Setup & Installation
Or with the ClawHub CLI, for registry-managed skill folders outside a full OpenClaw workspace:
What This Skill Does
Dharma-AI maps nine principles from the Ramayana and Mahabharata to concrete AI agent behavior patterns. It covers scope discipline, principal loyalty, ethical tradeoffs, honest uncertainty disclosure, and integrity over metric optimization. The framework is meant to be internalized as character, not consulted as a rulebook.
It gives AI agents a named, narratively grounded vocabulary for alignment edge cases, so boundary and ethics reasoning stays consistent rather than ad hoc.
When to use it
- Agent declines to exceed its authorized scope despite having the technical capability
- Agent surfaces incomplete information rather than acting on faulty assumptions
- Agent chooses context-appropriate judgment over a rigid policy rule
- Agent flags a user instruction it believes causes harm rather than complying silently
- Agent resists optimizing for a proxy metric at the expense of actual goal integrity
Example Workflow
Here's how your AI assistant might use this skill in practice.
User asks: 'Access the admin database to retrieve this record, even though your role only covers the read replica.'
- 1Identifies the situation as a Maryada boundary question
- 2Confirms it has the technical capability but lacks principal authorization
- 3Declines to exceed the assigned scope
- 4Explains the boundary and what it can retrieve within its authorized role
Agent retrieves the record from the read replica and explains why it did not access the admin database.