What Is Dharma in Buddhism? Meaning, Senses and Sources

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 9 November 2026

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In Buddhism, the Dharma (Pali dhamma, Sanskrit dharma) is the Buddha’s teaching and the truth that teaching points to. It is the second of the Three Jewels, between the Buddha and the Sangha, to which Buddhists turn for refuge. The same word in the plural, dhammas, names something else: the phenomena and mental events that make up experience. Which sense a passage means is not always obvious, and translators divide over it.

It sits among the core teachings of Buddhism; the short definition is in the glossary.

What does the word dharma mean?

Dhamma and dharma are one word in two languages, and the word is older than Buddhism. The Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary traces it to the Vedic dharma and dharman and to the root dhṛ, “to hold, support: that which forms a foundation and upholds”. Its summary of the word’s senses is “doctrine, right, or righteousness, condition, phenomenon”.

Later scholastics built on the root. Noa Ronkin’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the Abhidharma cites a definition transmitted in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, the auto-commentary to Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Abhidharma: “dharma means ‘upholding,’ [namely], upholding intrinsic nature (svabhāva).”

In Tibetan the word is chos: 84000’s translators of the Lotus Sutra note that saddharma, “or dam pa’i chos in Tibetan”, is generally translated “simply as Dharma with a capital D”. In Chinese it is 法, fa, as in Kumārajīva’s title for that sutra, Miao fa lian hua jing (妙法蓮華經), which Japanese reads Myōhō renge kyō (84000). John Krummel’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Kūkai glosses the word “Dharma; Jpn: hō”. Joined to the Buddha’s name it gives Buddhadharma: in 84000’s Lotus Sutra, Maitreya sees the buddhas of other realms “teaching this Buddhadharma”, and Peter Hershock’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Chan says Chinese Buddhists, early Chan among them, came to see themselves as “the true inheritors of the Buddha Dharma”.

The main senses of Dharma, text by text

Access to Insight’s glossary sorts the Pali word into four senses: “(1) Event; a phenomenon in and of itself; (2) mental quality; (3) doctrine, teaching; (4) nibbāna.” It adds that “the Dhamma of the Buddha denotes both his teachings and the direct experience of nibbāna, the quality at which those teachings are aimed.”

The teaching. The Buddha’s first public discourse, as Christian Coseru’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry calls it, is the one Bhikkhu Sujato titles “Rolling Forth the Wheel of Dhamma” (SN 56.11): the first sermon, read on its own page, and the image behind the dharma wheel. In MN 22 the Buddha offers “a simile of the teaching as a raft: for crossing over, not for holding on” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato), the parable told in full on the raft.

The law or truth of things. Sometimes the Dhamma is what the Buddha found rather than what he said. Britannica’s entry joins the two senses: in Buddhism dharma is “the doctrine, the universal truth common to all individuals at all times, proclaimed by the Buddha.” The Uppādāsutta sets out the order: first the law, then the awakening, then the teaching.

In SN 6.1, newly awakened, the Buddha reflects: “This principle I have discovered is deep, hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful, sublime, beyond the scope of logic, subtle, comprehensible to the astute” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato).

Phenomena and mental qualities. In the plural the word names what experience is made of. The Dhammapada opens with it, manopubbaṅgamā dhammā, and three translators give three readings: “Mind precedes all mental states” (Acharya Buddharakkhita), “Phenomena are preceded by the heart” (Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu), “Intention is the leader of things” (Bhikkhu Sujato). The fourth of the four foundations of mindfulness in MN 10 is dhammānupassanā, which Sujato titles “Observing Principles”: observing the hindrances, the aggregates, the sense fields, the awakening factors and the four noble truths.

Nibbāna. Access to Insight’s fourth sense is nibbāna, the goal at which the teaching aims. The Abhidhamma also counts it among the dhammas: in the Theravāda scheme, as Ronkin describes it, eighty-one kinds of dhamma are conditioned, and the eighty-second is “unconditioned”: “The single occurrence in this fourth category is nirvana (Pali, nibbāna).” See what is nirvana.

One Pali word, many English words

Even one translator needs several English words. Bhikkhu Sujato’s renderings:

Other translators divide differently: Dhammapada 5’s esa dhammo sanantano is “a law eternal” (Buddharakkhita), “an unending truth” (Ṭhānissaro) or “an ancient teaching” (Sujato), compared on hatred is never appeased by hatred.

Dhamma-vinaya: the Buddha’s own name for his teaching

Access to Insight’s glossary gives Dhamma-vinaya, “doctrine (dhamma) and discipline (vinaya)”, as “the Buddha’s own name for the religion he founded.” Sujato translates the compound “this teaching and training”. In the Pahārādasutta (AN 8.19) the titan lord Pahārāda lists eight things the titans love about the ocean, and the Buddha answers with eight things the mendicants love about “this teaching and training”. The sixth:

The pairing outlived the Buddha. In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (DN 16) he tells Ānanda that no one should think the disciples are left without a Teacher: “The teaching and training that I have taught and pointed out for you shall be your Teacher after my passing” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). In the Theravāda Vinaya’s account of the first council, Mahākassapa proposes, “let’s recite the Teaching and the Monastic Law” (trans. Bhikkhu Brahmali); he questions Upāli on the Monastic Law and Ānanda on the Teaching, and “In this way he asked about the five collections” (see Buddhist councils).

The six qualities of the Dhamma

The discourses describe the teaching in a fixed formula, recited in the recollection of the Dhamma (AN 6.10, SN 11.3). Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation, phrase by phrase:

In SN 11.3 the Buddha tells mendicants who get frightened in the wilderness to recollect him, or else the teaching, or else the Saṅgha. Recollecting the teaching is one of the ten recollections of AN 1.296–305, and in SN 55.1 “experiential confidence in the teaching”, in the same formula, is one of four things that make a noble disciple “exempt from hell, the animal realm, or the ghost realm” (see stream-entry). The Kālāma Sutta (AN 3.65) makes a similar appeal: give up what is unskilful “when you know for yourselves” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato).

Access to Insight’s glossary gives three related terms: pariyatti, “theoretical understanding of Dhamma obtained through reading, study, and learning”; paṭipatti, its practice; and paṭivedha, “direct, first-hand realization of the Dhamma”. The content of the first sermon is the four noble truths, and the practice named in the fourth “is simply this noble eightfold path” (SN 56.11, trans. Bhikkhu Sujato; see the noble eightfold path).

A “Dhamma talk” has a canonical ancestor: the Pali-English Dictionary glosses dhammī kathā as “religious discourse, sermon”. Other compounds have pages of their own: dharma names and dharma protectors.

The Dhamma as teacher and refuge

The Buddha himself is shown relying on it. In AN 4.21, just after his awakening, he looks for someone to honour and rely on, finds no one more accomplished than himself, and resolves: “Why don’t I honor and respect and rely on the same teaching to which I was awakened?” The divinity Sahampati approves: all Buddhas, past, future and present, live “respecting the true teaching” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). “True teaching” renders saddhamma, the Pali counterpart of the saddharma in the Lotus Sutra’s Sanskrit title.

The monk Vakkali, gravely ill, sends for the Buddha and confesses that he has long wanted to go and see him but was too weak:

What “seeing the teaching” involves is spelled out in MN 28, a discourse by Sāriputta, which quotes a saying of the Buddha’s: “One who sees dependent origination sees the teaching. One who sees the teaching sees dependent origination” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato; see dependent origination). The Aggañña Sutta (DN 27) lists “the embodiment of principle”, dhammakāya, among four “terms for the Realized One”. There it is a name for the Buddha himself; the Mahāyāna doctrine of the Dharma body comes below.

Dharmas: the building blocks of experience

The Abhidharma turned the plural sense into a system. Ronkin explains that the momentary events it analyses “are referred to as dharmas (Pali, dhammas), differently from the singular dharma/dhamma that signifies the Buddha’s teaching(s).” In this analysis “dharmas are all that there is”, understood “as evanescent events, occurrences, or dynamic properties rather than enduring substances.” Ronkin adds that “intrinsic nature” (svabhāva) “does not feature in the sūtras/suttas”; it became standard in the post-canonical literature.

The Dhammapada’s verses on the three marks show the plural at work. Dhp 277 and 278 say “All conditions are impermanent” and “All conditions are suffering”, of saṅkhārā; Dhp 279, like the close of AN 3.136, changes the subject to dhammā: “All things are not-self” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). The three verses are discussed on all conditioned things are impermanent and non-self.

Mahāyāna philosophy went further. Richard Hayes’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Madhyamaka, a school whose key texts are commentaries on Nāgārjuna, gives “the concise Madhyamaka way” of putting its view: “all phenomena (dharmas) are empty (śūnya)”, devoid of a nature “that they have independently.” The Heart Sutra, in 84000’s translation, says “all phenomena are emptiness” (Toh 21, trans. Dharmachakra Translation Committee); see emptiness and śūnyatā.

How the traditions differ on the Dharma

All the traditions take refuge in the Dharma; what they mean by it differs.

Theravāda. The Dharma is the teaching that, by the Theravāda Vinaya’s own account, the first council recited, preserved in the Pali Canon. The Pali-English Dictionary notes that Dhamma as doctrine is set apart both from the Vinaya and from the Abhidhamma, “what follows on the Dhamma” (see the three baskets).

Mahāyāna. The Lotus Sutra calls its teaching saddharma; 84000’s introduction notes that sat “primarily means ‘good’ or ‘true’” and chooses “the plain ‘good Dharma’”. In the Mahāyāna doctrine of three bodies (trikāya), Krummel writes, one way of understanding the Buddha is in terms of “the universal ‘embodiment of the Dharma’”, the dharmakāya, and “for traditional Mahāyāna, this hosshin is an abstract principle and hence impersonal and non-preaching” (see types of Buddhas). Kūkai, founder of Shingon in Japan, disagreed: for him the dharmakāya, identified with the Buddha Dainichi, preaches (hosshin seppō, “the dharmakāya’s expounding of the Dharma”).

Chan and Zen. A four-fold phrasing that, Hershock notes, “came to be used in Song dynasty China to characterize Chan distinctiveness” begins “a special transmission outside the scriptures” (see Zen Buddhism). Hershock adds that, given the “abundant references to canonical texts” in Chan records, it “does not necessarily call the value of textual transmission into question.”

Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan canon has two parts. 84000’s Reading Room groups the Kangyur’s texts under Discipline, Discourses, Tantra and Dharani, and describes the Tengyur as “the collected treatises” of “Indian and Tibetan masters”. Jonathan Gold’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry explains that for Sakya Paṇḍita “the dharma as translated” was “a minefield of interpretive problems”, yet no different in essence from “the dharma as it originated in its unadulterated form from the mouth of a Buddha”.

Pure Land and Nichiren. In East Asia the Dharma itself was thought to decline. Michele Marra describes the Japanese idea of the Last Dharma Age (mappō): three ages in which the True Dharma gives way to an Imitation Dharma and then to the Last Dharma. Britannica’s entry on mappō adds: “Assuming the date of the Buddha’s death to be 949 BCE, Japanese Buddhists calculated that the age of mappō began about 1052 CE.” In Marra’s account the idea became an existential problem “on a larger scale” after a short treatise, the Mappō tōmyōki (traditionally attributed to Saichō, an attribution scholars dispute), appeared at the beginning of the Kamakura era; Hōnen was the first to mention it in his writings, and Eisai, Dōgen, Shinran and Nichiren were “greatly influenced by it”. In Dennis Hirota’s Stanford Encyclopedia account of Hōnen’s Pure Land teaching, the nembutsu suits “the present age”, when ordinary Buddhist practice “has receded beyond the reach of beings”. Nichiren, 84000 notes, set out in 1253 to proclaim the supremacy of the Lotus Sutra and began teaching the recitation of its title. Nor was the worry only Japanese: Hershock notes speculations about “the eventual demise of the effectiveness of the Dharma” in China as Chan emerged.

Not the Hindu or Jain dharma, and not karma

Britannica’s entry calls dharma a “key concept with multiple meanings in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.” In Hinduism, it explains, dharma is “the religious and moral law governing individual conduct” and “one of the four ends of life”. There is a dharma for everyone (sadharana dharma), “consisting of truthfulness, non-injury, and generosity, among other virtues”, and a specific dharma (svadharma) “to be followed according to one’s class, status, and station in life”. The Pali-English Dictionary also lists “right, or righteousness” among the Pali word’s senses, but in Buddhist texts its centre is the Buddha’s teaching (see Buddhism vs Hinduism).

In Jain philosophy, the same entry adds, dharma is “commonly understood as moral virtue” but also has a meaning “unique to Jainism”: “an eternal ‘substance’ (dravya), the medium that allows beings to move” (see Buddhism vs Jainism).

The emperor Ashoka, who says in his first Minor Rock Edict that he had become a lay-disciple, used the word in a public, ethical sense. His second Pillar Edict asks, “Dhamma is good, but what constitutes Dhamma?”, and answers: “little evil, much good, kindness, generosity, truthfulness and purity” (trans. S. Dhammika).

Dharma is also not karma. Karma is action: “It is intention that I call deeds,” the Buddha says in AN 6.63 (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). The same discourse sets out their source, their result, and “the practice that leads to the cessation of deeds”, which “is simply this noble eightfold path”. Karma is one of the Dharma’s subjects, treated in full on karma in Buddhism.