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Figure 1 – uploaded by Joel Brereton
Table 1 The distribution of the term, especially its increasing frequency in the younger layers, confirms that it is a part of the developing termi- nology of the Rgveda. Interestingly, 7 of the 11 attestations of dharman in the oldest Rgvedic layer occur within book 5, and therefore its increasing occurrence in later books may partly reflect the influence of the Atri poets. In addition, the large number of attestations in 9, the Soma Pavamana book, shows that dhdrman belongs especially to the vocabulary of Soma. Not indicated by this chart, but almost as significant, is its association with Mitra and Varuna. These latter attestations are distributed throughout the Regveda, although they appear especially in its older levels: 6x in the family books, 2x in book 8 (including 1x in the Valakhilya section), Ix in 9, and 2x in 10. But even if it was not a central term within the Rgveda, dharman is thoroughly established in the text, since the word is attested at all its chronological levels. The following chart presents the occurrences of dharman (including dhdrmavant, satyddharman, and dharmakrt) through the layers of the Rgveda from the old family books (2, 4-6) to book 10 and the Rgvedic appendix in 8.49-59!: