The western world has become familiar with ‘karma’ sufficient for the word to be absorbed into everyday language. People understand karma as payback for wrongdoing meted out by the invisible hand of the universe. People talk of ‘good karma’ and ‘bad karma’ and ‘quick karma’. Perhaps the well-known saying ‘what goes around comes around,’ sums up how we in the west commonly understand karma.
Dharma is a different idea altogether, and one that sits awkwardly beside the western idea of karma. Where karma is a ledger of deeds repaid, dharma points to a duty, a way of living that is right in itself.
Kerouac used the word in the title of The Dharma Bums, where Neal Cassady’s travels with Gary Snyder are set against the backdrop of a search for something better than ordinary respectability.
That search runs through a good deal of what I think about and write about, and it is worth asking what the word is doing in a book title, and what it might mean for the way a person actually lives.
I blog about things that interest me, often to do with my writing. If you would like to keep reading, the Blog page collects the posts, and the home page introduces my two books, East – A Novel and Millennium – A Memoir.
Dharma is one of those words that sounds simple once you have heard it explained and yet keeps revealing new layers the more you sit with it. Where karma suggests a ledger of deeds settled elsewhere, dharma points to a duty, a way of living that holds value in itself, regardless of reward. The distinction matters on a personal journey, because it shifts attention away from what life owes you and towards what you owe the people and places around you. In the writing here, this idea recurs as a quiet compass: less a rule to obey than a question worth returning to, about how to travel through unfamiliar cities, how to treat strangers in bars and buses, and how to keep hope alive when the road turns out to be longer and stranger than expected.