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Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”

Meera Kulkarni Fellow
· 5 replies · 278 views
Religions comparedChineseIndianIslamicConfucianismIslamic jurisprudenceNatural lawAl-Shafi’iConfucius#comparative-concepts#dharma#li#sharia-and-fiqh
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I tutor engineering students in an evening course on Indian philosophy, and last week one of them asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?”

I tried to answer by comparing four terms that English tends to render as “duty”, “law” or “rule”, and I would like to test my comparison here.

  • Dharma (Indian): cosmic order, the law of that order, one's role within it, and the obligations flowing from the role, all at once. “Duty” captures only the last.
  • Li (Chinese): ritual propriety, the forms through which relationships are enacted. It overlaps only weakly with duty; it is more like the grammar of a shared life. Its partner yi, rightness, what the situation calls for, overlaps more.
  • Sharia and fiqh (Islamic): the first is the revealed path, the second the human discipline of working out what it requires. English “Islamic law” blurs them, which causes endless confusion.
  • Natural law (Scholastic): law legible to reason in human nature. This is the closest to dharma in one respect, that the obligation is grounded in an order, and the furthest in another, that it is in principle the same for everyone.

My suggestion to the student was that dharma combines the order-grounding of natural law with the role-specificity of li. Is that fair? I would especially like corrections from people who know the other three traditions better than I do.

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5 replies

  1. Khalid Mahmood Awan

    Fellow

    On sharia and fiqh, your distinction is exactly right and needs emphasising. When I was a judge, litigants would say “the sharia says” when they meant “the opinion of a particular school says”. Fiqh is plural, argued and fallible; the jurists from al-Shāfiʿī onward built an entire science of how to derive rulings and disagree about them. Your comparison holds: sharia, like dharma, names the order; fiqh, unlike dharma in its broadest sense, is openly a human craft of interpretation.

  2. Lin Pei-shan

    Contributor

    On li, I would push you to make it stronger. Li is not just the forms of relationship; for Confucius it is the medium through which a person becomes fully human. Restraining oneself and returning to li is how ren, humaneness, is achieved, according to one of the best-known passages in the Analects. So li shares with dharma the idea that obligations are not imposed on an already-complete self but are part of how a self is made. That is a deeper resemblance than role-specificity.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Fellow

    On natural law, a qualification. Aquinas holds that the first principles are the same for all, but he also says that the more you descend to particulars, the more the precepts can vary and admit exceptions. And Thomists have always recognised that obligations differ by state of life: a priest, a parent, a ruler. So natural law is not quite as role-blind as your summary suggests. Its universality is at the level of principles, its particularity at the level of application, which brings it a little closer to dharma.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Kenneth Leung Chi-ho

    Fellow

    This is a good list of false friends, Meera, and I would add a caution that applies to the whole exercise. Once you set four terms side by side, the table invites you to think they are four answers to one question. They may not be. Li answers a question about how relationships are enacted; sharia answers a question about God's will for human conduct; dharma answers several questions at once. The comparison is most useful when it shows that the questions differ, not only the answers.

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  5. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    Thank you. Pei-shan's point about li making the self is deeper than what I said, and Father Ikechukwu's correction about natural law is fair: I had made it too universal. Kenneth's caution is the one I will pass on to my student. Perhaps the honest answer to “what is dharma like?” is: like several things at once, which is why no single word in another language will do.