Brighton, England
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
https://adamkhan.net/rambles/the-dharma-tits

hat does Dharma really mean? If I’m right, Tolstoy explains it nicely with his famous opening sentence to Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That is, there’s a proper role for every component of a whole, and Dharma refers to that proper-parts-of-the-whole concept in regards to all reality. Dharma also refers to the proper perception of and perspective on that whole, understanding which parts are important and which are not, which are branch and which are tree, which are head, which limb.
I bring this up because I had a couple of brief joyful moods today that I quickly squelched in remembering that my dog Maddie is no longer. If we accept the central idea of Cognitive Therapy, that emotions merely follow thoughts, then entering a joyful mood when circumstances have not changed means that one’s thoughts have perhaps temporarily slipped into perceiving at least one area of the Dharma properly, with each part of that area in its proper place and relationship to the others.
Is my definition correct? According to this authoritative-looking URL (http://aboutdharma.org/what-is-dharma.php), Dharma means “protection”. Which is not at all what I’m saying. But on another page on the same site (http://aboutdharma.org/dharma-wheel.php), Dharma is the name given to Buddha’s collected teachings. Okay, according to The Free Dictionary I’m not wrong really (see definitions 1a, 1c and 3a):
- Hinduism & Buddhism
- The principle or law that orders the universe.
- Individual conduct in conformity with this principle.
- The essential function or nature of a thing.
- Hinduism: Individual obligation with respect to caste, social custom, civil law, and sacred law.
- Buddhism
- The body of teachings expounded by the Buddha.
- Knowledge of or duty to undertake conduct set forth by the Buddha as a way to enlightenment.
- One of the basic, minute elements from which all things are made.
Buddhism conflates the mechanics of reality with Buddha’s teachings of them; fair enough, that’s the leap of faith involved in anything worthy of calling itself a religion. Capitalized Dharma refers to Buddha’s teachings while lowercase dharma refers to the reality they teach about; again fair enough, kind of like the sacred and the profane in Western terms, which regarding these matters seem a little cruder. And similarly, Judaism gets close to conflating reality with its revealed mirror, the written Bible.
And cognitive therapy. Yes, according to Wikipedia, its founder Aaron T. Beck “introduced a focus on the underlying ‘schema’ — the fundamental underlying ways in which people process information — whether about the self, the world or the future.” Exactly. Beck’s schema is what I’m talking about regarding dharma — the proper way of viewing things. And here you go, an article ““Buddhism and Cognitive Therapy”” by Aaron T. Beck (2005) [Update 2016 Aug 20: this article since disappeared] and then “Reflections on My Public Dialog with the Dalai Lama”. (And they wonder why the web is more addictive than television — why, because if you look around enough it corroborates your own ideas!)
East and West are both grasping the elephant. As Beck himself writes: “From my readings and discussions with His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] and other Buddhists, I am struck with the notion that Buddhism is the philosophy and psychology closest to cognitive therapy and vice versa.” I would think that cognitive therapy is a reactive, bottom-up, case-by-case removal of patients’ errors, with correct ways set out drily as a series of rhetorical points; whereas Buddhism is a proactive, top-down, rich and complete poetic schema of the way it is.
