The Living Myth
Action, Consequence · Deed, Action, the Law of Consequence · Deed, action
Stories of Karma
Karma has no biography because it outranks every biography: it is the rule all biographies obey. Its ‘mythology’ is the doctrine’s own history — from the Vedic ritual’s power to bind, through the Upaniṣads’ interiorization, to the great vehicles’ global export — and the countless stories, from Nala to Savitri, in which its arithmetic drives the plot.
The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad relocates karma: no longer the ritual act alone but the intention behind every act — ‘one becomes good by good action, evil by evil action’. The ritual economy of the Brahmins became the moral economy of the universe, and no priest was needed to run it.
The Buddha’s formula is the doctrine’s cleanest statement: beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs of their deeds — nowhere else does the inheritance come from. Karma in Buddhism is intention (cetanā) itself; the deed’s fruit follows like the wheel follows the ox.
The Mahābhārata’s Savitrī tale stages the doctrine’s limit-case: Satyavān’s life exhausted by karma’s count, Yama arrives on schedule — and the wife’s flawless speech wins the husband back. The epic never denies the law; it shows a love so exact in its dharma that the law’s own keeper must honour it.
Jainism made karma physical: a subtle matter that clings to the soul like dust to a wet cloth, weighing it into rebirth. The doctrine’s imagery — the soul’s lightness restored by austerity until it rises like a flame released — is the most materialist eschatology India produced.
The Engine of Moral Causation
Karma is the law that no deed evaporates: every act plants its seed, and the harvest is the life — and lives — that follow. From a plain Vedic noun for “ritual action” it grew into the doctrine that drives Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cosmology alike: the moral physics by which the universe keeps its books without a bookkeeper.
Every deed is a seed; the fruit may ripen in this life or a later one — but it ripens.
Karma accrues by thought, speech, and body — the three doors of action the law watches.
Karma can be exhausted by experience — burned like a field of stubble — or bound by attachment like a new seed.
Mokṣa, nirvāṇa: the states beyond karma’s reach — the doctrines’ common horizon.
From the original script to the living URL
कर्म
The name in its original Sanskrit form. Karma (कर्म) is attested in the source tradition — “Deed, action”. Its original diacritics and script distinctions carry the full phonetic and orthographic weight of the source tradition.
karma
The plain karma form is identical to the Unicode restoration. Because this name is already written in Latin letters, no diacritics, stress, or script information were lost — only capitalization differs.
Karma
The Unicode restoration does not need to recover lost marks for Karma. Its value is canonical spelling and consistent cataloguing, not the reconstruction of erased orthography. The domain is readable as-is to both DNS and humanity.
Karma.com
This restoration is written entirely in ASCII letters — no Punycode encoding stands between Karma and the DNS. The domain reads identically to machines and to human eyes.
The attested spelling family of Karma
Karma
Restores कर्म. The full Unicode restoration. karma.com is not in the PuniCodex collection — it is watched for release; if it drops, this temple upgrades to an owned flagship. Attested by MW, Bhagavad Gita.
How Karma was spoken
How Karma travels from ancient script to the modern URL
The lore you have read is the living myth. Extended Lore opens the scholarly vault beneath it: the cult and its material remains, a history of the image, the name after antiquity, a meditation on what the name still means, and the full scholarly apparatus — etymology, orthography, sources.
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