Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative

Dimensions of Asian Spirituality

by Alf Hiltebeitel

Between 300 BCE and 200 CE, concepts and practices of dharma attained literary prominence throughout India. Both Buddhist and Brahmanical authors sought to clarify and classify their central concerns, and dharma proved a means of thinking through and articulating those concerns.

Alf Hiltebeitel shows the different ways in which dharma was interpreted during that formative from the grand cosmic chronometries of kalpas and yugas to narratives about divine plans, gendered nuances of genealogical time, royal biography (even autobiography, in the case of the emperor Asoka), and guidelines for daily life, including meditation. He reveals the vital role dharma has played across political, religious, legal, literary, ethical, and philosophical domains and discourses about what holds life together. Through dharma, these traditions have articulated their distinct visions of the good and well-rewarded life.

This insightful study explores the diverse and changing significance of dharma in classical India in nine major dharma texts, as well some shorter ones. Dharma proves to be a term by which to make a fresh cut through these texts, and to reconsider their own chronology, their import, and their relation to each other.

Genres: India, Buddhism

747 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2010

Reviews

[Queer · Rating 1 out of 5]

The dimensions of asian spirituality series is known for taking complex topics and making them interesting and relevant today. This is the least successful of the series in my opinion and features unnecessarily complex writing layered with a sprawling analysis that doesn't make itself clear enough for even an informed reader. Above all it took a topic that is nuanced, storied and challenging and made it incredibly boring. There was one moment when the author used an exclamation mark to highlight an important distinction that I had to read three times to only kind of get the point's potential power! The adventure of the buddha section at the end is the only reason this book gets any stars.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my Hindu Epics module

[Swami Narasimhananda · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the main differences in the idea of religion in the West and that in India comes from the understanding or the lack thereof, of dharma. This book aims to give a better understanding of dharma through an extraordinarily exhaustive account of both the word and the concept through an incisive analysis of Vedic, Buddhist, Puranic, Smriti, and bhakti texts, and even some works of literature. This book is the result of ‘cumulative fruitful conversations carried out amicably over subjects of some controversy’ (xi). The author—a professor in the department of religion at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Washington DC—has worked on this book with a feeling that he ‘should reread virtually everything on India’ he has ‘ever read as well as everything’ he has ‘written’ (3). With an exhaustive bibliography running over forty pages, this book is the authoritative reference on everything connected with ‘dharma’.