Righteousness

CRITICAL AND UNAVOIDABLE: unlike in any vernacular in this pipeline, there is no way to fully escape dharma’s weight in Sanskrit — धार्मिकता is an abstract noun built directly on धर्म, the first and organizing category of the four puruṣārthas (dharma, artha, kāma, mokṣa) and the entire subject of the Mīmāṃsā school’s scriptural-injunction hermeneutics and of the dharmaśāstra legal-ritual literature (varṇāśrama-dharma). न्यायः is equally unusable as a plain word for ‘justice’ because it is the proper name of an entire orthodox darśana (the Nyāya school of logic and epistemology). Every candidate term is already a school name or a theorized category. This term therefore requires mandatory explicit redefinition at every occurrence — ‘right standing before God granted through faith, not cosmic/social duty performed or ritually prescribed’ — rather than reliance on the word alone.