Dharma · Pāli: dhamma; Skt: dharma

Dharma (Pali dhamma) is a multivalent term. Its central sense is the Buddha’s teaching, the path he set out for the ending of suffering, as when he likens it to a raft: “Monks, I will teach you the Dhamma compared to a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto” (Alagaddūpama Sutta, MN 22, trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). It can also mean truth, or the law that the teaching describes. In a more technical use the plural, dhammas, means phenomena: the mental and physical events that make up experience. Ṭhānissaro notes that MN 22 is one of the rare discourses that “uses the plural form to mean ‘teachings’ rather than ‘phenomena’”. The Access to Insight glossary gathers the senses as “(1) Event; a phenomenon in and of itself; (2) mental quality; (3) doctrine, teaching; (4) nibbāna”, and records that the Buddha’s own name for what he founded was dhamma-vinaya, “doctrine (dhamma) and discipline (vinaya)”. In practice the word is met in the refuge formula, taken “in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha”, and in the wider core teachings of Buddhism.

Traditions read the same word differently. Ṭhānissaro observes that one major Mahayana text, the Diamond Sutra, takes the raft simile “as meaning that one has to let go of the raft in order to cross the river”, while on his own reading “one has to hold onto the raft properly in order to cross the river” and let go only at the further shore. In Mahayana philosophy the Madhyamaka school pushes the analysis of phenomena further still: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the school’s hallmark the doctrine that all things are “empty of inherent natures”.