The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c17.12

c17.12

More important, however, is that, as we saw, the dharma shows itself to be not so much a closed and fixed order as a wide-open problem. Now one may try to circumvent the problem by reasoning that dharma is not a law that is imposed, but one that is proposed, as Robert Lingat aptly puts it.²¹ Or as Louis Dumont, borrowing the well-known phrase about constitutional kingship, says, “Le dharma règne de haut sans avoir, ce qui lui serait fatal, à gouverner”.²² However, whether dharma is only proposed without being imposed, or reigns from on high without actually governing the world, it cannot resign its function of ordering the affairs of the world. Here, as before, we come up against the unforgiving rift between the mundane sphere and otherworldly renunciation, between pravṛtti and nivṛtti. The dharma is and must be transcendent and eternal, but by the same token, it is divorced from the world. Coming down to the mundane sphere to govern it is indeed fatal for the dharma. Yet it cannot avoid doing so on pain of losing its universal validity.