Karma and Good Qualities
In our own time, when an individual is described as talented, kind, or intelligent, it is believed he has genetics or his environment to thank. But ancient thinkers preferred to think that a person possessed or lacked particular qualities due to choices he made in past lives.
A person's good qualities were attributed to good actions he had taken in a past life. On the other hand, a person possessing bad qualities — such as hatred of others, antisocial tendencies, or even criminal behavior — was also the product of his past choices. Every thought, word, and action — and even nonaction — was believed to have deep effects on a person's spiritual relationships.
Jawaharal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, wrote in his autobiography, The Discovery of India, “The environment in which I have grown up takes the soul (or rather the atma) and a future life, and the karma theory of cause and effect, and reincarnation for granted. I have been affected by this and so, in a sense, am favorably disposed toward these assumptions.”
On the one hand, karma stresses recurrence — continual renewal and rebirth. On the other hand, the doctrine of the identity of atman and the Brahman stresses the permanent and unchanging. This apparent contradiction between the two concepts was solved by the understanding that the cycle of rebirth is caused by ignorance of the true nature of the self and the failure to realize that it never changes.
What is the Hindu concept of moksha?
In Hinduism, moksha is the release of the soul from a cycle of rebirths. It is one of the four acceptable goals of life, according to Hinduism. But for people seeking spiritual advancement, it is the ultimate goal of life.
Emancipation becomes, therefore, a process of coming to an awareness of that state of being that is beyond process, the identity of atman and Brahman. To have that intuitive knowledge is to become immortal, for “knowing All, he becomes All.” While in one sense it is true to say that this search is defined in terms of escape from the cycle of rebirth, on a higher level it is to be understood as the realization of the soul's true nature.
You must recall that the ultimate goal of life, according to Hinduism, was to attain moksha, instead of going back to human life on Earth. This being the case, a person's actions must be pure in order for those actions to have pure effects.
Some sects in ancient times appear to have believed that every soul must travel through a fixed number of births. One text puts the number at 8,400,000. The Ajivika sect believed that these births were inevitable; a person could reach liberation only after they were all completed.
