Grief and Dharma: Suffering, empathy and moral imaginative intuition

The article explores recent thinking on the 'hard emotions', in particular, grief, sorrow and mourning, and link the challenging inner and social condition to the calling of Dharma (righteous law, normatively worthy action). Drawing from some comparative work (academic and personal) in the study of grief, mourning and empathy, we shall discuss the treatment of this tragic pathos in classical Indic literature and modern-day psychotherapy. We shall demonstrate, despite being secularised, these emotions continue to serve as the sites of imagination at a much more personal and inter-personal level that are not antithetical to a Dharmic (sacred) quest despite their haunting presence even when 'the four walls collapse around one in the intensity of duḥkha (suffering, sorrow).