WHAT IS DHARMA? 

Pasalubong, Obligation, and the Battlefield Within

There is a particular kind of anxiety that begins for me weeks before I land in the Philippines. It isn’t about the flight, or the heat, or even the reunions themselves. It’s about the list.

Who gets pasalubong, and who doesn’t. Which titas will be offended if I don’t make the two-hour trip to their side of the province. Which cousin will quietly note, and remember for years, that I “didn’t even visit.” The backpack gets packed with small gifts multiplying by the day — one for this branch of the family, one for that one, one for the neighbor who isn’t even blood but who fed my mother rice as a child and has never been forgotten for it. And underneath all of it sits a question I used to think was simply logistical, and now understand is something else entirely: what do I actually owe here, and to whom, and why?

This year, sitting with that question again, I found myself back — as I so often do — in the middle of a battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita, watching a warrior lay down his bow.

The Warrior Who Couldn’t Fight

The Gita opens on the plain of Kurukshetra, where two branches of a single family have arrived to settle a war over a kingdom. On one side stands Arjuna, a prince and one of the finest archers alive. Facing him, arrayed on the other side, are his own cousins, his teachers, his great-uncles, the men who taught him to hold a bow in the first place.

Arjuna asks his charioteer, Krishna, to drive him out between the two armies so he can see who he’s about to fight. And when he looks — really looks — at the faces on both sides, something in him breaks. These are not strangers. These are the people who raised him, sat beside him at meals, taught him everything he knows. His limbs go weak. His mouth goes dry. His bow, the Gandiva, slips from his hand. “I see evil omens,” he tells Krishna, “and I foresee no good in killing my own people in battle.” He sits down in his chariot, refusing to fight, insisting it would be better to be killed unarmed than to win a kingdom soaked in the blood of family.

It matters, I think, exactly who Arjuna sees when he looks across that field. Two figures in particular undo him. The first is Bhishma — his beloved great-uncle, the grand patriarch of the family, one of the most formidable and skillful fighters alive, a man who had held Arjuna as a child and shaped the fate of the entire dynasty. The second is Drona — the very teacher who had trained Arjuna’s hands to draw a bow in the first place, who had shaped him into the finest archer of his generation, and whose favorite student Arjuna had always been. These are not abstract enemies. They are two of the people most responsible for making Arjuna who he is. To raise a weapon against them is to raise it against his own formation — against the hands that built him.

This is Arjuna’s crisis — and it isn’t cowardice. It’s something more complicated: a genuine, aching confusion about which of two goods should govern his action. Loyalty to family, or duty to his role as a warrior and protector of dharma in the world. Love and gratitude toward the ones who raised him, or accountability to the wider order they had both been placed inside. Which one is right, when both are real?

I think this is the moment in the Gita that gets skipped past too quickly, in the rush to get to Krishna’s answers. But Arjuna’s paralysis is the whole reason the teaching exists. He isn’t confused because he’s weak. He’s confused because he’s a person of conscience standing at a genuine crossroads — which is exactly where most of us stand, more often than we’d like to admit.

The Root of the Word

Before we get to what Krishna tells him, it’s worth sitting with the word itself. Dharma comes from the Sanskrit root dhṛ — to hold, to support, to sustain, to uphold. Dharma is, quite literally, that which holds things together. It is the order that keeps a thing from collapsing into what it is not.

Just as gravity keeps the planets from flying apart, holding each one steady in its orbit, dharma is what keeps human life aligned with truth and harmony — inwardly, in a single person’s character, and outwardly, across a whole society. It governs both scales at once. Without dharma, there is no gentle neutral drift; there is chaos. Selfishness quietly replaces responsibility. Temporary desire — whatever wants satisfying right now — begins to overpower the slower, steadier wisdom of what actually sustains a life over time.

So when Arjuna sits down in his chariot and asks what the right action is, he isn’t asking a small procedural question. He’s asking what will hold the world together — his family, his kingdom, his own integrity — and what will let it fall apart.

Krishna’s Answer: Dharma Is Not a Rulebook

What follows is eighteen chapters of dialogue, and at the center of it is a word that gets translated, badly, as “duty”: dharma.

Dharma is not a commandment handed down from outside. It isn’t a universal checklist that applies the same way to every person in every circumstance. Krishna tells Arjuna something that still unsettles people who want religion to be simple: śreyān sva-dharmo viguṇaḥ para-dharmāt svanuṣṭhitāt — better to perform one’s own dharma imperfectly than another’s dharma perfectly. Better your own path, poorly walked, than someone else’s path, walked well.

This is svadharma — one’s own dharma. It arises from your nature, your position, your relationships, the particular life you were born into and the particular obligations that come with it. Arjuna’s dharma, in that moment, was inseparable from being a kshatriya — a warrior born to protect order in the world, standing at the one moment history had placed him in. Krishna doesn’t tell him fighting is good in some abstract sense. He tells him that withdrawal — refusing to act, refusing his role, retreating from the field out of grief and confusion — is not actually the higher path it appears to be. It looks like renunciation. It’s really a kind of running.

But — and this is the part people miss — Krishna doesn’t just tell him to fight. He tells him how to act. This is the second half of the teaching, and it’s the half that makes the first half survivable: nishkama karma, action without attachment to the fruit of action. “You have a right to your actions,” Krishna says, “but never to the fruits of your actions.” Act fully, act rightly, act from your position in the web of relationships you actually belong to — and then release your grip on how it turns out, on whether you’re thanked, understood, or approved of.

Dharma, in other words, is not about the outcome. It’s not even primarily about the rule. It’s about the quality of attention and integrity you bring to the action that is actually, truly yours to take — as opposed to the action someone else’s life would call for.

Dharma Is Not the Same for Everyone

This is, I think, one of the most quietly radical teachings in the whole text: dharma is personal. It is not a single uniform code applied identically to every person regardless of circumstance. Different people carry different responsibilities according to their nature, their abilities, and the stage of life they’re standing in.

A doctor’s dharma is to heal. A teacher’s dharma is to educate. A judge’s dharma is to uphold justice. A parent’s dharma is to nurture. A student’s dharma is to learn with sincerity. None of these is higher or lower than the others. Each one becomes sacred not because of its status, but because of the honesty and selflessness brought to its performance.

This is why Krishna says what he says, twice, in almost identical words:

“Better is one’s own dharma, though imperfectly performed, than another’s dharma performed perfectly.” — Bhagavad Gita 3.35

And again, later in the text:

“It is better to perform one’s own duty imperfectly than to perform another’s duty perfectly.” — Bhagavad Gita 18.47

These verses are often misread as an endorsement of mediocrity — as if Krishna is telling Arjuna, and us, to simply settle for whatever we’re already doing. That isn’t it at all. Krishna is teaching authenticity, not resignation. True fulfillment doesn’t come from copying someone else’s path, however well that path suits them, or however impressive it looks from the outside. It comes from living in accordance with your own nature — even when that means doing something imperfectly, unglamorously, without applause, simply because it is genuinely yours to do.

Dharma Is More Than a Profession

It’s tempting to hear all of this and reduce dharma to career — to what you do for a living, or the role you were born into. The Gita is teaching something considerably wider than that. Your profession, your family position, your stage of life — these are only one expression of dharma, not its full measure.

Dharma also lives in the quieter, daily architecture of how you move through the world:

Every decision, in this light, becomes a small fork in the road — one direction sustaining dharma, the other quietly eroding it. Nothing is neutral. Whether or not you’re standing on a battlefield, each choice either holds the world a little more together or lets it come a little more apart.

Back to the Suitcase

So — pasalubong. The visiting. The fear of being the cousin who “didn’t even come by.”

For a long time I treated this entirely as a field of obligation: a ledger of relationships to be balanced, gifts to be distributed, visits to be paid, so that no one could say I’d failed them. That is its own kind of battlefield paralysis — not Arjuna’s grief-stricken refusal to act, but its mirror image: compulsive, fear-driven action, performed not from clarity but from the dread of being thought ungrateful, disloyal, “too Westernized,” changed by the leaving.

But dharma, as Krishna teaches it, was never meant to be fear wearing the costume of duty. Fulfilling obligation because you are afraid of what people will say is not svadharma. It’s closer to what the Gita calls acting from attachment — to reputation, to approval, to the fruit of being well thought of — rather than from the clear seeing of what is actually, truly yours to give in this particular return.

What is genuinely mine here? I am someone who left, who built a life and a family and a yoga studio on the other side of the world, who returns now as both daughter and stranger, both blood and guest. My svadharma in this visit is not identical to that of a relative who never left, whose whole life is woven daily into that fabric of obligation. It isn’t identical to my son’s, or my mother’s, or the cousin who has never known anything but that province. Each of us stands in a different relationship to that family, that history, that web — and each of us, if we’re honest, is called to a different action within it.

This doesn’t mean I skip the visits, or stop packing the suitcase. Arjuna, remember, does not get to walk off the field. Withdrawal was never the teaching. I have real love for these people, and real gratitude for a lineage that raised the person who raised me. Showing up, bringing something home for the ones who fed and held my family before I could remember it — that is action, not performance, when it is done from love rather than dread.

What changes is the inner posture. I can visit because I choose to honor what is actually mine to honor — not because I’m terrified of the auntie who will talk if I don’t. I can give a gift as an offering, not a bribe against judgment. And — this is the harder part — I can also accept that I will not see everyone, will not please everyone, and that someone, somewhere, may indeed feel slighted. Krishna doesn’t promise Arjuna that fighting will feel good, or that everyone will understand his choice. He promises only that acting from clarity, from one’s true position, released from grasping at the fruit, is the only honest way through.

Dharma Is Something You Discern, Not Something You’re Handed

If there’s one thing I hope this story leaves you with, it’s this: dharma was never meant to flatten us into identical obedience to an external code. It is closer to a compass than a script — something that has to be read freshly, honestly, in your particular body, your particular family, your particular crossroads, again and again.

Arjuna’s battlefield is every threshold where love and duty seem to pull in different directions — a family gathering, a resignation letter, a boundary you’re afraid to set, a visit you don’t know how to make time for. The Gita doesn’t tell us the answer will be comfortable. It tells us only that the way through is not avoidance, and it is not compulsive appeasement — it is clear-eyed, wholehearted action, taken from your own true place in the story, and then released.

I’ll still be packing that backpack again in a few months. But I’m packing it a little differently this time — less like a debt being paid, more like an offering being made. That, I think, is closer to what Krishna meant all along.