Three Traditions, Three Mechanisms

The atlas keeps the traditions' accounts distinct, because they disagree about what karma is and what carries it.

In Hinduism, broadly, karma attaches to the enduring self (atman) and binds it to the round of rebirth; its store can be worked off, and various paths, disciplined action, knowledge, and above all loving devotion, can offset or dissolve it, some schools holding that God's grace can cancel karmic debt outright. In Buddhism, karma is redefined as intention: "It is intention (cetana) that I call karma," the Buddha says in the Anguttara Nikaya; what ripens is the moral quality of the will behind an act. Because Buddhism denies a permanent self, it must explain how karma is carried without a soul to carry it, and answers with an unbroken causal continuity rather than a transmigrating substance. In Jainism, karma is the most literal of all: a kind of subtle matter that actually flows into the soul (jiva) and sticks to it, weighing it down, so that liberation requires both stopping the inflow and burning off the accumulated matter through austerity. The same word thus names a moral law, a psychology of intention, and a physics of the soul.