What does dharma mean to you?
Dharma is a nice, neutral sounding word which is similar to tao, to me. Someone else actually asked me a similar question and there is a reply on the first page of this thread. I think you will find your answer there.
That sounds like Zen, so why does your profile say your religion is Dharma? It sounds like a contradiction to me.
[witty quip][/witty quip]
Zen is a practice of the way things are, and the dharma is the way things are, like tao. I could easily switch out Dharma for Tao as my religion, and actually i'd been wanting to do it these past couple of days
And, traditionally speaking, ch'an (from which the Japanese zen comes), is influenced by both Taoism and Buddhism and regularly uses the term "the way", tao.
From said post, which is on the first page:
Life, especially in the context of Dhamma, is a matter of nature (dhamma-jati). This Pali word dhamma-jati may not corres*pond to the English "nature" exactly, but they are close enough. Take it to mean something which exists within itself, by itself, of itself, and as its own law. This sense of nature is not opposed to man as some Westerners would have it, but encompasses man and all that he experiences. We must understand the secret of the nature of life, which is to understand Dhamma.
Zen, is simply the way things are, naturally, without the conditioned perceptions of the mind which we take to be the way things are.
To recognize that, we practice staying at the center and letting things go their own way, without identifying until the dust settles. Like my signature quote and this, from the Hua Hu Ching, 10:
The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life. Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there.
So, to simply answer both questions, I choose dharma/tao as my religious identifier because they have a free, natural connotation without all that complicated frameworks that accompany having a religious identity.
It's just the way things are.
