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Karma, dharma, samsara and cremation each are formally linked to exactly the same four religions in this atlas: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Four separate convergence candidates, and all four resolve to the same underlying fact: these four religions, native to the Indian subcontinent and historically entangled with each other from their beginnings, share a working vocabulary that none of them treats as borrowed.

A Shared Problem and a Shared Currency

Samsara, the beginningless wandering through birth, death and rebirth driven by action and the craving behind it, is the problem all four traditions exist to address, not a backdrop to some other concern; understanding that it is the problem, rather than the setting, is the first requirement for reading any of the four. Karma, action and the consequence it carries across lives as well as within them, is the currency the problem is worked out in, though beneath that shared principle the four traditions differ enough that a single account of karma would misrepresent all of them: it is not divine judgement in any of the classical formulations, no sentence is passed and no record is kept by an official, and the process runs closer to a natural regularity than to a court.

What Each Tradition Adds, and What They All Still Do With the Body

Dharma, what upholds, is the term each tradition bends hardest to its own shape: Hindu usage covers cosmic order, moral law and the duty specific to a person's own station, Buddhism reads it as the Buddha's own taught path, Jainism and Sikhism each inherit the word while filling it from their own doctrine, so the single English rendering fails informatively rather than simply. Cremation is where the shared vocabulary becomes a shared practice rather than only a shared word: it is the norm across the Indian and East Asian traditions generally and was long forbidden across most of the Abrahamic ones, and both positions rest on argument rather than habit. Hindu antyeshti gives the body to fire as the last offering a person makes; Buddhist practice follows the cremation of the Buddha himself and produces relics that are then enshrined. Four candidates, one convergence: a family of religions that argue constantly with each other about doctrine still reaches for the identical four words and the identical rite when it comes to naming the problem of existence and disposing of the dead.

Where To Read More

• KarmaAction, Rebirth and ConsequenceThe shared currency: action and its consequence, impersonal rather than a court
• DharmaAction, Rebirth and ConsequenceThe word each tradition bends hardest to its own shape
• SamsaraAction, Rebirth and ConsequenceThe shared problem all four traditions exist to address
• CremationFunerary RitualsWhere the shared vocabulary becomes a shared practice
• HinduismDharmic (Polytheistic)One of the four religions all four concepts converge on
• BuddhismDharmic (Nontheistic)One of the four religions all four concepts converge on
• JainismDharmicOne of the four religions all four concepts converge on
• SikhismDharmic (Monotheistic)One of the four religions all four concepts converge on