Karma & Rebirth
The tradition's account of action and consequence: how karma works, how it carries across death, why the innocent suffer, and how the wheel is brought to rest.
Karma means action, and the consequence of action. It has never meant fate. What the tradition has argued over, for something close to two and a half thousand years, is almost everything else: how the trace of a deed is stored, what carries the account across the moment of death, who keeps the books, and whether the ledger is finally real at all.
These pages follow that argument. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad gives the earliest clear statement of it, in a conversation Yajnavalkya deliberately draws aside so that it will not be said in public. The Nyaya and Mimamsa schools built careful machinery to explain how an act performed now can bear fruit lifetimes later. Advaita answers that the whole ledger belongs to the level of appearance. The bhakti traditions answer that grace can cancel what no accounting could.
You will also find here the part most overviews pass over in a line: runanubandha, the debt-bond, the tradition’s account of why the same few people keep arriving in a life as though summoned.
Where the schools diverge, this collection sets them beside each other. It does not rule between them.