When I read Alf Hiltebeitel saying, “But the term ṛṣidharma was a surprise to me, as I had never even considered that there was such a thing,” I had to smile. Not because I found anything wrong with what he said. Far from it. He was a serious scholar who spent years studying dharma, and he was reporting honestly about his own discovery. He then points to the Mahābhārata, especially the Umā–Maheśvara Saṃvāda in the Anuśāsana Parva (13.126–134), where Śiva describes the dharma of ṛṣis and munis. [1]
Still, as a layperson, I could not help wondering: Would this really be a surprise to an ordinary Indian?
I am not so sure.
In India, dharma is such an all-pervasive word that we seem to have become quite comfortable putting it next to almost anything. We have rājadharma, svadharma, gṛhasthadharma, and many other expressions connected with particular people, situations and stages of life. So if someone tells an ordinary Indian that there is something called ṛṣidharma, the reaction may not be, “What is this new concept?” It may simply be, “Well, ṛṣis have dharma too. Why not?”
Perhaps that is where the difference lies. A scholar may encounter a term for the first time in a text and naturally ask when it appeared, where it occurs and what exactly it means. An ordinary Indian may hear the same word and recognize the pattern immediately.
And dharma is not confined to books.
Look at the Mahābhārata itself. Yudhiṣṭhira is closely associated with Dharma, and Yama is Dharmarāja. Then come ordinary Indian names. In Tamil Nadu one can come across names such as Dharmaliṅgam and Dharmadurai. In the North we have names such as Dharmendra Pradhan. I am not suggesting that these names have anything to do with the particular textual use of ṛṣidharma. I am only pointing out how familiar the word dharma is in Indian life. It is a religious idea, a moral principle, a title, an epithet—and quite comfortably, a part of someone’s name.
So when a scholar says, “I had never even considered that there was such a thing as ṛṣidharma,” an ordinary Indian might perhaps respond with a puzzled smile: “But what is so surprising? Ṛṣis have dharma too!”
There is another reason why this amused me. The Mahābhārata is not exactly a text in which one expects everything to be small, neat and predictable. P. V. Kane points out that the epic presents itself as encyclopaedic in scope. It famously says:
yad ihāsti tad anyatra yan nehāsti na tat kvacit
“Whatever is here is also elsewhere; whatever is not here is extant nowhere.” [2]
The Mahābhārata also has a long and complicated textual history, with different beginnings, additions and layers. Kane notes that the epic’s own character encouraged later scholars to add fresh material to it. [2]
So if someone discovers yet another dharma in the Mahābhārata, perhaps an ordinary Indian would not be terribly shocked. He might simply say, “It is the Mahābhārata. What did you expect?”
Of course, I am teasing. But there is something serious behind the joke.
Hiltebeitel himself, later in the same book, says that dharma had penetrated everyday life as a form of popular discourse. He also traces its use in conversations between religions and discusses its later revival in modern India, especially in the exchanges of Mahatma Gandhi with Jains, the British and B. R. Ambedkar. He finally describes dharma as a way of imagining religion as “an ethical and spiritual conversation that in principle excludes no one.” [3]
That observation makes his earlier surprise about ṛṣidharma even more interesting.
If dharma has been part of everyday life, if it has been used in stories and conversations, if it has travelled across religious and social boundaries, then perhaps an ordinary Indian has a different relationship with the word from someone meeting it mainly through textual investigation.
The ordinary person may not know where ṛṣidharma occurs. He may not know the Anuśāsana Parva, the chapter number or the history of the manuscript. But he may have grown up with the simple idea that different people can have different dharmas. A king has his dharma. A householder has his dharma. A renunciant has his dharma. A warrior has his dharma. Why should a ṛṣi be left out?
And this is perhaps why India has never been particularly disturbed by having many versions of its great stories. There is not just one Mahābhārata living in the Indian imagination, nor only one Rāmāyaṇa. There are Sanskrit texts, regional versions, devotional retellings, folk traditions, performances and stories passed from one generation to another. A Tamil person may know Kamban; someone else may know Tulsidas; another may know a story heard from a grandmother or a storyteller.
One person may know a particular episode that another has never heard of. One version may tell a story differently from another. The scholar may naturally ask, “Which is the original?” The ordinary person may simply say, “That is the version I know.”
That does not mean that textual scholarship is unnecessary. It is extremely valuable. It only means that the life of a tradition is sometimes wider than the text that a scholar happens to be studying. Perhaps the same thing happens with dharma.
The word has been used for so long, and in so many situations, that an Indian can easily understand the idea of attaching it to a particular person or circumstance without first consulting a reference book. In fact, I have even coined a playful expression: dharmadharma—the “dharma of Dharma.” If dharma comes from the Sanskrit root dhṛ, “to uphold” or “to sustain,” then why should the concept of dharma itself not be qualified by dharma? Why cannot we speak of dharmadharma? I am not claiming that this is an ancient technical term. I am simply taking the idea one step further: if everything can have its dharma, why should dharma itself be the only thing that cannot?
The Mahābhārata says, dharmo rakṣati rakṣitaḥ—“Dharma protects those who protect Dharma.” If Dharma itself has to be protected, then, in my playful way of thinking, it too must have something that upholds or protects it. Just as a king has his rājadharma, why should Dharma itself not have a dharmadharma?
That, perhaps, is the extraordinary flexibility of the word. So, was Hiltebeitel wrong to be surprised by ṛṣidharma? Certainly not. His surprise is perfectly understandable. Indeed, it is precisely because he was such a careful scholar that he noticed and recorded it. But as a layperson, I can still gently tease him.
He was surprised by ṛṣidharma.
I was surprised that he was surprised.
And perhaps an ordinary Indian would be even less surprised.
After all, if Yudhiṣṭhira can be associated with Dharma, Yama can be Dharmarāja, people can be named Dharmaliṅgam, Dharmadurai or Dharmendra Pradhan, and the Mahābhārata itself claims to contain almost everything, why should ṛṣidharma make us fall off our chairs?
Perhaps that is one of the little surprises of India:
What surprises a scholar may not necessarily surprise the people who have been living with the tradition all their lives.
Notes
1. Alf Hiltebeitel, Dharma (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 130–132.
2. P. V. Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. I, pt. I (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1990), 350; M. N. Dutt, The Mahabharata, vol. I (Delhi: Parimal Publications, 1988), Foreword, 1.
3. Hiltebeitel, Dharma, 170–171.
Ashram, August, 20, 2026
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