Dharma is among the least translatable words in the study of religion, rendered as order, law, duty, righteousness, teaching or the way things are, depending on the tradition and the sentence. It derives from a Sanskrit root meaning "to hold" or "to support", dharma is what upholds, whether the cosmic order, the social order, or the individual life lived rightly.
In its classical Hindu use, dharma names both the universal order that keeps the world coherent and the particular duty that falls to a person by birth, stage of life and circumstance, svadharma, one's own duty. The Bhagavad Gita gives this its most quoted expression: "Better one's own dharma imperfectly performed than another's dharma performed well" (3.35), a defence of acting according to one's proper station rather than borrowing another's. Dharma in this sense is not a single code but a web of obligations indexed to who and where one is, which is why the same word can mean "righteousness" in one line and "caste duty" in the next.