The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.7

c5.7

This is no different in the case of the Indian concept of *dharma*. The well-known difficulty of defining and translating this term is the result of its being caught on the horns of the dilemma outlined above. Dharma is the transcendent lodestar and is thus removed from the pressures of man's daily affairs. Or in Louis Dumont's adaptation of Thiers's phrase about the constitutional monarch, "le dharma règne de haut sans avoir, ce qui lui serait fatal, à gouverner."⁵ It is therefore based on the Veda, the *śruti*, even though the connection between Veda and dharma is in reality nonexistent; moreover, dharma has to be relevant for an ordinary man in society who does eat meat, marries his cross-cousin, interacts closely with people exhibiting different degrees of impurity, and generally has to act contrary to the tenets of dharma. In short, dharma has to take custom into account. Indeed *ācāra*, "custom," is considered an important source of dharma, and the task of determining what is the right custom falls on the assembly, the *pariṣad*. Of course, this pariṣad should be composed of educated and virtuous men, who by definition will be conversant with the Veda, however little relevance the Veda may have for the matter in hand. In theory, the circle is conveniently closed and everything is as it should be.⁶ But the reference to the council or assembly is no less significant, and in the final analysis, the dharma texts cannot but concede that no blame is attached to the man who simply follows the customs of his community even if they are contrary to the dharma.⁷ But neither will such a man arrive at the transcendent solution of the life-death problem, for, even after his death, he will remain bound to his community in following births.