Page 8 - All India Magazine Aug-2025

ity, its ignorant and devious nature subject to perversions and
violations of the true individual and the true social dharma, there
has to be superimposed on the natural life of society a State, a
sovereign power, a king or governing body, whose business is not
to interfere unduly with the life of the society, which must be al-
lowed to function for the most part according to its natural law
and custom and spontaneous development, but to superintend
and assist its right process and see that the Dharma is observed
and in vigour and, negatively, to punish and repress and, as far as
may be, prevent offences against the Dharma. A more advanced
stage of corruption of the Dharma is marked by the necessity of
the appearance of the legislator and the formal government of
the whole of life by external or written law and code and rule;
but to determine it — apart from external administrative detail —
was not the function of the political sovereign, who was only its
administrator, but of the socio-religious creator, the Rishi, or the
Brahminic recorder and interpreter. And the Law itself written or
unwritten was always not a thing to be new created or fabricated
by a political and legislative authority, but a thing already existent
and only to be interpreted and stated as it was or as it grew natu-
rally out of pre-existing law and principle in the communal life and
consciousness. The last and worst state of the society growing
out of this increasing artificiality and convention must be a period
of anarchy and conflict and dissolution of the dharma, — Kali Yuga,
— which must precede through a red-grey evening of cataclysm and
struggle a recovery and a new self-expression of the spirit in the
human being.
CWSA 20: 403-04

A law of religious and spiritual life
On the other hand, if we give to the word dharma only its
religious sense, in which it means a law of religious and spiritual
life, we shall indeed get to the kernel of the matter, but we shall

8 All India Magazine, August 2025