Authors: Dr. Mriganka Sankar Poddar
Abstract: If we look beyond myths, faiths, respective spiritual doctrines, and the practice of rituals, we shall see that the referent of Religion and Dharma is the same. The same Dharma becomes religion when we dress it with the clothing of rituals. Outwardly, in religions, we see only practices and rituals, and when we do not look into the heart of religions, we differentiate them according to external practices. We do not analyse the religious writings. Even due to an unknown factor, we do not show any interest to find out what remains left as the moral standard of a religion. We must know in this context that in Indian philosophy (or say in Indian code of conduct), notion of “dharma” plays an important role to build up a human character. This is namely to achieve mental steadfastness along with physical stability. These teaching includes the training of “celibacy” (i.e., which in broader sense includes the learning of how to restore one’s vital energy force). Unfortunately, after the colonial influence of British Ruling we have started to know that Indian aspect of “dharma” and English notion of “religion” are similar. This mistake has lead us to ignore the value of dharma that underlies this fundamental aspect of human life, which those great ancient saints, thinkers had set as the first among our four basic needs – dharma (to know moral code of conducts, and other true conditions of a righteous life), Artha (refers to both – our “need” and “money”, significantly, we first know our need, then give righteous effort in all regards to earn money to fulfil our need), kama (kama refers to our earthly needs that include both – the physical and also psychological desire), and moksa (spiritual liberation, which means to renunciate everything earthly and obtain complete freedom from suffering). In this paper, I shall discuss Indian aspect of dharma with reference to the religion of west to make it clear that, we should not take them as similar as what we actually understand about them at this juncture.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17569474
