Sanatana and Dharma

Sanatana and Dharma

Since time immemorial, the phrase Sanatana Dharma has signified the set of moralities and spiritualities typical of the Indian subcontinent. Today I want to do something different with it – a deeper analysis of the words themselves. What do they mean, what do they signify, and how do we accommodate the characteristic and self-attested eternal ideas of Sanatana with modern human life? Let me make the task easier and focus on Sanatana alone for the moment.

What is Sanatana? It’s a question that is flawed at its root. It asks for meaning, and the psyche – along with its social mirror – quickly replies that Sanatana is eternal, and therefore the word must signify the traditions that have existed since ancient times. Seems simple enough.

But what if we flip the question – who is Sanatana? This “who” takes us much closer to the literal meaning of eternal as we try to answer it. Traditions, forms of worship, rituals, religious texts – none of these can be Sanatana by their very nature. They have beginnings, they have human authors, they change across centuries. In fact, if the Hindu scriptures are to be believed, even the gods aren’t eternal – they come into existence with the beginning of creation. So if even gods aren’t eternal, who is Sanatana?

Here we enter territory where thinking by reason alone runs out, and we begin responding by synchronising ourselves to the universe. The Vedic rishis did exactly this and answered by describing the eternal as neti, neti – not this, not that – essentially undescribable. But we, being in the modern age, must acquiesce to the demands of nomination. So let us call this eternal consciousness. The answer to “who is eternal?” then becomes: consciousness is eternal.

And as soon as you say that, it begets the next question: why did the eternal consciousness choose to manifest as the definitely non-eternal creation we see around us? This is the question that breaks most theological systems. Advaita Vedanta tends to dismiss the problem by calling creation maya – illusion – which is elegant but leaves the questioner unsatisfied. Why would a complete, self-sufficient consciousness bother to dream up an illusion? Why this particular illusion, with its suffering and its beauty and its mathematics?

The most rational answer I have found comes from Kashmir Shaivism – a long-lost and very little-understood branch of Indian theology. As per this tradition, consciousness (Shiva) has all the attributes. But Shiva cannot taste or see his own attributes – he is formless. So Shiva vibrates (spanda), and Shakti, the dynamic part of the vibration, brings into existence the universe, so that through Shakti, Shiva can taste his own attributes. This is already a more honest answer than “it’s all illusion.” Creation here is not an embarrassment to be explained away – it is the purpose of the vibration. The eternal becomes the temporal not because it is fooled, but because it wants to know itself.

And then comes the stroke of brilliance. If Shiva is Shakti, and Shakti is creation, and creation is me, then I am Shiva. This is what Adi Shankaracharya wrote in the Nirvana Shatakam: Shivoham – I am Shiva. But this begets the obvious question: if I am indeed Shiva, then why do I not know about my own eternality? Why do I experience myself as this small, anxious, mortal thing that worries about tomorrow and forgets where it left its keys?

Kashmir Shaivism answers this by positing the existence of three malas or impurities that veil consciousness from itself. The first and most fundamental is anava mala – the impurity of individuality, the contraction by which infinite consciousness experiences itself as a finite, limited “I”. This is the root forgetting. Out of anava mala arises mayiya mala, the impurity of differentiation – the experience of self versus other, of separateness – and from that, karma mala, the impurity of action and its bondage, the sense of being a doer caught in cause and effect. The crucial point is that anava mala is not an accident or a failure. Shiva, by his own volition, chooses to forget his eternal nature – because without that forgetting, creation cannot come into existence, and Shiva cannot taste his own attributes through the play of Shakti. The veil is the enabling condition of the dance, not its mistake.

This reframes the whole spiritual project. We are not climbing out of a hole we accidentally fell into. We are remembering something we chose to forget – and the remembering is itself the final movement of the play.

This brings us to the final leg of the discussion, at least for today: how do I purify anava mala and again reach my eternal nature? And this brings us back to the second word in our title – Dharma. What is Dharma? I will not get entangled in the numerous theological discourses on this question and will answer it simply: whatever brings me closer to my true nature as eternal consciousness, that is Dharma.

What all encompasses Dharma under this definition is a much larger discussion for another day. But notice what this definition does. It does not anchor Dharma to a particular text, a particular ritual, a particular era, or a particular caste. It anchors Dharma to a direction. Anything that moves me toward remembering is Dharma; anything that thickens the forgetting is not. Now let us return to the full phrase.

Sanatana Dharma is not, as it is often construed, a set of ancient traditions. It is Dharma – holy action – that brings us closer to Sanatana – Shiva, consciousness, the eternal. So instead of framing it as Dharma that is eternal, it is better framed as Dharma for the eternal. This single preposition shift does enormous work. It allows Sanatana Dharma to be genuinely living and adaptive – because the actions that bring one closer to consciousness will naturally differ by era, by person, by circumstance – while keeping the referent absolutely fixed. The tradition does not need to ossify to remain itself, and it does not need to dissolve into “everything is valid” relativism either. The compass needle is the eternal; the path it points to from where you stand today is yours to walk. This, I think, is what lets Sanatana Dharma survive contact with modernity without either fossilising or evaporating. The ancients were not pointing at their own customs. They were pointing past them.

Borne out of a train of thoughts the writer was on last night.