Hindus affirm dharma, the righteous order of the cosmos and the duty proper to each person within it. The word spans cosmic law, ethics, and the specific obligations that arise from one's stage of life, temperament, and social role. The Bhagavad Gita frames its central teaching around it, counselling Arjuna that it is better to perform one's own dharma imperfectly than another's well, and that duty should be done for its own sake without attachment to results. Dharma thus binds the individual life into a larger moral and cosmic order.
Classical Indian philosophy did not use the term with a single fixed sense: the Purva Mimamsa school, following Jaimini's Mimamsa Sutra, defined dharma narrowly and technically as what is enjoined by Vedic ritual injunction, a matter chiefly of correct sacrificial performance, while the epic and dharmashastra literature, including the law codes and the Mahabharata itself, used the same word in the far broader ethical sense of righteous duty encompassing social role, personal conduct, and cosmic order. The scholar P. V. Kane's monumental History of Dharmasastra traced this widening of the term's scope across the centuries, noting that the word's very breadth, spanning law, ritual, and ethics at once, has no single adequate equivalent in English.