Is Dharma Untranslatable?
How free are we to find our own way with it?
Does every individual have a unique vocation? If so, to what extent is it limited by social conventions or other constraints? Or, to reference some books I enjoyed as a child, can you just “choose your own adventure”?
It’s common to hear the word dharma used to talk about the latter. In The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling, Stephen Cope writes: “Yogis believe that our greatest responsibility in this life is to this inner possibility – this dharma – and they believe that every human being’s duty is to utterly, fully, and completely embody his own idiosyncratic dharma.”
Defining dharma is rarely straightforward. Sanskrit dictionaries list multiple options, most of them related to doing the right thing – from “duty” and “virtue” to “law” and “order”. Others include “essential quality”, and since dharma derives from a word for “support”, its essential nature is an underlying structure that holds things together.
However, as the scholar Mark Singleton notes in this talk, it’s ironic that Cope based his book on the Bhagavad Gītā, in which dharma is described as inherited social roles, so liberation entails the performance of caste duties. Singleton therefore reflects:
