Journal of Dharma

EDITORIAL: CONFLICTS WITHOUT & FEARS WITHIN: A PAULINE CALL TO RESPONSIBILITY IN TIMES OF POLARIZATION

Mathew Attumkal — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Human beings, by nature, are carriers of conflict and fear; consequently, pluralistic societies necessarily contain differences of conviction, interpretation, interest and value. Disagreement can be a sign of intellectual vitality and democratic maturity. However, polarization begins when difference is transformed into an absolute division between us and them, when opponents become enemies, and when one’s own community is regarded as the exclusive bearer of truth while the other is considered morally suspect or fundamentally illegitimate. The distance between disagreement and dehumanization can then become dangerously short. It is within this context that responsibility acquires its philosophical, ethical, religious and political significance as it needs to be placed beyond blame. Generally, responsibility is understood as accountability for an action, decision or consequence. Though it is essential, responsibility is also to be reinterpreted as being responsible towards others. It concerns the relational character of human existence and recognizes that our words, actions, silences, choices and omissions determine the modalities of the public sphere. However, polarization encourages a convenient distribution of blame: they are responsible for division; they have abandoned truth; they are intolerant; they are the problem, etc. Such reasoning relieves individuals and communities of the need for self-examination. The ethical challenge is therefore to recover the capacity for self-implication and to manifest moral maturity.

Forging Conscience for a Polarized Age: Wang Yangming’s Engagement with Zen Buddhism and His Ethico-Political Thought

Ying Huang — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores how, against the ‘polarized’ backdrop of mid-Ming Dynasty political power struggles and intellectual dogmatism, Wang Yangming forged his doctrine of liangzhi (innate conscience) into a potent tool of ethico-politics through a critical appropriation and creative transformation of Chan Buddhist theories of mind-nature. The author argues that this ‘forged conscience’ not only provided scholar-officials with the inner authority to engage in political dissent during times of moral ambiguity but also, through the concepts of the ‘unity of knowledge and action’ and the ‘unity of all things,’ proposed an ethico-political imagination aimed at healing social divisions and reshaping public responsibility. This provides a profound historical case study for understanding how the East Asian intellectual tradition has responded to social crises.

Corporate Conscience and Ethical Imagination: Pañcatantra Wisdom in an Era of Corporate Polarization

Nabanita Ghosh, Smita Kavatekar & Sunita Kumar — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Corporate polarization denotes the fragmentation of corporate values from both ideological and ethical perspectives. Today, we witness that corporate organizations are standing at a moral crossroads. The gap has been widening between corporate rhetoric and actions, clearly witnessed in the conflicting and inconsistent ethical positions, ethical indifference, and their focus on performative Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This study attempts to answer two interrelated questions centered on the reawakening of corporate conscience: How can Dhārmic reasoning revive corporate conscience? & Can folklore nurture dissent and moral imagination in the context of governance? The study explores the theories of Arendt’s moral conscience (thinking as resistance), Sen’s idea of justice (ethical public reasoning), and Gandhi’s Satyāgraha (truth-based dissent). Further, the study considers how the Pañcatantra offers ways to navigate complex ethical terrains through its wisdom tales, which are not only abstract moral idealism but also advocate pragmatic ethics (Chakraborty, 1995; Banerjee, 2021). The discussion brings out the alignment of Pañcatantra stories with the appropriate SDGs (SDG 8, 12, and 16), instrumental in handling corporate crises. The study also attempts to introduce a few cases at both the national and international levels to anchor the morals of the Pañcatantra within the corporate ecosystem. The study recommends the value-added course for both academicians and professionals to gain insights into the significance of Dharma and karma.

Testimony as Responsibility in Times of Polarization: Oral History and Sino-Soviet Musical Exchange

Zhiyun Cai — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article interprets the oral histories of Chinese musicians trained in the Soviet Union as acts of testimony and responsibility amid ideological polarization. Rather than viewing oral history merely as a supplement to archival research, it approaches it as an ethico-epistemic practice in which remembering becomes a conscientious engagement with contested pasts. Focusing on musicians educated during the formative decades of the People’s Republic of China, the study explores how personal narratives mediate between individual life trajectories and the broader political and cultural tensions that shaped Sino-Soviet exchange. Epistemologically, it examines how oral testimony unsettles rigid distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity, memory and fact, showing that selectivity, reconstruction, and emotional inflection are intrinsic to historical understanding rather than methodological flaws. Ethically, it argues that recording and preserving fragile memories constitutes a responsibility to resist historical erasure and cultural amnesia, especially amid political rupture and polarized interpretations of the past. Oral history thus becomes a dialogical space where archival records and lived experience converge, enabling a more plural reconstruction of history grounded in conscience, resistance to forgetting and ethico-political imagination. By linking oral testimony with philosophical reflections on memory, responsibility, and public knowledge, the article contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue among historiography, philosophy, and cultural studies.

Eidos-Theos in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: Redemption, Reason and Responsibility

Binoj Mathew & Armila Antony C — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter through the heuristic framework of Eidos and Theos in order to reconsider the relation between symbolic instability and moral transformation in the novel. While Hawthorne criticism has long explored the Puritan ideology, gendered resistance and the ambiguous interpretation of the scarlet letter, less attention has been given to how shifting of symbolic meanings participate in the reconstruction of ethical identity. Drawing on theological hermeneutics, symbolic interpretation and narrative ethics, this study argues that Hawthorne’s symbols do not merely expose the rigidity of Puritan moral systems; instead, they acquire new significance through human experience and social reinterpretation. Within this framework, Eidos refers to forms of moral abstraction that reduce individuals to fixed juridical and social categories, whereas Theos designates a more relational understanding of identity shaped through responsibility, compassion and lived experience. Through analysis of the scaffold scenes, the forest episode and the Election Day procession, the paper demonstrates how Hester Prynne’s transformation disrupts the stability of public judgement and reshapes the meaning of the scarlet letter itself.

Conscience and Artistic Responsibility: Confucian Moral Aesthetics and Contemporary Chinese Art

Gelang Li — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article argues that, in times of social and ethical polarization, artistic practice can play a significant role in which conscience is cultivated, expressed and translated into responsibility. Moving beyond the view of art as entertainment or aesthetic pleasure, the author proposes that contemporary artistic practices embody a form of artistic responsibility shaped by the moral demands of the present age. To interpret this relationship philosophically, the author turns to Confucianism, where aesthetics and morality are inseparable and where self-cultivation grounds ethical engagement with the world. Drawing on the Confucian ideas of moral cultivation, innate moral awareness, and the unity of heaven, earth and humanity, the article develops a framework of moral aesthetics through which artistic expression can be understood as an outward manifestation of an inwardly cultivated moral disposition. This framework is then used to examine selected instances of contemporary artistic and digital practices in China, including folk narrative traditions, music and digital creative platforms, as spaces where individuals negotiate gender, economic vulnerability, cultural identity and social justice through aesthetic action. The article contends that conscience, when formed through self-cultivation, gives artistic practice an ethical orientation beyond self-expression or entertainment. Artistic responsibility consequently arises when aesthetic creativity becomes responsive to the well-being of others and to the social realities within which art is produced and received. By connecting Confucian moral aesthetics with contemporary Chinese artistic practices, the author demonstrates how self-cultivation can provide a philosophical foundation for understanding conscience and artistic responsibility today.

From Spectacle to Responsibility: Digital Sport, Polarization and the Ethics of Mediated Belief

Xiaoping Meng & Dongmei Lin — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the digital transformation of sport as a movement from aesthetic spectacle toward a broader horizon of meaning, belief, identity, polarization and ethical responsibility. While sport has traditionally been understood through competition and performance, digital media increasingly transform sporting events into spectacles that are repeatedly visualized, circulated, interpreted and emotionally invested across networked platforms. In a polarized public sphere, digitally mediated sport can function as a significant site of emotional investment, symbolic belonging and collective imagination. Spectatorship is therefore no longer a passive reception of events but an active process through which communities interpret performances, construct identities and circulate competing narratives.

Sovereignty and Conscience: A Political Theology of Anti-Conversion Laws in India

Roy Alex & Shampa I Dev — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In contemporary India, the contest over religious conversion embodies a deeper struggle within political theology—the negotiation between divine conscience and state sovereignty. While the Constitution enshrines freedom of religion as an expression of moral and spiritual autonomy, the rise of anti-conversion laws reframes faith within structures of surveillance and control. Ostensibly preventing conversions by “force” or “allurement,” these laws reveal how legal language mediates ethical responsibility, identity, and belonging in a polarized society. This paper examines the philosophical and ethical implications of such legislation, arguing that they transform the inner freedom of conscience, guaranteed by the Constitution, into an object of legal verification. Situated within the horizon of dharma and prophetic divergence, the study reclaims religious freedom as a living practice of conscience—where faith resists coercion, dissent sustains democracy, and political theology becomes a space of moral renewal and solidarity.

Conscience Against Ideological Memory: Re-Reading the “Three Obediences and Four Virtues” in Han China Through Ethico-Political Responsibility

Ya Wang & Yujie Gao — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The notion of San cong si de (Three Obediences and Four Virtues) has frequently been regarded as a paradigmatic expression of the subordination and inferior status of women in traditional Chinese society. This interpretation has become particularly influential in modern discussions of gender and Confucian ethics. Yet the historical evidence from the Han dynasty presents a considerably more complex picture. This article rereads the “Three Obediences and Four Virtues” through the interconnected concepts of conscience, responsibility, moral agency and ethico-political imagination. It argues that the subsequent memory of these norms can become ideologically selective when a historically differentiated system of social and familial responsibilities is reduced to the binary categories of oppression and liberation. The original framework undoubtedly contained a male-centred hierarchy and did not establish gender equality in political, economic, educational or public life. At the same time, Han sources reveal women exercising moral judgment and counsel, participating in economic production, influencing familial and political affairs, receiving education, making choices concerning marriage and assuming significant responsibility for the moral formation of children and the well-being of the household. The “Three Obediences,” therefore, should be examined not merely as prescriptions of passive submission, but also in relation to social position, relational dependence, reciprocal responsibility and the ethical obligations embedded in familial relationships. Particular attention is given to the capacity of wives to counsel their husbands, mothers to shape the moral character of their sons, women to participate in productive labour, and women to exercise a degree of agency in matters of marriage. These instances reveal forms of responsible dissent that need not entail a rejection of tradition but may instead arise from within its moral framework. The article argues that responsible historical interpretation requires moving beyond polarized memories of tradition and recovering the internal complexity of inherited ethical systems. Such a rereading neither denies the hierarchical dimensions of Han gender ethics nor romanticizes its social order; rather, it demonstrates how conscience and responsibility could operate within a differentiated structure of social relations and how the remembrance and interpretation of historical traditions themselves entail an ethical responsibility.

Ideological Narratives of Poverty and Prosperity: Marxism, Injustice and the Responsibility to Resist

Chong Zhang — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines Karl Marx’s critique of poverty and prosperity through the ideological narratives by which economic inequality is produced, justified and normalized. Marx’s analysis reveals that the accumulation of wealth cannot be separated from the social relations through which poverty and vulnerability are reproduced. Moving beyond a purely economic interpretation of Marxism, the article examines narratives that portray poverty as individual failure, prosperity as deserved achievement and inequality as inevitable. Such narratives become particularly significant in polarized societies, where competing representations of social groups can obscure structural injustice and weaken solidarity. Literary narratives are considered as forms of ethical imagination that reveal the human consequences of class, gender and institutional injustice. Drawing on Marxist scholarship and selected ancient Chinese perspectives on communal responsibility, the article argues that critical consciousness becomes ethically significant when recognition of injustice generates responsibility to resist its reproduction. Resistance entails solidarity, dissent and meaningful engagement with those whose suffering has been normalized. Marx remains significant for exposing structures and narratives that make inequality socially intelligible, normalized and politically acceptable.

Contemporary Philosophy of Education: Leading Voices from the Field

Huanling Zeng — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Contemporary Philosophy of Education: Leading Voices from the Field offers diverse perspectives on education amid epistemic fragmentation, democratic uncertainty, technological transformation and the marginalization of philosophy. Emerging from the Merritt Lecture series, it explores post-truth, democracy, artificial intelligence, spirituality and educational praxis. It also highlights the continuing need to place philosophical reflection at the heart of educational life and human formation. Its central achievement lies not in providing definitive answers but in reopening fundamental questions about education and human flourishing. The book’s lasting significance will depend on whether its philosophical insights can move beyond diagnosis toward institutional renewal and transformative Pedagogy.