Karma, Caste, and the Problem of Evil

"Karma doctrine transformed the world into a strictly rational, ethically-determined cosmos; it represents the most consistent theodicy ever produced by history." — Max Weber, The Religion of India¹

"These are irrefutable explanations but also unsupportable ones. I cannot see any way in which to study them empirically." — Ian Stevenson, on the rescues offered for retributive karma, 1987²

"Judged by the standard applied by Dr. Ambedkar, every known living faith will probably fail." — M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, July 1936³

Summary

Hinduism's oldest answer to suffering is karma:  every being is born into the body, family and fortune its own past deeds have earned, life after life.  The doctrine is stated in the two earliest Upanishads, which the translator Patrick Olivelle places "in the seventh to sixth centuries bce,"⁴ and the most famous version of it ties good conduct to birth in the three upper classes and bad conduct to birth as a dog, a pig or an outcaste.⁵  This article tests that answer the way the site tests Christianity's:  in the words of its own texts and best defenders, against the objections its critics raise, and then with the same tests turned on the Christian answer.  It then asks what the same texts teach about caste, how they were used, and how Hindu reformers have read them.

Conclusions, stated first.

1. Karma is a real theodicy and a strong one. The great Vedanta teacher Shankara, in the eighth century AD,⁶ answered the charge that God is cruel because he makes "the animals, eminently unhappy" by replying that God, like the rain, only gives what each soul's merit calls for.⁷⁷ Max Weber called karma "the most consistent theodicy ever produced by history," and Peter Berger ranked it "the most rational" of all theodicies.¹⁸ Two philosophers who defend it, Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis, are right that it handles the suffering of children and the victims of disasters more smoothly than the Western theistic answers do.⁹
2. Its strength is bought by placing every answer where no one can check it. The first sin is pushed into a past without a beginning. The offence behind any suffering is one the sufferer cannot remember. The match between crime and penalty is asserted, never measured. Ian Stevenson, who spent his career collecting cases he thought suggested rebirth, found "no evidence" in them for retributive karma and called its defenders' rescues "irrefutable explanations but also unsupportable ones."²² The philosopher Paul Edwards put it more bluntly: "The Law of Karma on the other hand is compatible with anything."¹⁰
3. The beginningless past relocates the question rather than answering it. It explains why this soul has this lot. It does not explain why there is a world of suffering souls at all, a point Leibniz made in 1697 about any endless chain of causes.¹¹ Shankara's own answer to that deeper question is that creation is "mere sport" with no purpose.⁷
4. The classical texts did draw the inference critics fear. The Laws of Manu says that the "mentally retarded, the mute, the blind, and the deaf, as well as those who are deformed" are born so "as a result of the remnants of their past deeds" and are "despised by good people."¹² Hindu defenders such as Arvind Sharma answer that a doctor can say smoking caused a cancer and still treat the patient with care.¹³ That is a fair reply about how karma can be held. It is not a reply to what Manu actually says.
5. The Christian answer passes some of the same tests and fails others. It gives evil a beginning in a good creation and a free fall, and in Jesus' own words its texts deny that a man born blind suffered for his own or his parents' sin, or that eighteen people killed by a falling tower were worse sinners than others.¹⁴¹⁴ That shuts off the victim-blaming that karma invites. But it pays for that with mystery: Job is never told why. And Augustine, the most influential theologian of the Latin West, reasoned from infants' misery to their guilt exactly as karma does: "under a just God no one can be miserable unless he deserves it."¹⁵ Inheriting the results of Adam's sin is a harder case on the memory test than karma, not an easier one.
6. Caste is in the texts. The Purusha Sukta of the Rigveda, in its latest book, has the priest come from the mouth of the sacrificed cosmic Man and the servant from his feet.¹⁶ The Laws of Manu (between the first century BC and the second century AD) says the Shudra "was created by the Self-existent One solely to do slave labour for the Brahmin," bans him from gathering wealth, cuts out his tongue for insulting a twice-born man, and puts the outcastes outside the village.^12121212 The Bhagavad Gita has God say he created the fourfold order and tells each man to keep his own duty.¹⁷¹⁷ Karma supplied the reason birth status was deserved.
7. The reformers are real, and they disagree with one another. The bhakti saints, such as the leatherworker Ravidas, taught that before God a family is "neither high caste nor low caste," but did not try to change the social order.¹⁸¹⁸ Vivekananda called caste "a crystallised social institution."¹⁹ Gandhi condemned untouchability and defended hereditary varna.³ B. R. Ambedkar said the fault lay in the religion itself. His movement burned the Manusmriti on 25 December 1927, and in 1936 he called for "dynamite" to be applied "to the Vedas and the Shastras."²⁰²¹
8. Caste is old and still strong. Genomes show that Indian groups mixed freely until about 1,900 to 4,200 years ago and then stopped.²² In a 2019-2020 survey of 29,999 Indians, 64% said it is very important to stop women in their community from marrying into other castes.²³ Indian Christians identify with castes too, and a third of them say stopping such marriages is very important.²³
9. The same test applied to the Bible's slave laws gives a mixed result. The Law of Moses let Israelites hold foreigners as property "perpetually."¹⁴ American Christians used Noah's curse on Canaan to call slavery God's will, and reformers from Gregory of Nyssa to Frederick Douglass answered them from the same Bible.²⁴²⁵²⁶ Christians behaved no better than Hindus where hereditary servitude paid. The difference is in the texts: no biblical text says a slave or a foreigner was born into that state because of sins in a former life, while the Upanishad, Manu and Shankara's reading of the Gita say exactly that about low birth.

Verdict.  Karma is the most internally tidy answer to suffering any religion has offered, and it is tidy because it cannot be checked.  It explains the distribution of suffering by moving every cause out of sight and every verdict onto the sufferer.  The fallen-creation answer explains less about who suffers and why, and says so.  On caste, the classical texts teach hereditary rank and use karma to justify it.  Many Hindus, from the saints to Gandhi to the framers of India's constitution, reject untouchability, but they do it by setting those texts aside, as Christians who rejected slavery had to set aside the proslavery reading of theirs.

The empirical cases offered for rebirth, children who say they remember past lives, are weighed in Reincarnation and Past-Life Memories.  The age of the Vedas is in How Old Are the Vedas?.  The general Christian problem of evil belongs to The Problem of Evil and Natural Evil and Animal Suffering.

Part 1: What karma teaches, in its own texts

The Upanishads: you become what you do

The word karma means "action."  In the early Upanishads it becomes a law of moral cause and effect that runs across lives.  The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad states it in the voice of the sage Yajnavalkya:  "According as one acts, according as one conducts himself, so does he become. The doer of good becomes good. The doer of evil becomes evil. One becomes virtuous by virtuous action, bad by bad action."⁵  The same passage roots action in desire:  "As is his desire, such is his resolve ; as is his resolve, such the action he performs ; what action (karma) he performs, that he procures for himself."⁵

The Chandogya Upanishad makes the next birth the payment for this one, and spells out what the payment looks like:

Accordingly, those who are of pleasant conduct here — the prospect is, indeed, that they will enter a pleasant womb, either the womb of a Brahman, or the womb of a Kshatriya, or the womb of a Vaisya. But those who are of stinking conduct here — the prospect is, indeed, that they will enter a stinking womb, either the womb of a dog, or the womb of a swine, or the womb of an outcast (candala).⁵

Patrick Olivelle's modern translation renders the same verse with "a woman of the Brahmin, the Ksatriya, or the Vaisya class" and "a dog, a pig, or an outcaste woman."⁴  The two translations agree on the point that matters here.  From its first clear statement, the doctrine of karma placed the social classes on the same moral ladder as the animals.  A good life earns a high birth, and a foul one a low birth, a dog's or an outcaste's.

The Bhagavad Gita: act without craving the fruit

The Bhagavad Gita, a dialogue between the god Krishna and the warrior Arjuna set in the epic Mahabharata, keeps the law of karma and adds two things.  The first is a way out:  act from duty and devotion, not for the fruit, and the act no longer binds.  The second is God.  Krishna says, "I am alike to all beings ; to me none is hateful, none dear. But those who worship me with devotion (dwell) in me, and I too in them."¹⁷  Even "a very ill-conducted man" who worships him "must certainly be deemed to be good."¹⁷  The Gita's teaching on caste duty is taken up in Part 4.

Shankara: why God is not cruel

The Brahma Sutra, a compressed digest of Upanishadic teaching, takes up the problem of evil in three short aphorisms, 2.1.34 to 2.1.36.  Shankara's commentary on them is the classic Hindu theodicy, and it is worth hearing in full because Shankara states the objection more sharply than most critics do.  The objector says God cannot be the world's cause, because:

Some beings, viz. the gods and others, he renders eminently happy ; others, as for instance the animals, eminently unhappy ; to some again, as for instance men, he allots an intermediate position.⁷

And further, "as the infliction of pain and the final destruction of all creatures would form part of his dispensation, he would have to be taxed with great cruelty, a quality abhorred by low people even."⁷

The sutra's answer is that God is not open to the charge "on account of his regarding (merit and demerit)."⁷  Shankara explains it with an image from farming.  The rain god Parjanya waters every field alike, "while the difference between the various species is due to the various potentialities lying hidden in the respective seeds, so the Lord is the common cause of the creation of gods, men, &c., while the differences between these classes of beings are due to the different merit belonging to the individual souls."⁷  The conclusion:  "the circumstance of the creation being unequal is due to the merit and demerit of the living creatures created, and is not a fault for which the Lord is to blame."⁷

The objector then asks the obvious question.  Before the first creation there were no deeds, so the first creation must have been equal, and the inequality has no cause.  Shankara's answer is that there was no first creation:  "the transmigratory world is without beginning. — The objection would be valid if the world had a beginning ; but as it is without beginning, merit and inequality are, like seed and sprout, caused as well as causes, and there is therefore no logical objection to their operation."⁷  If the world had begun, he adds, "we should have to acquiesce in the doctrine of rewards and punishments being allotted, without reference to previous good or bad actions."⁷

Two more points complete Shankara's picture.  Asked why God would create at all, he answers that the Lord's activity "may be supposed to be mere sport, proceeding from his own nature without reference to any purpose."⁷  And all of this belongs to the lower level of truth:  "the scriptural doctrine of creation does not refer to the highest reality; it refers to the apparent world only".⁷  For Shankara's non-dualism, karma, rebirth and the suffering they explain are real only in the world of appearance that ends at liberation.

Ramanuja, the leading teacher of qualified non-dualism, gives the same answer to the same sutras.  The world's inequality depends "on the deeds of the intelligent beings," and without that, "souls are requited for what they have not done, and not requited for what they have done."²⁷²⁷

How the schools differ

Hindu thinkers agree that karma governs rebirth.  They disagree about whether karma needs God.

1. Mimamsa, the school of Vedic ritual, held that a deed bears its own fruit through an unseen force, apurva, with no God needed. The Brahma Sutra records the view of Jaimini, its founder, that "religious merit (is what brings about the fruits of actions)."²⁸
2. Vedanta, following Badarayana, the sutra's author, says the fruit comes from God. Shankara argues that actions "pass away as soon as done, have no power of bringing about results at some future time," and that apurva "is something of non-intelligent nature, comparable to a piece of wood or metal, and as such cannot act unless moved by some intelligent being."²⁸²⁸ His conclusion: "the fruits come from the Lord acting with a view to the deeds done by the souls".²⁸
3. Nyaya, the school of logic, made the same argument into a proof of God. Karma is blind, so a mind must apply it. The Hindu scholar Arvind Sharma reports that the ninth-century Nyaya thinker Vacaspati Mishra reconciled "God's compassion" with "the working of the ‘law’ of karma."²⁹
4. Dvaita, Madhva's dualist school, makes God "the direct particular author of specific results and if they happen to be evil it is entirely because of the soul’s karma." Sharma notes that Dvaita faults the other schools for "making God’s attitude too impersonal (Advaita), or too removed (Visistadvaita), or too general (Nyaya)."²⁹

The difference matters for the problem of evil.  If karma runs without God, as in Mimamsa, Buddhism and Jainism, then karma is not a theodicy at all, because there is no God to defend.  If God runs it, the question returns in a new form.  Sharma, defending the Hindu view, says so himself:  "one is still left with a philosophical problem of evil in relation to God. This becomes clear once the issue is rephrased as follows: How is God to be related to karma?"²⁹  He goes further:  "If the doctrine of karma is accepted as an adequate explanation of the problem of evil then, as it was pointed out earlier, it is philosophically neater to accept atheism as well. For even if God may not cause evil under the doctrine of karma, if we accept the existence of God, then he allows it to exist."²⁹

Modern defenders

Most modern Hindu writers hold karma as a moral law that leaves room for freedom.  The philosopher S. Radhakrishnan, later President of India, put it in an image that is often quoted:  "Life is like a game of bridge. The cards in the game are given to us. We do not select them. They are traced to past Karma but we are free to make any call as we think fit and lead any suit. Only we are limited by the rules of the game."³⁰  Sharma says that for most Hindus karma is "an adequate answer to the problem of evil at the religious level, as distinguished from the philosophical," and that, "notwithstanding the loose ends or frayed edges that may show up when the doctrine is examined microscopically through a philosophical lens, it provides a satisfactory explanation of the problem of evil."²⁹

Western observers have been impressed too.  The German sociologist Max Weber wrote that "Karma doctrine transformed the world into a strictly rational, ethically-determined cosmos; it represents the most consistent theodicy ever produced by history."¹  Peter Berger ranked "the karma-samsara complex" as "the most rational one" of all theodicies:  "every conceivable anomy is integrated within a thoroughly rational, all-embracing interpretation of the universe. Nothing, so to speak, is left out."⁸  Both men judged its consistency, not its truth.  Weber also saw what it was consistent with:  karma and rebirth together "represent the unique Hindu theodicy of the existing social, that is to say, caste system."¹

Part 2: Karma as an answer to suffering, tested

The fullest modern test is a debate in the journal Philosophy East and West.  In 2005 the philosopher Whitley Kaufman asked "whether the doctrine can function as a systematic theodicy, as an explanation of all human suffering in terms of wrongs done in either this or past lives."³¹  He raised objections from memory, from "the lack of proportionality between wrongdoing and the observed suffering in the world, the problem of infinite regress of explanation, and the problem of compatibility of free will with karmic determinism," and concluded that they "provide (it is argued) sufficient reason to doubt whether the doctrine of karma and rebirth can in fact provide a satisfactory theodicy."³¹  Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis replied in 2007 that "all of these objections fail in their stated aim."⁹  Kaufman answered them, and Arvind Sharma added a Hindu voice in 2008.  This part takes the objections one at a time and gives each side's best case.

What karma explains well

Fairness starts with what karma does better than its rivals.  Chadha and Trakakis agree with Kaufman that "on some points, such as the suffering of children, the occurrence of natural disasters, and the possibility of universal salvation, the karma theory appears, initially at least, much more satisfactory than the attempts made to solve the perennial problem of evil by writers working within the mainstream theistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."⁹

They are right on all three.  A theist has to say why a good God lets a newborn die of a birth defect.  Karma has an answer ready:  the soul in that body brought the debt with it.  A theist has to explain why an earthquake kills the kind and spares the cruel.  Karma says the earthquake collected debts the eye cannot see.  And because the wheel turns until every soul is freed, karma need not consign anyone to everlasting loss.  The theory also covers animals, which most Western theodicies leave aside.  Shankara names their misery as part of the charge, and the Laws of Manu makes animal birth the price of sin:  "On account of faults resulting from bodily actions, a man becomes an immobile creature; on account of faults resulting from verbal actions, he becomes a bird or an animal; and on account of faults resulting from mental actions, he becomes a man of the lowest caste."¹²

So karma is not an evasion.  It is a complete account, and that is where the trouble starts.

The regress: answered, or moved?

The oldest objection is the one Shankara himself put:  if every inequality is earned, what earned the first one?  The philosopher Arthur Herman, in a book-length study of the problem of evil in Indian thought, states the Western critics' version.  Somewhere "there must have been a start, a time when I was pure and innocent, a golden age, perhaps, when God first created me, pure and lily-virtuous. Call this assumption the golden-age assumption. It destroys the effectiveness of rebirth as a solution to P.E. for it of necessity drags God back into the picture as a creator or first mover".³²

The Indian answer is to deny the golden age.  "This is precisely what the Indians by and large do," Herman writes, and he defends them:  "The beginningless response to the golden age assumption is a regress response but it is not a vicious regress. It is not vicious for the simple reason that at each stage the nature of existence can be explained by previous existences".³²  The Indian philosopher M. Hiriyanna, quoted by Sharma, puts it more simply.  To ask when a soul first became responsible "is really inadmissible, for it takes for granted that there was a time when the self was without any disposition whatsoever."²⁹

Herman is right that the regress is not vicious in the logician's sense.  Each link is explained by the one before.  But the question a theodicy has to answer is not only "why does this soul have this lot?"  It is also "why is there a world of suffering souls at all, and why does a good God keep it going?"  An endless chain does not answer that question.  Leibniz made the point in 1697, writing about the eternity of the world, not about karma:

Let us suppose that a book of the elements of geometry existed from all eternity and that in succession one copy of it was made from another, it is evident that although we can account for the present book by the book from which it was copied, nevertheless, going back through as many books as we like, we could never reach a complete reason for it, because we can always ask why such books have at all times existed, that is to say, why books at all, and why written in this way.¹¹

Applied to karma, the application being this article's and not Leibniz's:  a beginningless wheel explains why this soul was born blind, by a deed in an earlier life.  It does not explain why there is a wheel of souls being born blind at all.  Shankara saw the question and answered it in the sutras just before the ones on cruelty.  Creation, he said, is "mere sport, proceeding from his own nature without reference to any purpose. For on the ground neither of reason nor of Scripture can we construe any other purpose of the Lord. Nor can his nature be questioned."⁷  That is an honest answer, and it is not a theodicy.  It ends the inquiry by saying God's reasons cannot be asked, which is the same place the book of Job ends (Part 3).

Herman himself notes a second difficulty inside Hindu cosmology.  The world is dissolved and re-created in cycles, and each cycle opens with a golden age.  "How, it might be asked, can you have a dissolution and then a creation without involving yourself in a beginning? If the Kali Yuga will end in violence and suffering because all deserve it, then isn’t the golden age which preceded it a time of “beginning” in some sense of that word?"³²  The cycles themselves are described in Hindu Cosmology and Vedic Science Claims.

Infants and proportion

Karma's answer for a suffering child is that the child's soul is old and owes a debt.  Kaufman's objection is that the debts would have to be enormous and nearly universal.  In his reply to Chadha and Trakakis he summarises what their defence implies, that "People who suffer terribly really must have been horribly sadistic, brutal, and Nazi-like in past lives. But this is just my point: such a claim is highly dubious. Even a superficial knowledge of history and of human nature makes it simply implausible that so many people could have been so evil."³³

The defender can always reply that the debts were built up over many lives, or that this life's suffering repays only part of them.  Paul Edwards, a philosopher and critic of rebirth belief, showed where that leads.  Suppose a decent person dies under a drunk driver.  "Would this disconfirm the principle? Not at all. It only shows that in a previous life he committed evil deeds of which his present suffering is the just punishment."¹⁰  And if his next life is worse still, that only shows his old sins were larger than his present suffering covered.  "Since their theory is compatible with anything, the karmic believers need never give up, but we have already seen that the price paid for this immunity from refutation is very steep: it deprives the theory of any real content."¹⁰

No number can be put on the proportion, and that is the point.  The ledger has two columns.  One column, the suffering, is visible.  The other, the deeds of past lives, is not.  A claim that one column balances the other cannot be priced when only one column can be read.

The memory objection

Human justice tells the offender what he is being punished for.  Kaufman:  "It is, I argued, a basic principle of justice that one should in general be apprised of what one is being punished for and why; indeed, this knowledge would seem essential to the process of moral education. But the karmic system does not provide us this knowledge."³³  His critics, he reports, called this an "unreasonable demand for precise correlations between bad acts in the past and consequent sufferings in the future."  He answers that "the problem is not merely the lack of precise correlations, but of any correlation at all. I am unaware of a single verified historical example of anyone having a memory of one's deeds in a past life presented as explanation for present suffering."³³

The best Hindu reply treats karma as a natural consequence rather than a court sentence.  Sharma's version uses a medical case:  "Chronic smoking causes cancer, so the statement that a patient is now suffering from lung cancer as a result of being a chronic smoker is a statement of fact, which does not make medical science a callous science."¹³  The analogy is apt in one way and fails in another.  It is apt because a natural consequence needs no verdict to be read out.  It fails because the smoker knows he smoked.  The cancer teaches him and teaches others.  A karmic debt from a forgotten life teaches no one, and it cannot be told apart from a debt that was never incurred.

What the evidence for rebirth shows about karma

If anyone could test karma, it would be the researchers who collected cases of children claiming to remember past lives.  Their cases, and the doubts about them, are weighed in Reincarnation and Past-Life Memories.  Here only one finding matters.  Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, who led that research for decades and believed some cases suggested rebirth, looked for signs that conduct in one life shaped circumstances in the next.  He wrote:  "The foregoing cases and a few others offer the only hints I have found for the working of a process such as retributive karma. Even these cases, however, provide no evidence for such a process."²  He listed the ways a believer could save the doctrine:  a criminal's hidden virtue, a saint's secret vices, or penalties delayed "many lifetimes."  His judgment:  "These are irrefutable explanations but also unsupportable ones. I cannot see any way in which to study them empirically."²

This is a sympathetic witness.  Stevenson thought rebirth was a live hypothesis, and he still found no trace of moral bookkeeping in the cases that were supposed to show it.

Moral hazard: what the texts say

The sharpest objection is moral.  If all suffering is deserved, why help?  Kaufman stated it at the end of his reply:

It entails that there is no such thing as innocent suffering, that everyone gets just what he deserves. But then there can be no moral obligation to help others in distress, to protect, to rescue, perform acts of charity, or even to feel compassion for a sufferer.¹³

"In contrast," Kaufman concluded, "karma elevates the "blame the victim" idea into a systematic principle."¹³  Edwards had argued the same:  "It is not only not our duty to help him but it would seem on karmic principles that it is our duty not to help him."¹⁰

Defenders reply that this is a misuse, not the doctrine.  Sharma asks "whether the doctrine of karma and rebirth can be interpreted callously by those who might wish to do so, or whether it is a callous doctrine, in the sense depicted in the passage, by and of itself."¹³  His answer is that good doctors hold the patient "responsible for her condition" and still "do what they can to treat it," and that "the doctrine of karma and rebirth, as understood within the Indic tradition, encompasses both these dimensions of fact and value."¹³  Even Edwards records that when Theosophists told Annie Besant they could not help a man because his suffering was his karma, "She thought them cruel and wrongheaded".¹⁰  Edwards's examples of callousness come from Western Theosophists, not from Hindu authorities, and it would be unfair to treat them as typical Hindu teaching.

Sharma's question is the right one, and it can be answered from the classical texts.  The doctrine does not compel callousness.  A Hindu can hold that helping others is itself good karma, and millions do.  But the founding texts did draw the inference from suffering to worth.  The Laws of Manu lists the bodily marks of past sins, "A man who steals gold gets rotten nails; a man who drinks liquor, black teeth; the murderer of a Brahmin, consumption", and then concludes:  "In this way, as a result of the remnants of their past deeds, are born individuals despised by good people: the mentally retarded, the mute, the blind, and the deaf, as well as those who are deformed."¹²  The Chandogya Upanishad puts the outcaste beside the dog and the pig as the birth earned by "stinking conduct."⁵  And when the Gita says that "even those who are of sinful births women, Vaisyas, and Sudras likewise," can reach the goal, its translator notes that Shankara took the women, merchants and servants as examples of sinful birth, "birth resulting from sins," while the later commentator Shridhara did not.¹⁷

So the honest verdict on the moral-hazard objection is split.  It is wrong as a claim about what every believer must do.  It is right as a description of what the classical lawgivers and Shankara actually concluded.

Is karma even a theodicy?

Chadha and Trakakis make one more point.  A theodicy defends a good God, and karma came from traditions that often had none.  "It would be more appropriate, therefore, to speak of karma as an explanatory account of the existence of evil and suffering, rather than as a theodicy or a moral justification for the actions of a benevolent God."⁹  This is a fair distinction, and it cuts in two directions.  If karma is a theodicy, Sharma's own remark applies:  with karma in place, "it is philosophically neater to accept atheism as well."²⁹  If it is instead an explanatory account, a claim about how the world works, then it must be judged as an explanation, by its evidence.  Stevenson's result is that it has none, and Edwards's is that it cannot have any.

Part 3: The fallen-creation answer on the same tests

The series rule for these articles is that a test applied to another religion must be applied to Christianity too.  So this part runs the Christian answer through the same objections.  It does not rebuild the Christian theodicy, which belongs to The Problem of Evil and Natural Evil and Animal Suffering.  The biblical case for a historical Adam and for what the curse did and did not change is argued in Adam, the Fall, and Death and Death Before the Fall.

What the Christian account claims

The account has four parts.  God made a good world with a beginning.  The first humans chose against him, and the ground was "cursed because of you."¹⁴  Paul says that "sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all people because all sinned," and that "the creation was subjected to futility—not willingly but because of God who subjected it—in hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay."¹⁴¹⁴  The story ends when God "will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more."¹⁴

Where it does better

It gives evil a beginning.  The fallen-creation account does not need an endless chain.  Evil starts with a free creature's choice in a world that began good.  That answers Herman's "golden age" problem directly:  there was a golden age, and it was lost.  But the question does not vanish.  It moves to "why did God make creatures who could fall, and why did he let the fall spread to the whole creation?"  The free-will answers to that are serious, and they are also contested.  They are argued in The Problem of Evil.  Both accounts end their regress somewhere.  Karma ends it in a beginningless past and in Shankara's "mere sport."⁷  The Christian account ends it in a decision by God to make free creatures.

It refuses to read guilt off suffering.  This is the largest difference, and it is in the texts, not only in later teaching.  When Jesus' disciples met a man blind from birth they asked the karmic question:  "Rabbi, who committed the sin that caused him to be born blind, this man or his parents?"  Jesus answered:  "Neither this man nor his parents sinned".¹⁴  The disciples' question suggests that some Jews of the first century thought a person could sin before birth.  Jesus did not answer by placing the sin earlier.  He denied it.  When people told him of Galileans killed by Pilate, he asked, "Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered these things? No, I tell you!"  He said the same of "those eighteen who were killed when the tower in Siloam fell on them."¹⁴  The book of Job is built on the same denial.  Job's friend Eliphaz states the karmic principle:  "Who, being innocent, ever perished? And where were upright people ever destroyed? Even as I have seen, those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble reap the same."¹⁴  At the end God tells him, "My anger is stirred up against you and your two friends because you have not spoken about me what is right, as my servant Job has."¹⁴

So it cannot turn into a reason not to help.  A Christian who sees a blind man has been told in advance that the blindness is not a verdict.  The texts also forbid treating people by rank:  "do not show prejudice if you possess faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ."¹⁴

Where it does no better, or worse

It does not say why this person suffers.  Karma answers the distribution question.  The Christian account declines to.  Job is never told the reason.  Jesus says the blind man was born blind "so that the acts of God may be revealed through what happens to him,"¹⁴ which gives a purpose but no account of why him and not another.  A skeptic is right that, on this point, karma explains more.

It has its own inheritance problem.  On the Christian account infants suffer and die because of a sin committed by someone else, Adam, long before they were born.  Measured by Kaufman's memory test, that is worse than karma, not better.  Karma at least says the debt is the sufferer's own.  The Bible itself states the principle of personal responsibility in the law and the prophets:  "A son will not suffer for his father’s iniquity, and a father will not suffer for his son’s iniquity."¹⁴  It also has God "responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children to the third and fourth generations of those who reject me."¹⁴  Christians reconcile these by distinguishing guilt from consequence.  The consequences of a parent's sin can fall on a child without the child being guilty, as a drunk driver's children suffer for his crash.  That distinction is reasonable, and it is the same distinction Sharma draws between fact and value.  It does not remove the hard case.

Augustine drew the karmic inference.  The most influential theologian of the Latin West argued, against Julian of Eclanum, that the suffering of infants proves their guilt, because "Neque enim sub Deo iusto miser esse quisquam, nisi mereatur, potest," "for under a just God no one can be miserable unless he deserves it."¹⁵  (The translation is this article's.)  He taught that infants who die unbaptized suffer "the mildest punishment of all" for "the original sin they brought with them."³⁴  That is the same move karma makes, with Adam's sin in place of a past life.  When pressed on why one infant is baptized and saved and another is not, Augustine ended where Shankara did:  "Sed quare ille potius quam ille: Inscrutabilia sunt iudicia Dei," "But why this one rather than that one?  The judgments of God are inscrutable."¹⁵  A Christian who rejects Augustine's harshness here, as many have, should say so plainly.  The Christian tradition contains the karmic inference, even though the Gospels reject it.

Animals.  Karma can call an animal's pain deserved.  The Christian account cannot.  C. S. Lewis admitted it:  "The problem of animal suffering is appalling; not because the animals are so numerous ... but because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it."³⁵  Augustine said the same sixteen centuries earlier.  Beasts harm one another, he wrote, though "nec peccata ulla sunt, ut vindicta ista dicatur":  they have no sins for their suffering to be called a punishment.³⁶  Young-earth Christians hold that animal death and suffering came with the curse, which is the most natural reading of Genesis and Romans 8 but not a stated one, as Death Before the Fall shows.  Even on that reading the animal suffers because the creation was cursed, not because the animal earned it.  Here karma is more complete, at the price of making every suffering creature a convict.

Hell.  Most Hindu schools hope for the release of every soul in the end.  Classical Christianity teaches that some will be lost for ever.  Chadha and Trakakis list "the possibility of universal salvation" among karma's advantages.⁹  That is a real cost on the Christian side, taken up in Hell and Penal Substitution as Moral Objections.

The two answers side by side

Neither answer can be confirmed by observation.  Karma explains more and blames the sufferer.  The Christian answer explains less and forbids the blame.  A reader who wants a theory that accounts for every case will prefer karma.  A reader who thinks an account of suffering must not make the sufferer the culprit will prefer the Christian one.  The comparison does not prove Christianity true.  It shows that karma's chief advantage, its completeness, is bought with the two things critics most object to:  claims no one can check, and a verdict on every victim.

Part 4: Caste in the texts

Two words are translated "caste."  Varna, "colour" or "class," names the four orders of the scriptures:  Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (farmers and merchants) and Shudras (servants).  Jati, "birth," names the thousands of endogamous groups people actually belong to.  Below and outside the four varnas were the groups later called untouchable, today's Dalits.  The texts below are about varna and the outcastes.  The genetics in Part 6 is about jati.

The Purusha Sukta

The oldest text naming the four varnas is hymn 90 of the tenth book of the Rigveda, the hymn of Purusha, the cosmic Man whom the gods sacrifice to make the world.  Verse 12, in Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's 1981 translation:

His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior, his thighs the People, and from his feet the Servants were born.¹⁶

Ralph Griffith's older translation has "The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rājanya made. His thighs became the Vaiśya, from his feet the Śūdra was produced."³⁷

The hymn is late.  O'Flaherty writes that the idea of cosmic dismemberment is "quite ancient; yet the fact that this is one of the latest hymns in the Rig Veda is evident from its reference to the three Vedas (v. 9) and to the four social classes or varnas (v. 12, the first time that this concept appears in Indian civilization), as well as from its generally monistic worldview."¹⁶  Part of that argument is circular, since the varna verse is one reason the hymn is called late.  But the lateness of the tenth book as a whole does not depend on this hymn, and both sides of the dating debate accept it.  Shrikant Talageri, a leading writer for an Indian origin of the Vedic people, quotes Michael Witzel calling Book 10 "the great appendix to the Ṛgveda" and agrees that "the non-family books (1, 8-10) represent a later stage of composition and compilation."³⁸  The geneticists who dated Indian endogamy noted the same thing:  "The four-class (varna) system, comprised of Brahmanas, Ksatriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras, is mentioned only in the part of the Rig Veda that was likely to have been composed later (the appendix: book 10)."²²  The absolute dates of the hymns are argued in How Old Are the Vedas?.

The hymn itself is a picture of an ordered cosmos, not a law code.  Declan Quigley, writing on caste in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, notes that "there is nothing here about lineage or pedigree".³⁹  But he also notes what the image does:  "It is no accident that the concept of varna is inextricably tied to a sacrificial theory of human society."³⁹  The body has a top and a bottom, and later texts built on that.

The law books

The Manava Dharmashastra, or Laws of Manu, is the most famous of the Hindu law books.  Olivelle dates it "between the first century BCE and the second century CE."¹²  It opens with the Purusha image:  "For the growth of these worlds, moreover, he produced from his mouth, arms, thighs, and feet, the Brahmin, the Ksatriya, the Vaisya, and the Śūdra."¹²  It then assigns duties.  In Georg Bühler's 1886 translation:  "One occupation only the lord prescribed to the Sudra, to serve meekly even these (other) three castes."⁴⁰

The penalties follow the same order.  All quotations below are Olivelle's unless marked.

1. Insult. "If a once-born man hurls grossly abusive words at twice-born men, his tongue shall be cut off, for he originated from the lowest part. If he invokes their names and castes with disdain, a red-hot iron nail ten fingers long should be driven into his mouth. If he arrogantly gives instruction on the Law to Brahmins, the king should pour hot oil into his mouth and ears."¹² "The lowest part" is the feet of the Purusha.
2. The Brahmin's immunity. Of the ten places on the body where punishment may be inflicted, "They are applicable to the three classes; a Brahmin shall depart unscathed."¹² Bühler's Manu 8.380: "Let him never slay a Brahmana, though he have committed all (possible) crimes".⁴⁰
3. Servitude by nature. "He may, however, make a Śūdra, whether he is bought or not, do slave labour; for the Śūdra was created by the Self-existent One solely to do slave labour for the Brahmin. Even when he is released by his master, a Śūdra is not freed from his slave status; for that is innate in him and who can remove it from him?"¹²
4. Property. "Even a capable Śūdra must not accumulate wealth; for when a Śūdra becomes wealthy, he harasses Brahmins."¹²
5. The outcastes. "Candalas and Svapacas, however, must live outside the village and they should be made Apapatras. Their property consists of dogs and donkeys, their garments are the clothes of the dead; they eat in broken vessels; their ornaments are of iron; and they constantly roam about."¹²

Another law book, the Gautama Dharmasutra, has the penalty most often quoted against Manu.  In Bühler's translation, a Shudra who "listens intentionally to (a recitation of) the Veda, his ears shall be filled with (molten) tin or lac. If he recites (Vedic texts), his tongue shall be cut out. If he remembers them, his body shall be split in twain."⁴¹  Ambedkar and his biographer both put the molten metal in Manu.²⁰²¹  It is in Gautama.  Manu's nearest verse is the hot oil for a Shudra who presumes to teach Brahmins.  The correction does not soften the case;  it only puts the penalty in the right book.

Are these law books scripture?  They are smriti, "remembered" tradition, not shruti, the revealed Veda, and Hindus have always disagreed about how far they bind.  Gandhi said that "The Smritis for instance contain much that can never be accepted as the word of God."³  That is a real Hindu position and it should be stated.  But it is a reformer's position.  For most of two thousand years Manu was, in the words of Ambedkar's biographer, "the most revered work of the caste Hindus, and the most hated work by the Depressed Classes".²⁰

The Gita on one's own duty

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, speaking as God, says:  "The fourfold division of castes was created by me according to the apportionment of qualities and duties."¹⁷  It tells each to keep to his own:  "One's own duty, though defective, is better than another's duty well performed. Death in (performing) one's own duty is preferable ; the (performance of the) duty of others is dangerous."¹⁷  In its last chapter it lists the duties by class, ending, "And the natural duty of Sudras, too, consists in service. (Every) man intent on his own respective duties obtains perfection."¹⁷  "One should not abandon a natural duty though tainted with evil".¹⁷

The Gita can be read two ways.  The words "qualities and duties" (guna and karma) let reformers say that varna follows character and work, not birth.  Swami Dayananda, the founder of the Arya Samaj, said exactly that and proposed that varna "should not be hereditary, but should be decided by public examination at the age of 16 for girls and 25 for boys."⁴²  The older commentators read it by birth.  Shankara's gloss on 9.32, noted above, counts women, merchants and servants as examples of "birth resulting from sins."¹⁷

How karma made birth deserved

The texts join the two ideas of this article.  Karma explains why a soul is born where it is.  Caste says where it is matters.  Together they make the social order a moral order.  The Chandogya Upanishad sends good souls to Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya wombs and bad ones to dogs, pigs and outcastes.⁵  Manu makes "a man of the lowest caste" the rebirth earned by sins of the mind, and lists Shudras with "Elephants, horses, ... despised foreigners, lions, tigers, and boars" as "the middle course related to Darkness."¹²¹²  If birth is earned, then high birth is a reward and low birth a penalty.  That is what Weber meant when he called karma and rebirth "the unique Hindu theodicy of the existing social, that is to say, caste system."¹

Part 5: The reformers, in their own words

Hindus have argued against caste for as long as the texts above have existed.  The reformers below do not agree with each other.  Their disagreement is the most useful evidence on whether caste belongs to Hinduism.

The bhakti saints

The devotional poets of medieval India, the bhakti saints, included men from the bottom of the order:  Ravidas the leatherworker, Kabir the weaver, Cokhamela the Mahar.  John Stratton Hawley, who with Mark Juergensmeyer translated their songs, writes of Ravidas that "If one means by Hinduism the religious system whose central rituals are entrusted to Brahmins, whose central institutions require a set of reciprocal but unequal social relationships ... then Ravidas was not really a Hindu. As he saw it, there was nothing fundamental about the institutions of caste."¹⁸  Ravidas mocked the purity rules:  "Can I offer milk?" he asked, and answered that "The calf has dirtied it in sucking its mother’s teat."¹⁸  And he sang:  "A family that has a true follower of the Lord / Is neither high caste nor low caste, lordly or poor."¹⁸

Hawley is careful about the limits.  Ravidas "does not propose any religious legislation that would change the current social order."  His vision "seems to be not so much that God desires to reform society as that he transcends it utterly, and that in the light of the experience of sharing in God, all social distinctions lose their importance."¹⁸  The people of Ravidas's own community in Benares complain that the saints' "ecumenical spirit is almost never extended from the realm of bhakti hagiography into the real world."¹⁸  The bhakti saints made caste irrelevant to salvation.  They did not abolish it.

Swami Vivekananda

Vivekananda (1863-1902), the monk who brought Vedanta to the West, wrote from America in 1893 the sentence his followers still quote:  "No religion on earth preaches the dignity of humanity in such a lofty strain as Hinduism, and no religion on earth treads upon the necks of the poor and the low in such a fashion as Hinduism."  He blamed not the religion but "the Pharisees and Sadducees in Hinduism, hypocrites, who invent all sorts of engines of tyranny".¹⁹  Caste, he said, is social:  "everyone made the mistake of holding caste to be a religious institution and tried to pull down religion and caste all together, and failed. But in spite of all the ravings of the priests, caste is simply a crystallised social institution, which after doing its service is now filling the atmosphere of India with its stench".¹⁹  In 1898 he said of untouchability:  "That is not Hinduism: it is in none of our books; it is an unorthodox superstition which has interfered with national efficiency all along the line."¹⁹

The claim that untouchability is "in none of our books" cannot stand against Manu 10.51 or Gautama 12.4.  Vivekananda's position makes sense only if those books are not counted.  That is a choice about which texts bind, and it is a legitimate Hindu choice, but it should be named as one.

Gandhi

Gandhi fought untouchability for most of his life and defended varna.  When B. R. Ambedkar's speech Annihilation of Caste was published in 1936, Gandhi answered it in his paper Harijan:

Caste has nothing to do with religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know and do not need to know for the satisfaction of my spiritual hunger. But I do know that it is harmful both to spiritual and national growth. Varna and Ashrama are institutions which have nothing to do with castes. The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties.³

"The callings of a Brahmin—spiritual teacher—and a scavenger are equal," he wrote, and "there is nothing in the law of Varna to warrant a belief in untouchability."³³  He dismissed many of Ambedkar's texts:  "The Smritis for instance contain much that can never be accepted as the word of God."  His test for scripture was that "Nothing can be accepted as the word of God which cannot be tested by reason or be capable of being spiritually experienced."³  And he gave a rule for judging any religion:  "A religion has to be judged not by its worst specimens but by the best it might have produced."³

Gandhi's position abolished untouchability while keeping hereditary occupation, "the ancestral calling."  To the people at the bottom, that kept the order and only removed its cruelest rule.

B. R. Ambedkar

Bhimrao Ambedkar was born an untouchable and rose to chair the committee that drafted India's constitution.²⁰  He drew the opposite conclusion from Gandhi.  His speech Annihilation of Caste, written in 1936 for a Hindu reform society in Lahore, the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, whose conference was cancelled because its committee found the address "unacceptable,"³ says:

Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire which prevents the Hindus from co-mingling and which has, therefore, to be pulled down. Caste is a notion, it is a state of the mind.²¹

He did not blame Hindus for observing it.  "They observe Caste because they are deeply religious. People are not wrong in observing Caste. In my view, what is wrong is their religion, which has inculcated this notion of Caste."  The remedy:  "The real remedy is to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the Shastras."²¹  And more bluntly:  "you have got to apply the dynamite to the Vedas and the Shastras, which deny any part to reason, to Vedas and Shastras, which deny any part to morality. You must destroy the Religion of the Shrutis and the Smritis. Nothing else will avail."²¹

He had already acted on it.  On 25 December 1927, at a conference at Mahad in western India, his movement resolved that the Manusmriti "be publicly burnt."  "At nine o’clock that night the Manusmriti was placed on a pyre, in a specially dug pit, in front of the pandal, and was ceremoniously burnt".²⁰²⁰  He later explained it was a protest against a symbol, not a rejection of every line:  "It is not that all the parts of the Manusmriti are condemnable ... We made a bonfire of it because we view it as a symbol of injustice under which we have been crushed across centuries."²⁰  In 1935 at Yeola he vowed, "I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu."²⁰  On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur he became a Buddhist, with a great crowd of his followers.²⁰

The constitution his committee drafted says in Article 17:  "“Untouchability” is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of “Untouchability” shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law."⁴³

Is caste part of Hinduism?

Four answers are on offer, each from a serious source.

1. Caste is social custom, not religion. Vivekananda and Gandhi said this. Many Hindus today agree.
2. Varna is religious but should follow merit, not birth. Dayananda proposed this, and Dermot Killingley notes that "the idea of four varnas, based on merit and not birth, has become generally accepted in modern Hindu discourse."⁴²
3. Caste is religious and must be destroyed with its texts. Ambedkar said this, and left.
4. Caste in its modern form is a colonial product. The historian Nicholas Dirks argued in 2001 that "caste (again, as we know it today) is a modern phenomenon, that it is, specifically, the product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule." He added at once: "By this I do not mean to imply that it was simply invented by the too clever British".⁴⁴

The evidence settles part of this.  The texts in Part 4 show that hereditary rank, servitude, unequal punishment and the exclusion of outcastes were taught by authoritative Hindu writings long before any European arrived.  The genetics in Part 6 shows that marriage within closed groups is about two thousand years old.  Answer 4 is true only in Dirks's narrow sense, that British rule hardened and systematised a much older order.  Answers 1 and 2 are positions about which texts a Hindu should accept, not descriptions of what the classical texts say.  A Hindu is free to hold them, as Vivekananda and Gandhi did.  But the reason they had to argue so hard is that the tradition they inherited said otherwise.

Part 6: Caste today

What Indians say

The largest recent survey is the Pew Research Center's Religion in India:  Tolerance and Segregation, which interviewed 29,999 adults face to face between November 2019 and March 2020.²³  Its main findings on caste:

1. Nearly everyone has a caste, whatever the religion. "today Indians nearly universally identify with a caste, regardless of whether they are Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist or Jain." A quarter of adults say they belong to a Scheduled Caste, the Dalits, 9% to a Scheduled Tribe and 35% to the Other Backward Classes.²³ About 30% are "General Category," which "includes higher castes such as Brahmins (4%)".²³
2. Few see widespread discrimination, but many Dalits report it. "Just one-in-five Indians say there is a lot of discrimination against members of SCs".²³ Among Dalits in the South, 30% say they personally faced caste discrimination in the past year, and 38% in the Northeast.²³
3. Social life follows caste. Most Indians of other castes "would be willing to have someone belonging to a Scheduled Caste as a neighbor (72%). But a similarly large majority of Indians overall (70%) say that most or all of their close friends share their caste."²³
4. Marriage follows caste most of all. "Overall, 64% of Indians say it is very important to stop women in their community from marrying into other castes, and about the same share (62%) say it is very important to stop men in their community from marrying into other castes." Among Hindus the figures are 64% and 63%; among Muslims 74% and 70%; among Christians 37% and 36%; among college graduates, 50% and 48%.²³ Pew adds that "nearly identical shares of Dalits and members of General Category castes say stopping inter-caste marriages is very important."²³
5. Christians are not exempt. A third of Indian Christians, 33%, identify as Scheduled Caste and 24% as Scheduled Tribe.²³ Those figures show that Indian Christianity grew mostly among low-caste and tribal communities, and that caste came into the churches with them. Christians are the group least committed to caste endogamy, but a third of them still call stopping inter-caste marriage very important.
6. Belief in karma crosses religions too. "a majority of Hindus in India (77%) believe in karma, but an identical percentage of Muslims do, too," and so do 54% of Indian Christians.²³²³

What the genes say

Indian genomes keep a record of when marriage across groups stopped.  David Reich of Harvard and his Indian colleagues found in 2009 that many Indian groups descend from small founding populations that then stayed closed.  "Six Indo-European and Dravidian speaking groups have evidence of founder events dating to more than 30 generations ago (Figure S2), including the Vysya at more than 100 generations ago. Strong endogamy must have applied since then (average gene flow less than 1 in 30 per generation) to prevent the genetic signatures of founder events from being erased by gene flow."⁴⁵  They addressed the colonial thesis directly:  "Some historians have argued that “caste” in modern India is an “invention” of colonialism in the sense that it became more rigid under colonial rule. However, our results suggest that many current distinctions among groups are ancient and that strong endogamy must have shaped marriage patterns in India for thousands of years".⁴⁵

Priya Moorjani and colleagues dated the end of mixing in 2013.  Using 73 groups, they found "major mixture between populations in India that occurred 1,900–4,200 years BP," after which India shifted "from a region where major mixture between groups was common and affected even isolated tribes such as the Palliyar and Bhil to a region in which mixture was rare."²²  They note that "The shift from widespread mixture to strict endogamy that we document is mirrored in ancient Indian texts."²²

Analabha Basu and colleagues narrowed the date for the upper castes in 2016.  They found that "all upper-caste populations, except MPB from Northeast India, started to practice endogamy about 70 generations ago," which they put at "about 1,575 y ago (assuming 22.5 y to a generation)," in "the latter half of the period when the Gupta emperors ruled large tracts of India (Gupta Empire, 319–550 CE)."⁴⁶  The year depends on the generation length.  At the 29 years per generation that is common in such studies, the same 70 generations come to about 2,030 years, which lands near the time of Manu.⁴⁷  Basu's team links the change to the "strictures laid down in Dharmaśāstra".⁴⁶  That link is a reasonable reading of the timing, not something the genes can show.

An outside eyewitness confirms the picture from the same centuries.  The Chinese monk Faxian, who travelled in India from AD 399 to 414, wrote of the Gangetic kingdoms that "The only exception is that of the Chandalas. That is the name for those who are (held to be) wicked men, and live apart from others. When they enter the gate of a city or a market-place, they strike a piece of wood to make themselves known, so that men know and avoid them, and do not come into contact with them."⁴⁸  That is untouchability in practice, described by a foreigner fourteen centuries before British rule.

So the genetic, textual and travel records agree.  Caste endogamy and untouchability are about two thousand years old.  They grew up in the same centuries as the law books that taught them, and they outlasted every reform movement that came after.

Part 7: The same test applied to the Bible and slavery

The rule for this series is that a test used on another religion's texts must be used on the Bible.  The test applied to caste above has three parts:  what the text says, how it was used, and how reformers read it.  Christianity's nearest case is slavery.  Eric's published article Ancient Israel:  Slavery, Servanthood, and Social Welfare argues that Israelite servitude worked mainly as debt relief with strong protections, "though the system still permitted ownership and unequal status."  The Christian record after the Bible belongs to Christianity, Slavery, and Human Rights.  Here only the comparison is drawn.

What the text says.  The Law of Moses allowed Israelites to buy foreigners:  "they may become your property. You may give them as an inheritance to your children after you to possess as property. You may enslave them perpetually. However, as for your brothers the Israelites, no man may rule over his brother harshly."¹⁴  It punished a master whose slave died under the rod, but not one whose slave survived "one or two days ... for he has suffered the loss."¹⁴  The New Testament told slaves to obey their masters and did not command masters to free them.¹⁴  It also told Philemon to take back his runaway "no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, as a dear brother," and declared that in Christ "there is neither slave nor free."¹⁴¹⁴  So the Bible, like the Hindu law books, permits hereditary servitude for some people and does not abolish it.

How it was used.  American Christians used these texts to defend chattel slavery.  Thornton Stringfellow, D. D., wrote in the fourth edition of his Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery, published at Richmond in 1856:  "The first recorded language which was ever uttered in relation to slavery, is the inspired language of Noah. In God's stead he says," and quoted "Cursed be Canaan."²⁵  Of the abolitionists he wrote that their sentiments "would hold God himself in abhorrence, if he were to give such laws his sanction; but he has given them his sanction; therefore, they must be in harmony with his moral character."²⁵  "It is a Bible question," he insisted, and "I have placed before my reader what is in the Bible, to prove that slavery has the sanction of God, and is not sinful."²⁵  In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention admitted that "Many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves, and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery."⁴⁹  On the "how was it used" test, the Christian record in the American South is no better than the Hindu record in India.

How reformers read it.  Christianity, like Hinduism, produced reformers who argued from inside their own scriptures.  In the fourth century Gregory of Nyssa preached on a verse where the Preacher boasts of buying slaves:  "What are you saying? You condemn man who is free and autonomous to servitude, and you contradict God by perverting the natural law."  Since humans are made in God's likeness, "who is the person who sells and buys? Only God can do this".²⁶  Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery, wrote in 1845:  "between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference".  "I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."²⁴  Douglass's distinction is the same one Vivekananda drew between Hinduism and its "Pharisees and Sadducees."

Where the cases differ.  Three differences are in the texts themselves.

1. No biblical text says the servant deserved his birth. The Torah's foreign slave is a foreigner, not a sinner being repaid. The Upanishad, by contrast, says low birth is earned by "stinking conduct," Manu says the Shudra's servitude "is innate in him," and Shankara read "sinful births" in the Gita as "birth resulting from sins."¹⁷⁵¹² The Hindu texts give hereditary rank a moral and cosmic warrant. The biblical texts give servitude an economic and national one.
2. The one biblical curse that was read as a birth verdict had to be moved to fit. Genesis 9:25 reads "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves he will be to his brothers."¹⁴ It names Canaan, not Africa. To make it a curse on Black Africans, the proslavery writer Josiah Priest had to claim that the English "cursed Canaan" should read "cursed Ham," on the strength of an Arabic version he said was "of equal authority with the Hebrew."⁵⁰ The caste texts needed no such change: the Purusha hymn, Manu and the Chandogya name the classes themselves.
3. The reform readings rest on different kinds of texts. Christian abolitionists could point to the creation of every human "in the image of God" and to Paul's "neither slave nor free."¹⁴¹⁴ Hindu reformers had the bhakti verses and the Gita's "I am alike to all beings,"¹⁷ but they also had to set aside the Gita's "fourfold division of castes was created by me" or reinterpret it, and they had to reject Manu as Gandhi did. Both sets of reformers chose some texts over others. The Christian reformers' texts were the ones about human nature and the gospel. The Hindu reformers' texts were about salvation, while the texts about society said the opposite.

Gandhi's own rule applies both ways:  "A religion has to be judged not by its worst specimens but by the best it might have produced."³  By that rule Christianity is not judged by Stringfellow, and Hinduism is not judged by those who enforced untouchability.  But the rule judges behaviour, and this article's question is also about texts.  On the texts, the difference stands:  karma made low birth a verdict on the soul, and the Bible never did.

Objections and responses

1. "Karma is not punishment. It is a natural law, like gravity, so objections about memory and justice miss the point." This is the best Hindu reply, made by Sharma and by Chadha and Trakakis.⁹¹³ It is a fair correction of critics who picture a heavenly court. But it moves karma from ethics to natural science, and there it needs evidence. The one research programme that looked for it found none, by the account of its own leader.² And the classical sources do not speak of natural law only. The Brahma Sutra and Shankara have God dispense the fruit, and Manu speaks of sin, guilt and the despised.²⁸¹²
2. "A beginningless chain is not a vicious regress." Agreed. Herman is right that each link is explained.³² The objection is not that the chain is incoherent. It is that the chain explains the parts and not the whole, as Leibniz showed for any eternal series, and that Shankara's own answer for the whole is that God's activity is "mere sport."⁷¹¹
3. "Christianity punishes infants for Adam's sin. That is worse than karma." On the memory test, yes, and this article says so in Part 3. Augustine drew exactly the inference karma draws.¹⁵ The Christian reply is that the Gospels deny the inference from suffering to personal guilt, and that consequence is not the same as guilt. That reply rejects Augustine on this point. It does not make the hard case easy.
4. "Hindus do not follow Manu. Quoting it is like quoting Leviticus against Christians." Many Hindus do reject Manu, as Gandhi did.³ But the comparison with Leviticus cuts the other way. Christians read Leviticus as superseded by the New Testament, and their own scriptures say so. The Hindu reformers had no later scripture that overturned Manu; they had to argue that parts of the tradition were inauthentic. And the karma-caste link is not only in Manu. It is in the Chandogya Upanishad and in Shankara's reading of the Gita.¹⁷⁵ For most of two thousand years Manu was, in Keer's words, "the most revered work of the caste Hindus".²⁰
5. "Caste as a rigid system was a British creation." Dirks, the main scholar cited for this, explicitly denies that caste "was simply invented by the too clever British".⁴⁴ The genes show strong endogamy "for thousands of years," and Faxian saw untouchables striking wood to warn others away about AD 400.⁴⁸⁴⁵ British rule may have hardened caste and turned it into census categories. It did not create it.
6. "The Bible condoned slavery too, so this is a double standard." Part 7 grants the Christian record its full weight: the Torah permitted perpetual servitude of foreigners, and Christians used the Bible to defend American slavery.²⁵¹⁴ The remaining difference is about what the texts claim. No biblical text says a slave deserved his birth because of sins in a former life. The Hindu texts quoted here say that about low birth.
7. "The Christian answer is just 'mystery.' That explains nothing." It explains less, and the article says so. But karma's explanation of the hard cases also ends in mystery, at a different place: past lives no one can examine, and a creation that is God's "sport."⁷ Augustine and Shankara both end by calling God's reasons beyond inquiry.¹⁵ The difference is what each claims before it reaches the mystery. Karma claims to know the sufferer is guilty. The Gospels claim to know he is not necessarily so.
8. "Karma makes people responsible for their lives. Christian grace lets them off." Stevenson made this point himself, listing Christian "escapes ranging from the idea of predestination to that of atonement for all our sins by Christ’s death on the Cross."² It is a fair point about motive and deserves a fuller answer than this article can give. But Stevenson also noted the reverse: a believer "may apply the doctrine of karma as a means of evading responsibility instead of accepting it; by attributing a current misfortune to misconduct on the part of a remote predecessor personality, one can avoid a need for reform of one’s present behavior."²
9. "Indian Christians practise caste too, so caste is Indian culture, not Hindu religion." The Pew data support the first half: caste crosses every religion in India.²³ But a practice can be cultural and religiously grounded at the same time. Christians who keep caste act against their own texts, such as James's warning against seating the poor on the floor.¹⁴ Hindus who keep caste can cite their texts in support. That is the difference the reformers themselves fought over.
10. "Bhakti shows that Hinduism at its heart is egalitarian." Bhakti made caste irrelevant to salvation, and that matters. But Hawley, who admires the saints, notes that Ravidas "does not propose any religious legislation that would change the current social order."¹⁸ The Gita that says "I am alike to all beings" also says "The fourfold division of castes was created by me."¹⁷¹⁷ Both are in the tradition.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The central journal papers were not read in full. Kaufman's 2005 paper, Chadha and Trakakis's 2007 reply, and Kaufman's 2007 rejoinder sit behind paywalls. Their arguments were read through the publisher's opening pages and Sharma's 2008 quotation of Kaufman. The individual replies Chadha and Trakakis make to each objection are known here only through Kaufman's summary of them, which a fair reader should treat with care.
2. No modern scholarly translation of the Purusha Sukta was read beside O'Flaherty's. Jamison and Brereton's 2014 translation of the Rigveda, now the standard, was not obtained, and Witzel's 1995 paper on the late date of Book 10 could not be downloaded. The lateness of Book 10 rests here on O'Flaherty, on Talageri's summary of Witzel and Proferes, and on Moorjani's citation of Witzel.
3. Present-day practice of untouchability was not measured from a primary source. The India Human Development Survey's figures on households that practise untouchability, and the National Crime Records Bureau's counts of crimes against Dalits, were found only in secondary summaries and are not used.
4. Whether belief in karma makes people blame victims was not tested empirically. Social psychologists have studied belief in karma and in a just world. That literature was not reviewed, so the moral-hazard section rests on texts, not on measured behaviour.
5. Augustine's Latin was translated here. No published English translation of Opus imperfectum 1.39 was read. The sense is plain, but a reader should check the translation against the Latin given in the notes.
6. Basu's link between endogamy and the Gupta age is disputed. A letter to PNAS proposed that the shift coincides with foreign invasions instead. It was not read.
7. The date of the Gautama Dharmasutra relative to Manu was not checked. The article calls it "another law book" for that reason.

Verdict

Karma is the most complete answer to suffering any religion has offered.  Shankara's version clears God of cruelty by making every inequality the fruit of a soul's own deeds, and it covers infants, disasters and animals, cases where Christian theodicies struggle.  Its completeness has a price.  The causes it names lie in past lives no one remembers, its proportions cannot be measured, its first cause is pushed into a past without a beginning, and the whole is finally God's "sport."  Its own most sympathetic researcher found no evidence for it.  Its classical texts also drew the conclusion its critics fear:  that the disabled, the outcaste and the low-born earned their state.

The fallen-creation answer explains less.  It does not say why this child suffers, and Augustine's attempt to say so reached the same harsh conclusion as karma.  But its founding texts reject the inference from suffering to personal guilt, and so it cannot make the sufferer the culprit without contradicting Jesus.

On caste, the Purusha Sukta, Manu, Gautama and the Gita teach hereditary rank, and karma made that rank deserved.  Hindu reformers, from Ravidas to Vivekananda to Gandhi, softened or rejected the system by setting parts of their tradition aside, and Ambedkar left it.  Caste endogamy, two thousand years old in the genes, is still the norm.  The Bible's slave laws and their use in America fail the same test of use, and Christians should say so plainly.  They pass the test of text in one respect that matters to this article:  no biblical text calls a slave's birth the wages of his own sin.

Sources