Dharma and the Moral Dilemma of Life

Written on December 5th, 2021 by The Millenial

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A brief take by the millennial on the concept of dharma and moral dilemma in life, through several instances from great Indian epics.

Introduction

Dharma one of the four purusharthas forms the heart of Indian philosophy and is an untranslatable expression. It encompasses a wide variety of connotations ranging from duty, justice, law, goodness, morality, and even customs. The word is a derivative of the Sanskrit root dhr which means ’to sustain’. It can be viewed as the balance in one’s self and in ones surrounding based on moral law and duties that sustains the social order, universe, and even the individual. Does this conceptually complex idea of dharma help in enlightening the human mind and relieving it from the continuous inflow of doubts and questions? Does dharma help us out of the moral dilemmas we face in this quixotic world due to our inherent ignorance and vulnerable nature? Does staunch commitment to dharma alleviate us from the misery of birth and of being alive? Thoughts such as these drive us to explore more on the meaning of dharma and its effect on our life.

This idea of dharma has been a very important topic in Indian philosophy and is all the more relevant in the contemporary world. In In this modern world, we are plagued by in-numerous occasions of moral dilemmas in our daily lives which are implicit to human nature and also explicitly developed due to a lot of external factors like nationalism, religion, justice, crime, passion, poverty, etc. Most of the dilemmas we encounter can be associated with one or a combination of our doubts and queries on the right course of action when human moral elements like envy, courage, duty, anxiety, despair, selflessness, non-violence, remorse, or revenge get ignited. Inability to understand such thoughts objectively and the consequent lack of clarity regarding the path to follow results ultimately in the moral dilemma of life.

The idea of dharma raises a lot of questions in our minds. It raises the question about being able to focus on one’s actions and not on its fruits. It forces us to examine our inherent flaws which are destructive in nature like envy and ego and again bounces us back to the previous question about our ability to be a karmayogi with a shorter ego. As discussed before certain events happening in this contemporary world makes us question the idea of equality, hypocrisy, and crime when social vices like caste system, racism, gender biases, etc come into play. Moreover, crimes happening around us also set us to think about the justice system associated with it and this train of thought will also touch the topics like remorse, forgiveness, and retributive justice. Even though at the onset dharma may sound more of like a pure moral goodness but rather at many instances, it seems to be contradictory and many times have nothing to do with idealistic pacifism.

This contradictory nature of dharma and the dilemma it stirs up in life is beautifully illustrated in the great Indian epic of Mahabharatha. The epic dramatically portrays, the choice one has to make between moral purity and action. This is very clearly seen from the fact that the epic tells a story of a great war fought between the good and evil winner of which is a reluctant, idealistic and pacific king Yudhishthira who goes on to win the war he never wanted to fight through deceit, trickery and skill. After the war is won the said king then suffers inconsolably of grief and remorse and the victory ironically starts looking like a defeat. It explores heavily the above-mentioned topics of envy, grief, greed, selflessness, deceit, etc through the brutal and chaotic nature of life, and how the human decision is profoundly affected by them. This confusion on the right course of action to be taken becomes all the more aggravated in the epic when king Yudhishthira finds his righteous wife and brothers in hell and encounters the villainous Dhuryodhana in heaven.

In this article, we will take a peek into this moral dilemma life throws at us concerning many human qualities few of which is explored in the following sections and how dharma can be interpreted in terms of this to converge on the right course of action if any.

Moral dilemmas in Life and Dharma

Selflessness

In the Bhagawad Gita, the lord explains the importance of selfless action or the path of a karma yogi. In comparison to those who are prompted to act by earthly impulses, the Lord cites the example of realized souls who are at peace but continue with their ordained duties until the end of their worldly life in a detached way.

He then goes on to highlight his role as a great example of a karmayogi. There is nothing that he desires nor does he lack anything, yet he continues to tirelessly work towards protecting and preserving the world from falling into non-existence. He says that to create an object is appreciable but it takes much more effort to maintain and sustain the creation.

The Lord wants us to adopt this selfless approach of performing our karma, with no personal attachments or expectation of return. This way of working frees us from the bonds of the selfishness of this material life and alleviates us to a stature where it is possible to love every being and thus attain liberation. Selflessness thus also manifests in the act of love and the dilemma it creates is beautifully illustrated in the great epic of Ramayana.

During the celebrations of the coronation of Rama, Kaikeyi demands Dasaratha for the two blessings she was granted years before when she had saved his life and asks for Bharata to be coronated instead of Rama and send prince Rama to exile for 14 years in the jungle. Dasaratha is stuck according to the law of dharma, for he can not go back to his word. He begs Kaikeyi to yield, but she is firm. When Rama discovers what causes the agony of his father, he smiles and cheerfully decides to surrender the throne. If we are tasked to decide who is right among, Bharata who cannot retain the kingdom for his unwavering love towards his brother, or Rama who wants to pursue the direction of Dharma by honoring his father’s word. How can one decide which one of these is a greater path?

Rama’s unswerving and absolute dedication towards honoring his father’s word selflessly points toward his firm resolute towards dharma. This is akin to the kind of dharma discoursed in the scriptures. But will it be wrong if Rama disregards his father’s words, which ultimately caused Dasaratha’s death and pain to his mothers, siblings, and subjects, for the greater good of serving his subjects and claiming his birthright?

Now let us see it from the direction of Bharata. It is said that love is the only force that cannot be dominated by dharma. When love attains its ultimate form of true devotion, it is said to outshine the call of Dharma. Bharata’s devotion towards Rama is unparalleled and calls upon the god to break his laws to uphold the devotee’s honor.

As much as this is true one should also ask the question, what is love? It is undisputed that the selfless form of love is the ultimate. Selfless love only desires to give, it wants nothing nor expects anything in return.

The force of dharma that leads Rama to the path to exile is the same that does not allow Bharata to take up the throne which is rightfully his brother’s. Both brothers are following their path of dharma, the path of selfless love and sacrifice. This makes it hard for those of us who try to see righteousness separately from selfless acts of love.

Duty

Let us explore the concept of duty by analyzing the thoughts of the famed king Yudishtira from the greatest epic of Mahabharata. After losing the game of dice, the Pandavas are in exile in the forest. Draupadi is overcome with grief and humiliation and asks Yudishtira that what is the point of being good in a world where the bad seem to be rewarded while that upholding dharma faces hardship.

This is a line of thought the majority of us can relate to, which would have crossed our minds at some point in our life. To this, Yudhishthira with his typical modesty answers that “I act because I must”, and then he goes on to say that his actions are not based on any expectation of reward rather, he acts from a sense of what he has to do. He is indicating that this sense of duty is a standard of conduct and in itself a reward. Later in the epic, Krishna elucidates this by bringing in the idea of a Karma yogi, the idea of which is basically about performing one’s action without expecting any ’fruits’. But it’s a matter of thought if normal human beings can attain such an alleviated stature of selfless action. In the world of ours, it is very hard to find people who have an instinctive sense of duty.

Draupadi wonders why the king does not feel outraged like a warrior must at the injustice of the situation they are in and fight to reclaim what is rightfully theirs. This stubborn pacifism while being exploited frustrates Draupadi. But Yudhishthira explains that he has given his word and must uphold the same as that is what his instinctive, scrupulous sense of duty guides him to do.

But Pandavas decided to go to war when after 13 years of exile, Duryodhana adamantly refuses in returning their kingdom, depicting how Yudhishthira was transformed from a super moral idealist to a pragmatist. He also acknowledges the limit of absolute goodness while traversing between the two ideological extremes, one of his previous super moral ideals and the other that of amoral Duryodhana. This newfound view of duty is grounded in self-interest but stands clear of any amorality. This can also be seen in some sense as a kind of reciprocal altruism

This reciprocal altruism can also be analyzed in terms of a famous problem in game theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma where the selfish strategy is to betray your partner, the altruistic strategy is to not betray your partner but run the risk of being betrayed, while the collaborative strategy which is the best is that neither should confess.

This does not intend to dilute the essence of selfless duty in any sense, it would be fortunate to have more people with the sense of duty as a calling, those in the likeness of the teacher from Dharmapuri district in Tamil Nadu featured in the Times of India, a man who due to his strong commitment to his profession as a teacher cycled about 32 km daily for about 20 years, not to miss a single day of imparting knowledge to students.

As Immanuel Kant an eighteenth-century German philosopher once said, “When moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of action that one does not see”. These instinctive inner principles or the human motives behind an action holds the key in deciphering one’s sense of duty.

For the contemporary world, I would like to assert on assimilating the idea of reciprocal altruism into this, favoring the idea of dedication to duty without expecting anything in return but at the same time grounded in self-interest.

Envy

Nowadays people are instilled with a growing concern of one’s status in society, and as a result, compare themselves to others who possess material objects which you did not. Everyone one of us has gone through such situations where we envy those who either garner more attention through their skills that we do not possess or can achieve things that we could not. At times rather than fostering healthy competition and to better oneself, this can spiral down into an unhealthy environment fostering malicious thoughts.

Envy all together is not a bad attribute, as the positive sort of envy leads to ambition and creates a want to emulate success but this unlike the negative envy does not foster any malicious desire of depriving your opponent of something for you to achieve it. this sort of envy not only is constructive it does not fill you with agony or pain of any sort.

But most of the time envy manifests into a downward leveler, where instead of motivating one upwards it prefers to see the other side or both fail. The envious person becomes ready to employ any means to reduce the discrepancy between them sufficiently.

Here the question arises, whether a life lived according to dharma relieves us from the misery of envy. According to the epic Mahabharata envy is all-pervasive, a natural and universal emotion. It warns us not to take this emotion lightly just as human frailty, while asserts that it warrants at most seriousness, lack of which may impact ones both public and private life inflicting damage.

The best way to tackle this universal issue is through utmost conscious effort in only encouraging the positive envy while warranting off any sort of brutally competitive mentality. Also again the idea proposed in the Gita on the path of selfless work or Karma yoga finds very apt as it just asks you to keep working selflessly with no attachment to the fruit of the action. This will also ultimately help one insulate from the potential damage of negative envy.

Revenge

We will discuss in brief the overwhelming system of retributive justice which is a result of the belief that respect is deserved by the victims. Acknowledging the resentment of the victims is the best way to respect them as an individual and hence extremely genuine and more importantly a sustained act of repentance by the wrongdoer is the only way to forgiveness can be justified.

Revenge philosophically is wrong and questionable as it warrants the suffering of another individual from which another can derive satisfaction. It also is not considered a good path to traverse as revenge is highly intertwined with rage, violence, and obsession. It goes against one’s obligation towards the elimination of suffering or the moral aspect of respecting other humans and the act of ahimsa.

Yet there are strict limitations to the practical capacity of a human to forgive as at times the fact that a person is capable enough of inflicting pain keeps others in check of committing any wrong to him. Also in the event of excessive forgiveness and act of reconciliation may rob many people off their legitimate right to seek justice compromising the natural law of the guilty being punished.

Remorse

Remorse is a more intense and completely different emotion than regret. The best example to depict this can be when a child is hit by a truck the onlooker will feel regret while the driver will feel remorse. This can even be regardless of if the fault was with the driver or not. Remorse leaves a scar in one’s life a void filled always by the action committed for which one is remorseful, deteriorating to the extent that it can turn into self-pity.

Remorse can trigger a new set of actions in a completely new direction, born out of the person’s desperate desire of protecting one’s integrity and purity even putting other people at its expense.

The yoga approaches to solve this by introducing the practice of reducing the human impulse to react and hence achieving a still mind bringing out a calm and peaceful state of mind.

Conclusion

Dharma is a complex idea to be digested by those who insist on having a clear, crisp, documented code of righteousness. Ever since the start of civilization as known to us today, there has been conflicts between the the idea of love and duty, forgiveness and revenge, selflessness and envy, etc.

The power and will to sacrifice come from pure and selfless love. While the sense of duty can be measured to an extent through one’s invisible instinctive intent behind the action. Envy can be channeled positively to trigger ambition and constructive competition. Revenge in its primal form is considered amoral but at times the potential to safeguard oneself from harm comes from the realization that everybody can inflict pain.

Even though we have discussed in brief a few of human qualities and the dilemma encountered regarding the same in our lives, it is not easy to provide dharma with a structure or form which is unquestionable. Despite of this, the concept of dharma forms the north star in our struggle to live a righteous and joyous life.

References

Gurcharan Das. The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma. Penguin Books, 2012.

Basant Kumar Lal. Contemporary Indian Philosophy. Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 1978

Reconciling Dharma and Selfless Love: Lessons from The Ramayana, https://yogainternational.com/article/view/reconciling-dharma-and-selfless-love-lessons-from-the-ramayana

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