A traceably-sourced research project and essay series that recovers dharma as the universal human craft of building an ethical world to live inside — secular, cross-cultural, and evidence-based.
In Search of Dharma takes the word dharma away from the yoga studio and shows it as something far larger: what every human group does when it assembles a way of living — values, stories, practices — that holds the group together. There is no single The Dharma. There are many, and they are made, plural, and unprivileged; because they are made rather than found, we can — and now must — build new ones consciously.
The project deliberately separates gathering evidence from writing essays:
- Stage 1 — Research notes. For each research question, one cited note whose every claim carries a source. The product is traceable evidence, not polished prose.
- Stage 2 — Essays. Eight essays and a preface, written from the notes. The prose names its sources in the open and hides the citation apparatus; each essay closes with a Sources & further reading list that preserves the chain back to the notes and their original works.
The point of the whole project — traceable evidence behind every claim — is meant to
survive the move from note to essay. The per-note recipe is in
METHODOLOGY.md.
Read in order, the nine parts form one argument: a first-person search from "what even is a dharma?" through real dharmas in the wild to "can we build new ones on purpose?"
The series blueprint — the arc, the per-part briefs, and the status dashboard — is in
Essays.md.
The nine parts are also assembled into a single book, In Search of Dharma —
subtitled The human craft of building ethical worlds: a natural history of ethics in
eight essays — built from cover.md and the part files by
mk-book.sh:
./mk-book.sh [epub|pdf|all] [--audio none|link|embed] # defaults: all, noneThe script preprocesses each part (frontmatter, image shortcodes), then stitches them
into an EPUB3 with pandoc and a PDF via weasyprint, with embedded fonts and optional
per-chapter audio narration (link adds hyperlinks to the hosted MP3s; embed
bundles them into the EPUB). The built EPUB and PDF are distributed via GitHub
Releases rather than tracked in the repository.
The evidence base is organised into eight categories, each a directory of cited notes:
- Foundational — etymology, universal patterns, boundaries, cognates
- Historical — the Axial Age, urban complexity, pre-literate ethics, transmission, the lifecycle of a dharma
- Philosophical — autonomy vs. collective, grounding, relativism
- Cultural — the Samin, Ubuntu, indigenous oral dharmas, Abrahamic frameworks, Subud and Sumarah, the Badui
- Psychological — neuroscience, evolution, moral development, ritual, psychopathy, neurodivergence
- Contemporary — secular translation, the digital age, economics, gender
- Critical — failure modes, appropriation, power, falsifiability
- Future — planetary dharma, AI, post-traditional dharmas, encoding ethics
The master question registry and status dashboard is Questions.md; the
shared note structure is fixed by
1-foundational/_template.md. Every work cited across
the notes is resolved once in the citation register, SOURCES.md.
◉ Status. Both stages are complete: all 44 research questions have their cited notes, and all nine parts are written. The series is in final pre-publication polish, so wording may still shift; the evidence base is stable.
The full corpus — the 44 cited research notes and the nine essays — is published as a
Hugging Face dataset:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/garydean/defining-dharma (configs notes and
essays), generated from this repository by
mk-hf-dataset.py. Reuse for AI training, retrieval, and research
is welcome under the same CC BY 4.0 licence.
Each milestone release is also archived on Zenodo with a citable DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21348716 (all versions — resolves to the latest release).
Corrections — factual errors, broken citations, cross-essay inconsistencies — are the
most valuable contribution. See CONTRIBUTING.md for what fits
this (curated, authored) project and how to submit.
Written by Gary Dean (Biksu Okusi) — https://garydean.id.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided you give appropriate credit.