Hello world!
This being my first post here, I’d like to begin by introducing myself. My name is Gokul Madhavan and I’m a first-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard. I graduated from the College in 2008, and was on Dharma Board freshman and sophomore years, first as a freshman rep, and then as forum chair. It’s been a wonderful experience to see Swadharma grow and evolve over the years, and I’m delighted to have this opportunity to contribute something to the Dharma community; indeed, I see it as part of my dharma to do so!
As I see it, part of the “purpose” (or prayojana, as some classical Indian philosophers would put it) of my posts here is to help me clarify my own sense of dharma, by which I mean an understanding of my place in society (in the “cosmos”, if you like) and of my responsibilities towards society and towards individuals. One of the fascinating things about dharma is its context sensitivity: what we ought to do depends on who we are, where we are, and who/what we’re dealing with. But what makes this tricky is that we humans never occupy a single position in society: we exist in a tangled web of relationships and hierarchies, every component of which exerts a different force on us. It’s not unusual then, that our dharma as enjoined by one of our relationships conflicts with our dharma as enjoined by another, and in the absence of a “meta-dharma“, so to speak, it is extremely difficult to know what the “right” is.
In a sense, this re-introduces the “gray area” that Sonali was concerned with in her post, not merely as an artifact of human confusion, but as a moral/ethical aporia thrown up by the system of dharma itself. Gandhi-ji’s insistence on Truth, whatever that may be, is then a meta-dharma that helps us resolve this aporia, but of course, it need not be the only one. Arjuna’s despair before the beginning of the Mahābhārata war, Daśaratha’s despair upon hearing Kaikeyī’s demands, Rāma’s banishment of a pregnant Sītā to the forest—all of these are examples of conflicting dharmas. There are traditional accounts of resolutions to these aporias, but they do not—they cannot—dispel the fundamental tension between the clash of two dharmas.
What is to be done? What do we do when we have to choose between two “right” paths? This is not an abstract debate but a deeply real and relevant one. I don’t have a good answer, but I want to pose this question anyway: asking the right questions is half the battle, after all. If this question has been asked in the past, so much the better—I will learn more from your responses! Perhaps we will be able to construct a sequence of posts and comments that may eventually converge on some semblance of an understanding of Dharma 
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4 Comments
So do you envision a sort of hierarchy of obligations? What could be a basis for deciding between two conflicting courses of action, both of which our dharma directs us to perform?
You mention Gandhi’s reliance on Truth as one possible meta-dharma. Perhaps concern for self-welfare, and for the welfare of others can be two other such meta-dharmas.
what is the defination of Swadharma?
@mesuniljoshi
There is an older post (http://www.swadharma.org/2009/01/17/what-is-swadharma/) which asks the same question — take a look and see what you think.
@ AK:
I wish I could articulate clearly what I thought! While the idea of a hierarchy of moral obligations seems appealing as a way to resolve this, I don’t think it can work, abstractly speaking. What guarantees that different meta-dharmas won’t clash and force you to take recourse to a meta-meta-dharma?
(Maybe I’m just a pessimistic failed mathematician, but I see Gödel smirking whenever I think of situations like this!)
My gut feeling is that the only consistent meta-dharma we can follow is our gut feeling. For some people this gut feeling can be translated into an easily expressible and context-independent meta-dharma like “Truth” or “sevā”. For others, it may result in a set of choices that appear logically inconsistent to the outsider. I’m okay with that.
Part of the vagueness of such a question is that we don’t really have consistent sources of dharma any more. What once would have been unquestionable Vedic injunction or unbreakable śastric mandate has now faded away, for better or for worse, into vague proclamations of a harmless pantheism. I think this gives us the awesome freedom and the correspondingly terrifying responsibility to pick our own, individual sources of dharma, whatever they may be.
In any case, this stuff really needs to be dug into. I don’t really think I know what I’m saying here, so take whatever I’ve said with a heap of salt.
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