Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions

The present collection of essays presents a variety of ideas about rebirth, often in competition and disagreement, but always in dialogue; for what makes Indian thought so fascinating is the constant rapprochement between opposed world views, hardly a true synthesis, but a cross fertilization that seems to have no end, one mediation giving rise to another, each result becoming a new cause, endlessly, like Karma itself. This volume might serve as model of diversity to explain how any group of South Asians will fight (as Marriott has put it)–and, indeed, to explain how any group of Indologists will fight. For we too are actors and how can we tell the dancers from the dance? The Indians themselves have developed highly sophisticated ways of dealing with such differences of strata, for they do not hold assumptions in the same way on different levels; they treat Karma sometimes as a concept, sometimes as a theory, some times as a model; sometimes they accept it, and sometimes they challenge it.