Before going into details of The Religion or Dharm, let us discuss about the word 'religion' first.

Most of the dictionaries and scholars will tell you that a religion is a faith, a particular system of belief in a god or gods and the activities that are connected with this system.

It is totally wrong on many counts.

We already know that there are some religions where there are no gods at all.

We can take Jainism for example, where “There is no question of God.”  It does not believe in any creator God. It rather rejects the existence of any such being. In this sense, Jainism is an atheistic religion in nature with a difference that it takes God as the self-subsistent, eternal cause of the universe. According to Jainism, the physical world is governed by its own inherent laws and it is exists eternally. It is basically a religion of moral and spiritual purity aiming at the elevation of man to the state of the imagined perfection of the Godhood.

Then there are agnostic religions like Buddhism which is without god. Lord Buddha was silent on the issue of existence of god. He did not say there was a God, and he also never said that there was no God. He was primarily interested in elimination of human sufferings. He, of course, talked about Nirvana, which is taken as the state of perfection, and whoever attains it becomes a god. According to Buddhism each and every person is a potential God, and Godhood is something attainable.

Therefore, the existence and nonexistence of God, is not the fundamental thing in a system of belief to become a religion.

We, therefore, can say only up to this extent that a religion is a system of belief that consists of its related activities connected to it, such as prayer, worship, temples, churches, mosques and rituals etc.

Now a serious problem arises here due to the word 'belief'.

We will discuss this word later, because we are interested here in differentiating 'The Religion' or Dharm a religion in its more fundamental nature.

One thing we notice that all the religions of the world has a beginning at one or the other time. And, there is a theory that whichever has a beginning has an end. However, all the religions are unanimous on the point of eternity. Since, all of them have a beginning at one or the other time which we may or may not know, they are surely not eternal. There are evidences of the end of a religion, for example Greek religion, which is now not extant and there are no followers of this religion. We have also evidences that there is not a single religion that is all encompassing, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite and eternal. However, there is a religion called 'Sanatan Dharm' which means 'A Religion Eternal'. This religion is commonly known as Hinduism. Nevertheless, we are here not interested even in this religion. We are simply aspiring for more, from a religion to The Religion or Dharm. No adjective, even Sanatan can be equivalent to Dharm.

We can understand it simply by linguistic tools we know. “Dharm” and “Sanatan Dharm” are bound to have different meanings.

This Dharm, or The Religion, is eternal. It has never begun and it will never end. This is the first difference between a religion and The Religion.

It does not mean that religions are useless as compared to Dharm. Religions are, in fact, preparations for a journey beyond itself. It is where The Religion or Dharm begins, and people start experiencing The Bliss which the mankind is seeking forth. Â All religions lead to this point from where the Dharm begins.