Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Action, Rebirth and Consequence gathers fourteen concepts describing how a deed carries forward, within a life or across many, through the mechanism Hindu, Buddhist and Jain thought each call karma but define differently.

Karma is the shared word and the least shared idea. Hindu accounts largely treat it as an impersonal natural regularity, though some theistic schools bring God in to dispense its fruits. Buddhism locates it in intention, the disposition behind an act rather than its outward shape. Jainism is the outlier, holding karma to be a literal subtle matter that adheres to the soul like dust, which is why Jain asceticism burns it off rather than restrains it, a mechanism Karma in Jain Teaching sets out through influx, binding, stopping and shedding. Samsara names the wandering this drives, a predicament rather than a comforting cycle, and the traditions disagree over what continues through it, an enduring self in Hindu accounts, no self in Buddhism, a soul weighed down by matter in Jainism. Samskara supplies the residue, the groove a past act leaves that inclines the mind to repeat it. Ahimsa, non harming, is worked furthest in Jainism but stays contested in Hinduism and is the first Buddhist precept.

The same problem recurs outside the Dharmic cluster: Gilgul in Jewish mysticism, Metempsychosis among the Greek Pythagoreans, and Tanasukh, affirmed by the Druze from a closed canon this entry does not reconstruct. Papa and Punya works the same ground as merit and demerit in Hindu law, and Akusala names the Buddhist alternative to sin. Dharma, Bardo, Sarbat da bhala and Votive Offering close the group, naming the order an action answers to, the Buddhist interval between states, a Sikh prayer for welfare, and religion's gift to a god on condition.