Lexicon Foundation

Dharma

Definition

Dharma is the sustaining law of the cosmos — not an external rule but the inner order of living reality itself, in which human beings participate when they open themselves to it.

By Gwendolin Kirchhoff · Philosopher (Updated: October 13, 2026) 13 min read

Sonnenstrahlen brechen durch den Wald und tauchen den Boden in goldenes Licht
Lucas Fonquernie

The Sanskrit word Dharma derives from the root dhri: to bear, to hold, to sustain. What Dharma names is not a rule that someone decrees, nor a code to which one submits. It is that which holds reality together from within — the cosmic order itself, insofar as it is not imposed from outside but inscribed in living things. To ask about Dharma is to ask about the sustaining law of the cosmos, and this question reaches far beyond Indian philosophy, for it touches the core of any serious natural philosophy: Is there an order inherent in the whole, or is order merely what human beings project onto a mute world?

#The Law That Pervades All Things

The oldest surviving formulation of this thought in the European tradition comes from Heraclitus (c. 520—460 BCE). In Fragment 114 he writes: All human laws are nourished by the one divine. For it commands as far as it wills, and suffices for all, and prevails over all (cf. Heraclitus, Fragments; Diels/Kranz). What Heraclitus calls Logos is not an abstract rational principle but the living order of the cosmos, in which human beings participate when they are awake enough to recognise it. True reason, as Jochen Kirchhoff (1944—2025) summarised this thought in a conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff, is nothing other than the interpretation of the laws that pervade the universe (cf. Kirchhoff, Heraklit vs. Sokrates, 2022, 39:39).

Dharma and Logos do not denote the same thing, but they answer the same question: Is there a law that is not made by human beings but underlies the whole? If you dismiss this question as merely historical, you overlook its edge. Both traditions affirm it, and both draw a consequence that reaches far beyond cosmology. If such an order exists, then ethical action is not a matter of convention but of attunement. One does not act rightly because one follows a prescription, but because one is in contact with what the situation inwardly demands.

#How Does the Cosmic Law Relate to Human-Made Laws?

According to Gwendolin Kirchhoff, there is no escaping the cosmic primal law; human-made laws can be accepted as authorities in a simplistic sense, or also in another sense. In her conversation with Elisa Gratias about the Odyssey (TransitionTV, September 2026), she answers a viewer’s question about the purpose and effect a law has for people. The primal law (Urgesetz), to which one is subject in any case, is for her the law of deeper nature and of the cosmos (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, Das Schicksal ist größer als wir, 54:31–54:41, transl.). This law, she says, “you do not escape” (ibid., 54:40–54:42, transl.): “That is what determines your life”, and it is “greater than you” (ibid., 54:41–54:46, transl.).

She speaks first of accepting human-made laws as authorities in a simplistic way (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, Das Schicksal ist größer als wir, 54:45–54:55, transl.). But one can also accept them in another sense: “One sees, so to speak, their limits; one sees, with a certain benevolent attention, what they are meant to protect and what is meant by them and what meaning they have in the overall context” (ibid., 54:55–55:08, transl.). In this sense, Kirchhoff says, one can assent to them “out of a different kind of friendliness” (ibid., 55:07–55:10, transl.). Otherwise, she says, they could also have something restrictive about them, “if I simply stick to them or if I simply adopt that purely as my ideology” (ibid., 55:11–55:18, transl.).

The word Dharma does not occur in this answer. Kirchhoff does not say here whether she equates this primal law with the Indian Dharma. See also the entry on fate.

#From the Vedas to the Dhammapada

In the Indian tradition, Dharma is a foundational concept that has unfolded over millennia. In the Vedic hymns, the oldest religious texts of India, Rita appears as the cosmic order sustaining the course of the stars, the succession of the seasons, and the moral conduct of human beings alike. Rita is that which is right, in the double sense of the word: what is correct and what resonates. Dharma succeeds and broadens this term. In the Bhagavadgita, Dharma becomes sacred duty — derived not from self-interest but from the position of the human being within a cosmic order. Action without attachment to the fruit of the deed, so runs the central demand, is action in accord with Dharma.

In Buddhism, the emphasis shifts. Dharma — in Pali, Dhamma — here denotes the teaching of the Buddha and at the same time the law of reality itself. The Dhammapada, the path of truth, a collection of sayings from the Pali Canon, opens with an insight that pervades the entire text: From the heart all things proceed, are heart-born, heart-fashioned. Whoever acts with a well-disposed heart, joy follows like an inseparable shadow (cf. Dhammapada, I.1—2; Neumann, 1921). The order of the cosmos and the order of the heart are not two different things here. They condition each other. Whoever is inwardly disordered generates outer disorder, and vice versa.

#What Is Sanatana Dharma?

Sanatana Dharma is a self-designation by which some Hindus name their religion; the Sanskrit sanātana dharma means eternal dharma, eternal order. The expression itself is old: in Sanskrit texts it denotes duties and orders that hold at all times. Hindu leaders, reformers and nationalists also use the expression as a name for Hinduism as a unified religion; this usage became popular in the nineteenth century, the same period in which British writers coined the word Hinduism (cf. Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries Sanatana dharma and Hinduism). The word Hindu, by contrast, was given from outside: Greeks and Persians already used it for the inhabitants of the Indus valley, and at first it referred to the people of that region, not to a religion (cf. ibid., entry Hinduism).

Read philosophically, the adjective touches the question this article turns on: whether there is a law not made by human beings. An order that is called eternal does not hold only because someone decreed it.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff says in the film “Die Kunst des inneren Weges” (“The Art of the Inner Path”, 2023): “Dharma is correct action, action in accord with the great whole” (Kirchhoff, 2023, 1:14:38, transl.). What Dharma is for her is “not fixed from outside; rather, it is a contact with something that is really there in the space” (ibid., 1:15:17, transl.).

In her conversation with Michel Jacobi (2023), she describes a contact in which she finds no existential emptiness but a living, highly ordered fullness of thought, from which she begins to put her circumstances and relationships in order (cf. Kirchhoff & Jacobi, 2023, 15:14–15:32). “So the contact also brings one into contact with a divine law, if you will” (ibid., 15:33, transl.). The Kogi, Kirchhoff says, have their own word for it; in Old Indian it is called Dharma (cf. ibid., 15:38).

The Greek tradition asks the same question with the Logos of Heraclitus, whose thinking the essay Heraclitus vs. Socrates sets against the Socratic, and the Chinese tradition with the Dao; the tradition overview traces these lines.

#What Does the Dharma Wheel Stand For?

The Dharma wheel (Sanskrit dharmachakra, Pali dhammacakka) stands for the Buddha’s teaching and its proclamation; it is one of the central symbols of Buddhism (cf. Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry Dharmachakra). In the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha’s first discourse counts as the first turning of the wheel of the teaching: the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, literally the discourse on setting the wheel of the teaching in motion. According to tradition, the Buddha gave it in the deer park at Isipatana near Varanasi, today’s Sarnath, to a group of five mendicants. In it he sets out the middle way between two extremes, the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. At the end of the discourse the gods proclaim that near Varanasi the Buddha has set the supreme wheel of the teaching rolling, and that this wheel cannot be turned back by anyone in the world (cf. Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11).

The wheel frequently has eight spokes, which are read as the Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. The number is not fixed. The wheel on the lion capital that the emperor Ashoka had erected at Sarnath in the third century BCE has 24 spokes; in this form, as the Ashoka Chakra, it stands at the centre of India’s national flag (cf. Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry Dharmachakra).

In this tradition, setting the wheel in motion denotes the proclamation of the teaching. The discourse also describes a practice to be cultivated: the Noble Eightfold Path is to be developed (cf. Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11, 3.1–3.4, 4.8–4.10 and 8.1–8.3).

#Not a Calculable Law

What distinguishes Dharma from every modern code of rules is the way it is recognised. Dharma cannot be formalised. It cannot be translated into an algorithm, pressed into a decision diagram, or encoded as an ethical system. When you consider what would be right in a given situation, you will find that the answer is never fully derivable from a rule. The notion that ethical action is calculable — that a sufficiently complex model could derive the right decision — misunderstands the nature of what Dharma means. For Dharma does not demand obedience to a rule but an organ for what the moment requires.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff named this connection in the 2026 Everlast AI debate: What comes from the Indian tradition as so-called Dharma belongs to those domains of world knowledge that must be drawn upon for the foundation of a fully humanistic civilisation (cf. Kirchhoff, Everlast AI Debate, 2026, 1:52:19). The opposite pole — the idea of a calculable ethics — follows from a cosmology that conceives the cosmos as a dead mechanism. Where there is no inner order, order must be imposed from without. Where no living reason is at work, only the algorithm remains.

Natural philosophy calls precisely this prior decision into question. If the cosmos is alive, if it possesses an order that is not made by human beings, then ethics is not an imposition but a form of participation. Then Dharma, Logos, and Dao become expressions of the same fundamental insight in different languages: the human being is not the legislator of reality. The human being is the listener.

#Three Traditions, One Nerve

Dharma in the Indian sense, Logos in Heraclitus, Dao in Laozi (c. 6th century BCE). Three words responding to the same reality in different cultures. What the Daoists call Wu Wei — acting without forcing — is the practical side of Dharma: whoever perceives the order of the whole need not coerce. The question that unites all three traditions is not: Which rules shall we establish? But rather: What happens when a human being recognises the order that sustains them and derives their action from it?

Jochen Kirchhoff took this convergence philosophically seriously. In Was die Erde will (Kirchhoff, 1998, Gustav Lubbe Verlag) he develops the thought that inner and outer ecology are inseparable: how we regard the cosmos affects how we treat the earth. Dharma, in this context, would be the name for the insight that the cosmos possesses an order which cannot be ignored without harm — to one’s own body and to the body of the earth.

When you speak of Dharma, therefore, you are not speaking of a foreign doctrine that would need to be imported. You are speaking of an insight that is equally alive in the European tradition — in Heraclitus, in Schelling, in Kirchhoff — only under different names. What is missing is not the knowledge. What is missing is the organ to hear it. Wisdom describes the disposition from which this hearing becomes possible, and the tradition overview traces the line from Vedic Rita through Greek Logos to the natural philosophy of the present.

#Sources

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Dharma?
Dharma is a central concept in Indian philosophy, literally meaning 'that which sustains.' It denotes the cosmic order underlying all living reality — not a law imposed from without, but the inner law of the cosmos itself.
What is the difference between Dharma and morality?
Morality consists of rules set by human beings. Dharma is the cosmic order itself, preceding all convention. Whoever acts in accord with Dharma does what is right not out of obedience but out of attunement to what the situation demands.
What does Dharma mean in Buddhism?
In Buddhism, Dharma denotes both the teaching of the Buddha and the law of reality itself. The Dhammapada, the 'path of truth,' contains its core ethical insight: from the heart all things proceed — whoever acts with a well-disposed heart, joy follows like an inseparable shadow.
What Is Sanatana Dharma?
Sanatana Dharma (Sanskrit sanātana dharma, the eternal dharma) is a self-designation by which some Hindus name their religion. The expression is old; as the name of the religion as a whole it spread only in the nineteenth century. The word Hindu, by contrast, was given from outside: Greeks and Persians already used it for the inhabitants of the Indus valley, and at first it referred to the people of that region, not to a religion.
What Does the Dharma Wheel Stand For?
The Dharma wheel (dharmachakra) is one of the central symbols of Buddhism and stands for the Buddha's teaching and its proclamation. In the tradition, the Buddha's first discourse in the deer park at Isipatana near Varanasi counts as the first setting in motion of the wheel of the teaching. It frequently has eight spokes, which are read as the Noble Eightfold Path; the number is not fixed.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff
Gwendolin Kirchhoff “Nature thinks. The human being is the place where it recognises itself.”

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