized meanings that will be brought into the classical dharma texts of Hinduism. The form dhárman appears to be a Rigvedic coinage. It thus makes its debut as a poetically crafted concept, since the Rigveda consists of poetry.Dhárman occurs sixty-three times in the Rigveda’s 1,028 poems. This is not enough to be considered a governing concept there, but it is found in all the chronological levels of the Rigveda, with increasing frequency in late-level hymns. If its Rigvedic meanings maintain an overall consistency, it deserves our attention for two reasons. First, it raises the question of whether Rigvedic meanings have some staying power in classical meanings of dharma. The nature and manner of Vedic continuities is a controversial topic. Rigveda prayers or verses require precise utterance rather than understood meaning. Yet it will be the view of this book that important continuities arise from dharma’s genesis in poems. Second, it means that one must be wary of “backreading” classical meanings into Rigvedic usages. Scholarly treatments of dharma usually start well after the Rigveda or barely pay it lip service by making inadequate summaries and anachronistic translations of the older dhárman. Such distortions are important to resolve. 20 DHARMA The most common backreading is to see the classical term dharma as “replacing” a Rigvedic notion of “cosmic order,” and then to backread this understanding into Vedic dhárman. The term said to mean “cosmic order” in the Rigveda is ṛta. Rigvedic ṛta, best translated as “truth,” is a cosmic order resonant with the “truth” of the Rigvedic hymns and verses.The Rigveda poets first discerned it in their inspired compositions, and those who recite their verses ritually can keep this cosmic order functioning. In citing Rigvedic hymns, ṛta will appear as “truth.” Since ṛta no longer means “cosmic order” in classical Hinduism , and dharma sort of does, it is convenient to think that dharma not only replaced ṛta but must always have had some such connotation itself. But it is safe to say that dhárman did not mean “cosmic order.” Moreover, the ideas of “cosmic order” to which dharma becomes attached differ from the Rigvedic “cosmic order” denoted by ṛta. Classical usages of “dharma” put the term into the service of a sociocosmic order that is more ideology than poetry or ritual implementation . TheVedic “cosmic order” is something else. The other type of backreading, also common but more diverse, is to interpret dhárman through lenses of karma, “action.” It is more diverse because karma itself has different meanings and usages,from its earliest sense of “ritual act” to the later sense of a “law of karma,” which explains reincarnation as the repercussion of one’s acts. While only the first of these meanings has been read directly into Rigvedic usages of dhárman, a fusion of the two has also been smuggled into the mix.This is the idea that dharma as “duty” and karma as “act” imply each other if one acts in accord with “one’s own dharma” (svadharma) in “maintaining the cosmic order.” Certain classical texts, most notably the Bhagavad Gītā, do equate “one’s own dharma” with “one’s own karma,” but that does not justify its importation back into the Rigveda. Unlike dhárman, both ṛta and karma are indeed governing concepts in the Rigveda, and karma remains one through all Indian traditions. But neither of them ever governs the history of dharma. This book proceeds from the mantra,or perhaps better, hunch, that dharma is never just “action.” I will address two dimensions of dhárman that seem to have importance beyond the Rigveda: its usage in poetically crafted enigmas, and its ties with kingship. The Rigveda’s ten books—composed perhaps between 1500 and 1100 BCE—have...