Dharma and Duty

Dharma is one of Hinduism's most important and complex concepts, meaning simultaneously cosmic order, moral law, and individual duty. Your personal dharma — svadharma — is the specific set of obligations that arise from your particular position in life.

The Bhagavad Gita dramatizes this through the warrior Arjuna's crisis. Facing battle against his own relatives, he wants to abandon his duty. Krishna counsels him that fulfilling his dharma as a warrior — even when painful — maintains cosmic order. Abandoning dharma to avoid discomfort is a greater evil than the suffering that duty requires.

This ethic of duty echoes Kant's emphasis on obligation regardless of feeling, arrived at independently and centuries earlier.