Dharma
Many translators have noted the difficulty of translating the word dharma because of its multiple meanings: thing, phenomenon, quality, truth, doctrine, teaching, ultimate reality, virtue, mental object, and so on. The Eight Thousand and other Prajñāpāramitā scriptures often play with these meanings. Indeed, the word dharma can have more than one meaning at the same time in this scripture, especially when it is used in proximity with related Sanskrit words like dharmakāya, dharmatā, and dharmadhātu. To allow for the etymological resonance and meaningful ambiguity in these passages, Harrison and others have opted to leave the term untranslated. Leaving readers to assess for themselves what each occurrence of the term may mean has both advantages and disadvantages.
In this translation, the untranslated, capitalized term Dharma—either alone or followed by the word “teachings”—is used to refer to the Buddha’s doctrine or specific teachings, because that has become a standard or convention. For other usages, however, the term dharma is rendered by the most appropriate term in each context, but with a note indicating the other meanings possibly intended. This approach has led to the term dharma being most often translated as a “thing”—in the generic sense of physical and mental things like forms, consciousness, and so on.59 Likewise, the compound word sarvadharmāḥ has been translated in the positive as “all things” or “everything” and in the negative as “nothing,” “anything”—or in many cases “any thing” (to point to the emphasis on “thing”). A less common usage of dharma in this scripture is translated as “awakened qualities”—when referring to the qualities possessed by a worthy one (arhat), a solitary realizer (pratyekabuddha), or a bodhisattva—or just as “qualities” where more appropriate.
As for compound terms with dharma in them, each is translated according to its most common usage, for example “truth body” (dharmakāya), “true nature of things” (dharmatā), and “ultimate realm of things” (dharmadhātu). However, all these compound terms can be interpreted variously in different contexts by the commentators from their differing philosophical perspectives. Ratnākaraśānti, for instance, explains the term dharmakāya in some contexts as “body of teaching” (Dharma=deśanā+kāya), in some as “body/embodiment of the true nature of things” (dharmatā+kāya), and in others as “body of awakened qualities” (dharmānām+kāya). For Haribhadra, the “true nature of things” (dharmatā) is often synonymous with emptiness and the “ultimate realm of things” (dharmadhātu). But depending on context, Ratnākaraśānti explains the “ultimate realm of things” (dharmadhātu) as the fundamental source (dhātu<hetu) of all things, or as the fundamental “source of all (awakened) qualities.”