Dharma as it is to me
During my childhood, I have vivid memories of accompanying my parents to religious and cultural events where they volunteered. I didn't yet understand the weight of their work, but I was always pulled in by the liveliness of it: the noise, the color, the sense that something larger than any one person was being built in that room.
As I got older, I began to see what I'd only felt as a child: the camaraderie holding those gatherings together. Every event ran on teams of volunteers, hosts, priests, cooks, planners, and devotees, each with a distinct role. The hosts welcomed and honored every guest who walked in. The priests led the rituals, and their words could quiet an entire hall. The cooks made sure no one left hungry or overlooked. The planners moved between every group, making sure each had what it needed to do its part. And the devotees, the guests, were free to simply worship, held up by everyone working around them.
What strikes me most, looking back, is that the faces weren't always the same. Some volunteers and guests showed up at every single event; others rotated in and out, new each time. But you'd never guess it from watching. There was a "we are in this together" mindset so tight it felt like everyone had been doing this work for years, whether it was their first event or their fiftieth. That, to me, is the real beauty of it: bhakti isn't confined to standing in front of the murti with folded hands. Cooking for hundreds of people, setting up chairs, coordinating the next hour's schedule, that's devotion too. Worship and service turned out to be the same offering, just wearing different clothes.
This is how I've come to understand Sanātana Dharma, not as a rulebook, but as a way of life. It's also the piece I've had to work hardest to carry with me outside of India, in rooms where no one else grew up watching their mother run a kitchen line for hundreds, or knows why an event like that doesn't need a single person in charge to hold together. Explaining it to friends, or eventually to my own kids, has forced me to understand it more plainly than I ever did as a kid in the room.
Life doesn't look the same for everyone, and Sanātana Dharma doesn't ask it to. We aren't expected to live identically, only to recognize our differences and still find a way to build something together, the way that hall full of rotating, devoted faces did. A few core ideas anchor this, ones I learned early and am still learning: smriti, shruti, and purāṇas.
Smriti is what's remembered and practiced, the habits and customs passed down. It changes by generation, and honestly, by person; my smriti isn't my mother's, and it won't be my children's either. Shruti is different: it's what doesn't change, the underlying truths of the universe, the ones no version of memory or custom can override. And the purāṇas are the stories, not just folklore, but a way of making shruti legible. They translate the eternal into something a person can actually hold onto and recognize themselves in.
Together, these three are the scaffolding. What you build on top of it, and how you climb, is yours to determine. Some people climb through bhakti, some through service, some through study, some through quiet, private searching. Different faces, different routes, same mountain. Neither is more correct than the other; that's the whole point.
I'll follow my path. You follow yours. Wherever we each land, we come back to the same hall, the same shared table. And that, to me, is the essence of being a Sanātani.
