The Respect I Know, and the Respect I Have Yet to Learn

There is a word I have lived with for most of my adult life without seriously questioning: respect.

For me, respect has always meant recognising the dignity of another human being. It means treating people with courtesy, listening without contempt, disagreeing without insult, and recognising another person's worth without diminishing my own. I can respect someone without agreeing with them. I can respect authority without surrendering my judgement.

For nearly thirty years of conscious adult life, I have tried to conduct myself this way—with dignity towards every person, irrespective of age, position, wealth or social standing.

Yet I struggle with the deeper meanings contained in samman, ādara and Tamil mariyādai. These words seem to ask for something more than dignity. They imply reverence, deference and an acknowledgement of relationships, age, learning and position.

My instinctive response is resistance.

Why should age itself command reverence? Why should position create an obligation to defer? Why should I respect someone merely because tradition tells me that I should?

It feels, at times, like an imposition.

And yet this discomfort troubles me precisely because I consider myself deeply drawn to Dharmic principles. If Dharma is merely a set of principles that I personally find reasonable, then perhaps it is not Dharma at all. Dharma asks me to look beyond the individual self—to duty, relationship, humility and an order larger than my own preferences.

The Bhagavad Gita offers an uncomfortable challenge here. In Chapter 13, Krishna includes amānitvam—humility, or freedom from the demand to be honoured—and ācāryopāsanam, reverence towards the teacher, among the qualities associated with knowledge. In Chapter 4, praṇipāta, paripraśna and sevā—humble approach, questioning and service—are presented as the way to approach knowledge.

What strikes me is that questioning is not excluded.

The Gita does not demand that I surrender my intelligence. It asks me to combine intelligence with humility.

Perhaps this is the reconciliation I am searching for.

I can disagree without contempt. I can preserve my autonomy without arrogance. I can honour a teacher without surrendering my capacity to question. I can bow without believing myself inferior.

The Tamil ethical tradition, particularly the Thirukkural, similarly places great emphasis on humility, learning, gratitude and conduct within relationships. It suggests a conception of life in which the individual is not merely an autonomous self but someone embedded in a network of obligations and relationships.

Perhaps my difficulty has been that I have understood respect primarily as a judgement I make about another person: I respect you because I have found you worthy.

The Dharmic conception seems to invite another possibility:

Respect as a discipline I practise within myself.

Perhaps ādara asks me to cultivate the humility to recognise value before demanding that it prove itself to me.

I am not yet there.

I do not want to abandon the egalitarian instinct that says every human being deserves dignity. But perhaps I need to add something to it.

For thirty years, I have tried to live by: “I will treat every person with dignity.”

Perhaps the work of the rest of my life is to learn:

“I will also learn to recognise what is worthy of reverence.”

The first protects the dignity of the other.

The second disciplines my ego.

Perhaps Dharma requires both.

And perhaps respect, ultimately, is not something I give to another person.

It is something I cultivate within myself.