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Why do scholars keep saying “duty” is a bad translation of dharma?

Kavya Menon Fellow
· 5 replies
Religions comparedBuddhistIndianMimamsaKumārila BhaṭṭaThe Buddha#dharma#duty#false-friends#translation
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I am translating some Malayalam devotional poems into English, and I've hit a word I can't carry across. The word dharma comes up constantly, and every English version I look at uses “duty” or “righteousness”. Then a lecturer in a comparative philosophy class I sat in on said, almost in passing, that “dharma is not duty”, and that the English word leaves out the very thing that makes the obligation an obligation.

I felt that was true without being able to say why. When my grandmother said something was her dharma, she did not sound like an employee describing her job. She sounded like someone describing the shape of the world.

Could someone explain, for a beginner:

  1. What the word dharma covers that “duty” does not.
  2. Whether it means the same thing in Hindu, Buddhist and other Indian traditions.
  3. What a translator should do, if neither “duty” nor “righteousness” works.
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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Your grandmother had it exactly, Kavya.

    The word comes from the root dhṛ, to hold or support. Dharma is what holds things together. In the Brahmanical traditions it covers, at once:

    • cosmic order, the regularity by which the world holds together, heir to the older Vedic idea of ṛta;
    • the law of that order, what is enjoined;
    • one's place within it, according to stage of life and station;
    • the obligations flowing from that place.

    English “duty” captures only the last. It drops the reason the obligation binds: that by fulfilling it you uphold the order that upholds you.

    In my own school, Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, the second sūtra of Jaimini defines dharma as the good that is made known by Vedic injunction. That is a precise technical sense: dharma is known from scripture, not by perception or inference, and it is a good, not merely a command. Kumārila spent much of his work defending that account. So even within Brahmanical thought the word has a sharp technical life alongside its broad one.

    For translation: many translators now leave dharma untranslated after explaining it once, the way English has accepted karma. If you must translate, choose by context: “order”, “the right way”, “what is proper to one”, and accept that each time you lose something.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Kavya Menon

      Fellow

      “What holds things together” is going to stay with me. And Harpreet's image of dharam as the son of compassion holding up the world is almost a poem already. I think I will follow Govinda's advice: leave dharma in the English, and let the poems teach the reader what it means.

      Helpful · 2

Other answers

  1. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    In the Buddhist tradition, dhamma (the Pali form) has several senses that are not the Brahmanical one. It means the Buddha's teaching, as in taking refuge in the Dhamma; it means the truth that teaching expresses; and, in the plural, dhammas are the elementary phenomena the Abhidhamma analyses. None of these is a duty attached to birth or station. So the same word in a neighbouring tradition shifts from social order to a teaching about how things are, and the Buddha's use of it was in part a deliberate reinterpretation.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Harpreet Kaur Grewal

    Fellow

    In Sikh scripture too the word has its own life. In the Japji, Guru Nanak says the mythical bull said to hold up the earth is dharam, the son of compassion. So what holds the world up is not a beast but righteousness born of compassion. The image keeps the old sense of support and gives it a new root. I have always found that lovely, and it might be useful for your poems, Kavya.

  3. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    In Tamil the nearest word is aṟam, and the first of the three books of the Tirukkuṟaḷ is named for it. When I read it with my children, I explain aṟam as both virtue and the right way of living together, which is close to Govindaji's “what holds things together”. Tamil translators of Sanskrit texts usually render dharma as aṟam, and it works better than any English word I know, because it already carries the sense that goodness and order are one.

    Helpful · 1