What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionEvery act carries its consequence forward; what you do shapes what you become.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Hinduism and Eckankar are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
Travels across8 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJainism · c. 550 BCE
Newest holderAum Shinrikyo · 1984 CE
Turns up as11 tenets · 6 codes · 3 scriptures · 2 figures
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 10 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Action bears fruit: karma binds consequence to deed across lifetimes.
No judge required — cause and effect run through moral life as surely as through nature.
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Heaven runs out. Liberation does not.
Svarga is a reward with an expiry date — good karma spends down and the soul comes back. Moksha is the only exit, and every school in the tradition, however violently it disagrees about what moksha is, agrees that it is the point.
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Beings are reborn through six realms.
Gods, jealous gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, hell-beings — a wheel with no exit but awakening, and human birth the rare rung where the work can actually be done.
held by most
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Karma is intention.
It is intention, monks, that I call karma — the act begins in the mind, before the hand moves.
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Karma is a substance.
Not a moral ledger and not a law of consequence — fine physical matter, drawn to the soul by passion and stuck there by it, with a measurable weight, duration and intensity. This is the distinctive Jain claim, and the technical literature on it runs to thousands of pages.
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The soul is liberated by its own effort.
No god saves; austerity and care burn karma from the soul until it rises free.
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Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Poa — that a killing could improve the victim's next life.
Poa in Tibetan practice is a rite performed for the dying to guide consciousness at death. Asahara inverted it: a person accumulating bad karma could, he taught, be killed by an enlightened master as an act of mercy. This is the doctrine that made the murders internally legible, and it is rejected by every Buddhist school it was borrowed from.
⚖ contested within
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Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
Balance your karma in this embodiment.
The teaching says the account can be settled and the ascension made in this life. The violet flame is offered as the instrument for doing it.
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Eckankar
— one faith of this family holds it
Your karma is your own bookkeeping.
The teaching declines to blame parents, society or God. The Master may take on some of the burden of an initiate; the account stays in the initiate's name.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
There is no devil in this.
No adversary of Bondye, no principle of evil, no hell. There is harm, and harm has a source — a person who paid for it, a neglected obligation, an ancestor who was not fed. The problem is always somebody's conduct, which is a considerably more uncomfortable theology than a devil.
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Which hand you work with.
Practitioners distinguish between serving with the right hand and working with both, and the distinction is theirs rather than an outsider's imposition. There is a market for harm, everyone in a district knows who serves it, and the tradition's stated sanction is consequence rather than prohibition — it comes back, and it comes back on your children.
⚖ contested within
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
A human birth is the opening, and it closes.
The soul is said to pass through 8.4 million forms; the human one is the rare chance to remember the Name and get out of the cycle. Karma sets the terms — but the Sikh accent falls on grace, which can cut the sequence short without notice.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The ledger of merit and demerit.
A printed book with a scoring system: saving a life is a hundred merits, speaking harshly to a parent is a demerit, and you total the day before bed. It was a mass practice among the late imperial gentry. Its own compilers raised the obvious objection — that scoring corrupts the act — and answered that the habit outlives the motive.
⚖ contested within
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The account outlives you.
Chengfu, inherited burden: unresolved wrong is passed down, so present misfortune may be an ancestor's debt rather than your own fault. It is a theory of suffering that does not blame the sufferer, and it also makes the living permanently responsible for the dead, which is why so much of the practice is funerary.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
The knowledge cuts both ways.
The same herbs, words and workings that heal can be turned to harm, and practitioners do not pretend otherwise. What the tradition asserts instead is that work done to injure returns to the sender, and often to their children — which is a claim about consequences rather than a prohibition backed by an authority.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The ledger of merit and demerit.
A printed book with a scoring system: saving a life is a hundred merits, speaking harshly to a parent is a demerit, and you total the day before bed. It was a mass practice among the late imperial gentry. Its own compilers raised the obvious objection — that scoring corrupts the act — and answered that the habit outlives the motive.
Go deeper — context →
Which hand you work with.
Practitioners distinguish between serving with the right hand and working with both, and the distinction is theirs rather than an outsider's imposition. There is a market for harm, everyone in a district knows who serves it, and the tradition's stated sanction is consequence rather than prohibition — it comes back, and it comes back on your children.
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T
The one who works with both hands.
Vodou has no devil, so wrongdoing has to be attributed to people. A bòkò is a practitioner who will take money to do harm — and the distinction between the oungan who serves with the right hand and the bòkò who uses both is drawn by practitioners themselves, argued about, and not always clear from outside.
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Poa — that a killing could improve the victim's next life.
Poa in Tibetan practice is a rite performed for the dying to guide consciousness at death. Asahara inverted it: a person accumulating bad karma could, he taught, be killed by an enlightened master as an act of mercy. This is the doctrine that made the murders internally legible, and it is rejected by every Buddhist school it was borrowed from.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →