What is the Dhamma (Dharma)?

The Dhamma (Dhamma; dharma in Sanskrit) is first of all the teaching of the Buddha. The word has no single English equivalent: depending on the passage it is rendered as “teaching”, “truth”, “principle”, “quality”, “phenomenon”, “object of mind”.

Four uses come up often enough to be worth separating - keeping in mind that this is not a strict canonical classification.

1. The Buddha’s teaching. In the suttas it usually travels in a pair with the Vinaya, the monastic discipline. Before his death the Buddha said that the Dhamma and Vinaya he had taught and laid down would be the teacher for the community after him (DN 16). Dhamma here is something you practise, not only something you read.
2. What the teaching points at: impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), the absence of an unchanging self (anattā), dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda). These are specific regularities of experience, above all the causes of the arising and cessation of suffering (MN 38). In this sense the word does not mean prescribed duty or a single cosmic order - Sanskrit “dharma” carries those meanings outside the Buddhist teaching.
3. The path of practice through which the teaching is realised: virtue (sīla), collectedness or concentration of mind (samādhi), wisdom (paññā).
4. Dhammas in the plural - phenomena and contents of mind. Mind (mano) stands in the list of six sense bases alongside eye and ear, and dhammas are what it takes in, the way the eye takes in what is visible. The description of dharmas as elements of existence is set out in the third part of the Buddhist canon, the Abhidharma, and a separate text, the Abhidharmakosha, is devoted to their detailed classification. But the term did not start there: in MN 10 the fourth foundation of mindfulness is called exactly that, “contemplation of dhammas”, and it covers the five hindrances, the five aggregates, the six internal and external sense bases, the seven factors of awakening and the Four Noble Truths.

The canonical formula describes the Dhamma this way: well expounded by the Blessed One (svākkhāta), visible here and now (sandiṭṭhika), immediate (akālika), inviting one to come and see (ehipassika), leading onward (opaneyyika), to be known by the wise, each for themselves (MN 7).

The Dhamma is one of the Three Jewels, together with the Buddha and the Sangha, and these are what one takes refuge in. Taking refuge in the Dhamma means deciding to rely on the Path and to walk it. At the same time MN 22 warns against clinging to the teaching itself: the Buddha compared the Dhamma to a raft, bound together to cross a river - once it has done its job, it should be left behind, not carried further on one’s head.

Where to read: MN 22 (the simile of the raft), MN 10 (contemplation of dhammas), MN 7 (the formula of the Dhamma’s qualities).