Notes : An Apprenticeship on Signs & Matters

If you’ve spent any time with early Buddhist texts, you’ve encountered the word dhamma. You’ve probably also noticed something strange: the word seems to mean different things in different contexts. Sometimes it refers to the Buddha’s teaching. Sometimes it means truth, or reality, or phenomena, or righteousness, or just the way things are. Translators don’t agree on how to render it. Some leave it untranslated altogether.

This isn’t a failure of translation. The word really is doing all of these things at once. This polyvalence isn’t accidental—the Buddha deliberately exploits and transforms the term in ways that reveal something essential about his project. Understanding how dhamma works might help us understand what we’re doing when we practice.

The Word Before the Buddha

Dhamma derives from the Sanskrit root dhṛ, meaning “to hold, support, maintain.” The root gives us the sense of what upholds or sustains—what keeps things in place. Before the Buddha ever used the word, it already carried several layers of meaning in the Brahmanical world he inherited.

There was dharma as cosmic order—the principle that makes the universe cohere, the regularity of natural processes, the reliable pattern of seasons and celestial movements. The Vedic concept of ṛta gradually merged into dharma in this sense. It’s what holds everything together.

Then there was dharma as social-ethical duty—one’s prescribed role and obligations according to caste and life-stage. Your svadharma, your own particular duty, was determined by birth. A warrior’s dharma differed from a priest’s. To live according to dharma meant fulfilling the role you were born into.

Beyond these, dharma also meant law, custom, norm—the established way things are done, what is proper or fitting. And finally, it could mean quality or characteristic—a thing’s nature, what makes it what it is. Fire has the dharma of heat.

The Buddha inherits all of these resonances. What he does with them is radical.

The Buddha’s Distinctive Uses

In the Pāli Nikāyas, we can identify at least six distinct uses of dhamma. Precision here matters, so I’ll walk through each carefully.

Dhamma as the Teaching

This is probably the most familiar sense. When the texts speak of “hearing the dhamma,” “teaching the dhamma,” or the “dhamma-vinaya” (teaching and discipline), this is what’s operative. It’s the Buddha’s dispensation as a whole—what we might call Buddhism, though that term is a modern Western invention. This is saddhamma, the “true teaching” or “good teaching.”

Dhamma as Truth or Reality

This sense hovers between “natural law” and “the nature of things.” A famous passage in the Nidāna Saṃyutta (SN 12.20) has the Buddha say: “Whether Tathāgatas arise or not, there remains this dhamma-ṭṭhitatā (stability of dhamma), this dhamma-niyāmatā (fixed course of dhamma).” Here dhamma means something like the lawful structure of conditioned arising itself. The Buddha doesn’t invent it—he discovers it. It would be there whether anyone noticed or not.

Dhamma as Phenomena

This usage anticipates the later Abhidhamma literature, but it’s already present in the Nikāyas. “Sabbe dhammā anattā“—”All dhammas are not-self.” Here dhammas are the basic constituents of experiential reality: mental factors, material qualities, processes. These aren’t “things” in a substantialist sense—they’re events, occurrences, experiential moments. Some scholars render this as “experienceable qualities”—a mouthful, but it captures something important. What can arise, what can be known, what constitutes the stream of experience—these are dhammas.

Dhamma as Mental Object

In the schema of the six sense bases, dhamma is paired with mano (mind) as its object—just as visible forms are objects of eye-consciousness, and sounds are objects of ear-consciousness. Here dhammas are “mind-objects,” a heterogeneous category including mental states, concepts, ideas, and perhaps the other dhammas themselves when taken as objects of reflection.

Dhamma as Righteousness

The Buddha also uses dhamma to mean ethical conduct, justice, what is right. A king rules “by dhamma” when he rules justly. This preserves some continuity with Brahmanical usage, but notice what’s absent: caste-specific duty. Dhamma as righteousness is detached from birth and social position. It applies to everyone.

Dhamma as Quality or Nature

The older sense persists: when texts speak of something having a certain dhamma (characteristic), this is what’s meant. Conditioned things have the dhamma of arising, persisting, and passing away. Ignorance has the dhamma of obscuring.

The Deliberate Polyvalence

The Buddha doesn’t disambiguate. He never pauses to say, “I’m using dhamma in sense three now, not sense one.” The different meanings slide into each other. This isn’t sloppiness. The polyvalence is deliberate.

For the Buddha, these senses aren’t ultimately separate. There’s a deep convergence between what is taught, what is the case, what constitutes experience, and what is to be done. The dhamma you hear from a teacher is about the dhamma that is (reality, the structure of things). That reality consists of dhammas (phenomena) which you investigate. And this investigation constitutes living according to dhamma (righteousness, the proper way). The word holds these together because, for the Buddha, they are held together.

This differs sharply from the Brahmanical framework, where dharma as cosmic order and dharma as social duty were unified by the sacrificial-hierarchical system. The Vedic priests maintained cosmic order through ritual; the caste system reflected that cosmic order in social form. Each legitimated the other. The Buddha breaks this link entirely. He replaces the whole integrating framework with something else: the liberative investigation of conditioned arising. The unity of dhamma‘s senses isn’t grounded in ritual or hierarchy but in the structure of experience itself and the possibility of its transformation.

A Unifying Thread

What unites these senses? Dhamma names what is structurally the case about experience and reality, in a way that is both discoverable and liveable.

It’s the how of things—how they arise, how they persist, how they cease, how this matters for suffering and its end. The Buddha’s particular genius is to make the same word name three things at once: the structure (phenomena, their characteristics), the recognition of that structure (truth, teaching), and the living in accord with that structure (righteousness, the path of practice).

Consider the stock description of the dhamma that appears in the early texts—the formula practitioners would have memorized as part of the recollection of dhamma (dhammānussati). The dhamma is svākkhāto (well-proclaimed), sandiṭṭhiko (visible here and now), akāliko (immediate, not delayed), ehipassiko (inviting investigation—”come and see”), opaneyyiko (leading onward), and paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhi (to be known by the wise for themselves).

The dhamma is something taught (“well-proclaimed”), something real (“visible here and now,” “immediate”), something to be investigated (“come and see”), something practical (“leading onward”), and something personally realized (“to be known by the wise for themselves”). All the senses converge in a single formula. The teaching is about reality, reality is investigable, investigation leads forward, and what it leads to is personal realization.

What This Means for Practice

This has consequences for practice. Most obviously, hearing the teaching and investigating reality aren’t separate activities. When you study a sutta and when you sit in meditation, you’re engaged with the same dhamma—in different modes, but not with different objects. The conceptual understanding and the direct knowing are meant to inform each other continuously.

It also means that ethics and insight aren’t separate tracks. Living according to dhamma (righteousness) and understanding dhamma (truth) support each other. The precepts aren’t arbitrary rules imposed from outside; they reflect the structure of conditioned arising. Acting in ways that generate less craving, less aversion, less delusion is acting in accord with how things actually work. The ethical and the epistemic are woven together.

And it means we shouldn’t reify dhamma as some abstract principle floating above experience. The dhammas (phenomena) are right here, in every moment of seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling. The structure is not elsewhere. The investigation happens in experience, not apart from it. This is what sandiṭṭhiko—”visible here and now”—really points to.

Realization isn’t the accumulation of information. Paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhi—”to be known by the wise for themselves.” No amount of textual study substitutes for direct seeing. The teaching points; you have to look. But looking without the teaching leaves you without orientation: you might look and not know what you’re seeing. The interplay matters.

The Dhamma-Eye

There’s a striking image in the texts: the arising of the dhamma-cakkhu, the “dhamma-eye.” This is what opens at the moment of stream-entry, the first of the four stages of awakening. The stock formula for this moment is the lived or experiential realization that: “Yaṃ kiñci samudaya-dhammaṃ, sabbaṃ taṃ nirodha-dhammaṃ“—”Whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation.”

The grammar is worth pausing over. Yaṃ kiñci means “whatever” or “anything whatsoever”—it denotes universality, everything without exception. Samudaya-dhammaṃ: having the nature of arising, subject to origination. Sabbaṃ taṃ: all of that. Nirodha-dhammaṃ: having the nature of cessation.

When you see something as nirodha-dhamma, you realize that “maintenance” is impossible. You aren’t just losing the object eventually; the object is a process of loss. It isn’t a thing that will someday cease—it’s ceasing, right now, as part of what it is to be the kind of thing it is. The one who has opened the dhamma-eye doesn’t just know this conceptually. They see it. And that seeing changes everything about how they move through the world.

Living Within the Word

The Buddha could have invented new terminology—a technical term with a single, precise meaning. Instead, he took a word saturated with cultural resonance and transformed it from within. He kept the sense of “what holds things together” but relocated it from cosmic ritual to the structure of experience. He kept the sense of “duty” but detached it from caste. He kept the sense of “law” but made it something discovered through investigation rather than received through tradition.

The result is a word that enacts its own meaning. Dhamma holds together what might otherwise seem separate: principles and reality, phenomena and truth, ethics and insight, study and practice. To understand the word is already to begin practicing with it. And to practice with it is to find out whether the understanding holds.