In search of dharma

by Biksu Okusi

 

The word ‘dharma’ is all over the place nowadays: yoga studios, paperback spines, meditation apps. Now try to define it.

With 3000 years of religion and philosophy stripped away, dharma means something startlingly plain: that which holds. Not incense, but a beam, the thing that keeps a life, a people, a world from falling apart.

Once you see this, a harder truth follows: no single ‘Dharma’ was ever handed down from above. There are only dharmas, plural, built by human beings wherever we appear. This means they can be built, or rebuilt, again.

In search of dharma follows the word from Sanskrit root through the first crowded cities, and from an illiterate Javanese farmer who assembled an ethical world in a teak forest, to nine women who set their feet in wet cement in a protest outside the presidential palace.

Along the way, it asks uncomfortable questions. Why every dharma’s failures are its strengths turned inside out, whether an ethic can still bind without a god, and whether we can now build one deliberately with our eyes open, without crushing anyone inside it.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Biksu Okusi knows neither monastery nor university. Raised in remote Western Australia, he is a naturalised Indonesian writing from Bali. This book was built on forty years of reading, three decades inside Indonesian society, and knowledge from 15,000 curated documents, every claim traceable to its source. You are not asked to trust him, but to follow the links.

 

Brilliant, very well written and researched, concise and compelling. In search of dharma is a wonderful example of how secular dharma should evolve; not by finessing the words of a founding figure into an orthodoxy but by taking the enquiry further into new areas unanticipated by one’s predecessors.
– STEPHEN BATCHELOR, co-author of Living life on life’s terms: turning the wheel of secular dharma

 

ON SALE FROM 26 NOVEMBER 2026 • Download an excerpt (available soon)

Anthropology | Philosophy | Buddhism

Order directly from Tuwhiri, or from Ingrams

If you would like to interview Biksu Okusi for your publication, podcast or newsletter send us an email

Download New Title Information for USA | UK & Europe | Aotearoa New Zealand

 

FORMATS

Paperback • US $19.95 from our online store (free shipping worldwide) and in bookstores
AU $29.95 • CA $27.95 • EUR €16.95 • GB £14.95 • NZ $34.95 • ID Rp350,000
from our online store (free shipping worldwide), in bookstores, and online
232 pages – 152mm x 229mm x 15mm
ISBN : 979-8-9980676-0-0

ePub / PDF • US $6.95
ISBN : 979-8-9980676-1-7

audiobook • US $6.95 – AI narrated
ISBN: 979-8-9980676-2-4

special audiobook + ePub bundle • US $9.95
listen to or download the audiobook Preface here