Dharma as a Religious Concept：A Brief Investigation of Its History in the Western Academic Tradition andIts Centrality Within the Sinhalese Theravada Tradition
This article sketches historically, and briefly, some significant interpretations of the concept dhamma proposed by Western scholars, i. e., scholars participating in the Western academic tradition over the course of nearly a century and a half. In addition, the study presents interpretations developed within the Theravāda Buddhist tradition and maintained within the Sinhalese Theravāda tradition for at least a millennium and a half.
The presentation is not argumentative but rather is historical, synthetic, cumulative, and open-ended. The article develops briefly the history of dhamma in the Western academic tradition and in the Sinhalese Theravāada tradition and attempts to maintain the thesis, not yet fully developed by Western scholars, that the central religious concept in the Theravāda tradition is dhamma, the presence of which provides doctrinal coherence in the entire Theravāda system of thought and soteriological continuity from this life to that which transcends. In the closing segment of the study, a series of hermeneutic alternatives are suggested whereby a Western scholar, by drawing upon his/her own intellectual and/or religious heritage, might perceive the profundity of religious apprehensions discerned by Theravāda Buddhists in and through the concept of dhamma.
