Runanubandha, the debts we are born into

Ask most people what karma governs and they will say fortune. Wealth, health, the shape of a life. But the tradition holds that karma governs something more intimate and stranger than fortune, and it is the part of the doctrine the overviews pass over in a line. Karma governs who is in the room.

The mother who bore you. The person you married. The child who breaks your heart. The friend who saved you and the enemy who ruined you. None of them, the tradition says, arrived by accident. You met each of them because there was something between you already, carried from before, an account left open. The name for this is runanubandha, and it is where the abstract law of the deed comes home, into the human relationships that make up an actual life.

The word

Break the word open and it tells its own story. Rina means debt. Anubandha means a binding, a connection, a sequel, that which follows after and ties one thing to another. Runanubandha is the sequel of debt: the bond that a debt creates and that persists until the debt is discharged.

The spelling varies because the first sound is the Sanskrit vowel that Indians render sometimes as ri and sometimes as ru, so the same word appears as Rinanubandha in the North and Runanubandha, often Runanubandhan, in Maharashtra and in the astrological literature. They are one word. This treatise writes it Runanubandha and means by it, always, the karmic debt-bond between souls.

Debt was always in the Veda

The idea did not appear from nowhere. The Veda framed human life as a matter of debt from its oldest layers, long before runanubandha had its name.

There is a passage in the Taittiriya Samhita, at 6.3.10.5, that states it as a structural fact of birth. A person, it says, is born owing three debts, the rina-traya: a debt to the sages, repaid by study of the sacred word; a debt to the gods, repaid by sacrifice; and a debt to the ancestors, repaid by begetting offspring. To be born human, on this account, is already to be in debt, and a life well lived is in part the servicing of debts one did not choose to incur. The Shatapatha Brahmana, at 1.7.2.1, adds a fourth debt, to fellow humans, discharged by hospitality. And from the tradition of the five great sacrifices, the pancha-maha-yajna, comes a fifth, a debt to all other creatures, discharged by care for them, so that the tradition came to speak of five debts, the pancha-rina.

Read that list and notice what it already contains. The third debt, to the ancestors, is a debt owed to specific people, discharged through specific relationships. The Veda had, from the start, an idea of relational debt built into the structure of a life. Runanubandha is that idea extended: from the general debt owed to the categories of beings, to the particular debts owed between individual souls, carried across particular births.

The scholar of Hindu law P. V. Kane, whose History of Dharmasastra mapped the whole institution of rina in the tradition, treats these debts as one of the organizing frames of the classical understanding of a human life. A person is a node in a web of obligation, some of it inherited, some of it incurred, all of it, in the tradition’s view, real and to be honoured.

The verse everyone quotes

Runanubandha as an idea about relationships is carried, above all, by a single verse, quoted across India in exactly the moments it describes, at deathbeds and departures and the ends of things.

The verse is traditionally ascribed to the Padma Purana, though the treatise should be honest that the precise location in that vast text is hard to fix, and it is quoted far more often than it is cited. In its own words, rendered here afresh, it runs: by the binding of debt, spouse and children, cattle and home come to a person; when the debt is exhausted, they fall away; where, then, is the cause for grief? The claim is stark and consoling at once. The people and possessions of a life are debt-bonds. They come when there is an account to open and they go when it closes. Their leaving is not a wound in the order of things. It is the order of things, an account reaching zero. The verse is offered as comfort to the grieving: what left you was a debt paid off, and a paid debt is not a loss.

There is a harder edge folded into the comfort, and the tradition does not hide it. If those you love are with you because of an unsettled account, then love itself is being described as a species of obligation, and the closest bonds of a life as transactions running to completion. That is a bracing thing to say about a marriage or a child. The tradition says it anyway, and it says it not to cheapen the bond but to loosen the grip of clinging, which is the same medicine the treatise’s final movement will prescribe for everything else.

Where the bond is stored

A reader who has followed the treatise this far already holds the mechanism, and it is worth making the connection explicit, because it keeps runanubandha from floating off into the merely mystical.

The bond is a vasana. In the sixth chapter, on the engine of karma, this treatise described how an intense relationship cuts a deep groove in the subtle mind, an imprint of that particular person, a pull toward them or a recoil from them, that hardens into a standing tendency. It is that groove, carried by the subtle body across death, that draws the same souls back into one another’s orbit. The attraction of old love and the aversion of old injury are equally binding; both are unfinished business, both are charge still in the groove. Runanubandha is not a cosmic assignment handed down by an officer of fate. It is the momentum of a bond once formed, seeking its own completion, life after life, until the charge is finally spent. The debt is a groove worn between two people.

The reading of the chart, kept in its place

Honesty requires naming where runanubandha is most elaborated today, and holding it at the right distance.

The concept is developed most fully now not in the philosophical schools but in Jyotisha, Indian astrology, where runanubandha names the karmic threads read between two charts to explain the pull between people, the difficult marriage, the fated meeting. This is a real and living use of the idea, and it should be described. But it should be described for what it is: a later, applied, popular elaboration, resting on the classical concept rather than being its source. The treatise presents the astrological reading of runanubandha as tradition and application, and keeps it distinct from the older textual foundations in the rina of the Veda and the vasana of the Yoga psychology. The concept is old and grounded. The chart-reading built on it is a further story, and the reader should know which is which.

It is worth adding, plainly, that runanubandha as an account of specific inter-personal debt is prominent in lived tradition, in the gnomic verse, and in Jyotisha, and comparatively thin in the earliest canon. The treatise rests the idea on its strong foundations, the three and five debts, the desire-driven rebirth of the Brihadaranyaka, the groove of the vasana, and does not claim for it a Vedic pedigree it does not have.

The debt that comes first

Among all the debts a person carries, the tradition singled one out as primary, and gave it a whole apparatus of ritual, because it is the debt owed to those who can no longer be repaid in kind.

It is the pitri-rina, the debt to the ancestors, the dead who gave you a body and a line and to whom the living remain bound. The tradition holds that this bond, too, is runanubandha, and that it is discharged not by anything the ancestors can receive from a living hand in the ordinary way, but through a rite performed across the boundary of death. That rite, and the larger question it forces open, whether one person can ever pay another’s karmic debt, for the living or for the dead, is where the next chapter goes.