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What Is Dharma In Sanatana Dharma?

Dharma in Sanatana Dharma can only be understood not explained in words. Here is the answer to the query – What is Dharma in Sanatana Dharma?

Under the concept of dharma, the Hindu brings the forms and activities which shape and sustain human life. We have diverse interests, various desires, conflicting needs, which grow and change in the growing. To round them off into a whole is the purpose of dharma. The principle of dharma rouses us to a recognition of spiritual realities not by abstention from the world, but by bringing to itslife, its business (artha) and its pleasure (kama), the controlling power of spiritual faith. Life is one and in it there is no distinction of sacred and secular. Bhakti and Mukti are not opposed. Dharma, artha, kama go together. (Religion and Society By Dr S Radhakrishnan)

The spirituality, vitality and intellectuality, characteristic of the Indian civilization, stem from the concept of dharma in all its varied aspects.

Dharma is the concept that gives unity to the diversity of human life, its aspirations and human values. Dharma is a comprehensive doctrine of duties and rights of individuals in an ideal society and as such ‘the law of mirror of all moral action’. (Philosophies of India – Heinrich Zimmer)

Dharma is literally what which holds “a thing together, makes it what it is, prevents it from breaking up and changing into something else, its characteristic function, its peculiar property, its fundamental attribute, its essential nature, is its dharma, the law of its being, primarily. (The Science of Social Organization I by Bhagwan Das).

Dharma means more than just a code of duties for it is also understood as a mystic force capable of rewarding and punishing human beings through its mysterious workings.

The Mahabharata describes Dharma as being ordained for the advancement and growth of all creatures, “for restricting creatures from injuring one another’ and to uphold all creatures.

Dharma presupposes an eternal moral order which is based on cosmic archetypal ideation, which persists immutably and which is utterly independent of and indifferent to merely human preferences, conveniences or manipulations. (Meaning of the Mahabharata – V. S. Sukthankar)