Rev. Danny Fisher

Photo by Reuters.

How about another quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whom I first quoted and wrote a short biography for in this post?  Today’s comes from his book Kindness, Clarity, and Insight, pg. 41–it’s his striking, affecting definition of the word “Dharma”:

Dharma is a Sanskrit word that means “hold.”  From a wide point of view this word can refer to all phenomena because each phenomena holds its own entity.  However, in the context of dharma and the world, dharma refers to any practice through which a person who has it in his or her continuum is held back from a specific fright.  This holding back or protection can be from sufferings that are effects or from the causes of those sufferings, the afflictive emotions.  We are seeking to control the mind, and those practices through which the mind is controlled are dharma.  They hold one back temporarily from fright, and they also hold one back in the long run from frightful or bad situations that would be produced by entering into afflictive emotions.