dharma

√dhṛ "to hold, bear, support, sustain" + suffix -ma → dharma, literally "that which holds". The Vedic form is the neuter dhárman; the masculine dharma becomes standard in classical usage.

The etymological argument is explicitly made in the epic itself: dhāraṇād dharmam ity āhuḥ — "they call it dharma because it upholds" (MBh 12.110.11). Cognate formations: dhāraṇā, dhṛti, vidhāra.

No single English word covers dharma. "Duty", "law", "religion", "virtue", "nature", "teaching" and "phenomenon" are all correct translations in some context and misleading in most others. The word's stability lies not in a fixed sense but in a fixed metaphor: whatever holds something up — a cosmos, a society, a person, a moment of experience — is its dharma.

The earliest Vedic usage is closest to the metaphor's surface. Dhárman denotes an ordinance or foundation, often something Indra or Varuṇa establishes, and it stands alongside ṛta, the older term for cosmic regularity. Over the Vedic period ṛta recedes and dharma absorbs much of its work, shifting from a cosmic to a ritual and then to a social register.

By the Dharmasūtra and Dharmaśāstra period the word has become the name of an entire discipline: the systematic determination of right action by varṇa and āśrama, sourced from śruti, smṛti and the practice of the learned. The epics inherit this apparatus and immediately break it — the Mahābhārata's characters spend far more time discovering that dharma is sūkṣma, subtle, than applying it cleanly.

Buddhist usage forks decisively. Dharma as the Buddha's teaching sits beside dharmāḥ in the plural, the momentary constituents of experience analysed in Abhidharma — a technical sense with no close Brahmanical parallel. Any corpus search on this term is therefore searching several distinct words that happen to share a spelling.

Continuity with ṛta. Lüders and Brereton read dharma as the direct heir of ṛta's cosmic sense; Halbfass argues the Vedic dhárman is narrower and more ritual from the start, and that the cosmic reading is retrojected from epic usage.

Sanātana dharma. Whether the phrase carries anything like its modern, tradition-wide sense in the epics is disputed; Hiltebeitel finds it locally rhetorical, marking an eternal norm invoked against a specific transgression rather than naming a religion.

Buddhist plural. Whether dharmāḥ in the Abhidharma sense derives from the Brahmanical term or represents an independent technical coinage remains open; Gethin and Cox differ on how much semantic continuity to grant.

svadharma and caste. Modern readings split sharply over whether BhG 3.35 indexes duty to birth-varṇa or to disposition (svabhāva, cf. 18.41–44). The Sanskrit underdetermines the choice; the commentators do not agree.