There are two major gifts which Wilhelm Halbfass has bestowed upon the Indologist who works outside of the strictly defined Indian philosophy and the six darśanas as such. The first is a renewed interest in the intellectual value of word study, outside of the more narrow realm of etymology. Time and again his work has focused on the history of a particular word as a kind of micro-intellectual history, and with felicitous results. His essay on dharma in India and Europe, and his treatment of the word bhāva and abhāva in Being and What There Is, are two more of the salient examples of this kind of writing. In addition, Halbfass has cautioned us that the medium of cultural transition is as important as the content, no matter what period of Indian thought we are examining. In his epilogue to India and Europe, Halbfass wonders whether the exchange between the two cultures has determined not only the content, but the medium of the message. He is concerned here with both the vehicle and conditions of cultural transmission in this stormy, painful, and enriching relationship.

The present article takes up these two major contributions —the intricacies of dharma and the medium in which cultural transmission occurs. In his ‘Dharma in the Self-Understanding of Traditional Hinduism’, mentioned above, Halbfass takes pains to note particular nuances of the term. For instance, he argues with Robert Lingat's assertion that in the Mahābhārata, dharma is dhāraṇa, ‘supporting’, ‘maintenance’, in the sense of cosmological, eternal law.