Dharma: Hindu

Generally, dharma refers to the religious and legal duties of Hindus. Within Hinduism, the dominant tradition for the explanation and study of dharma was called Dharmaśāstra, the two-thousand-year-old scholastic tradition of Hindu religious law. However, many other Hindu traditions also addressed the nature of dharma, accepting, modifying, or rejecting its formulation within Dharmaśāstra. Traditionally, dharma was defined contextually according to idealized social groups, and its content thus changed from group to group. Beginning in the nineteenth century, modern reformulations of Hindu dharma have stressed a universal and eternal conceptualization of the term as a collection of natural moral virtues.