Fate in India. An Exploration of a Conceptual Field

Sven Sellmer

When applying foreign notions to a culture, it is advisable to treat these notions not as more or less narrowly defined concepts, but as intrinsically vague conceptual fields. Often it is possible to identify basic human problems or questions at the centre of such fields that, in a next step, may serve as points of departure for further explorations. In the case of ‘fate’, I propose to start with two problems: one concerned with the past, and one relating to the future. The first one is finding an explanation of an unexpected and incomprehensible past event, e.g. the sudden death of a young person. The second problem consists in predicting normally unforeseeable future events, e.g. the outcome of a momentous, but risky action and the like. Severable conceptions which arise as answers to these challenges in different Indian traditions will be briefly discussed. It will be argued that the proposed double origin of the conceptual field of ‘fate’ tends to lead to certain inconsistencies when unified systems of causality, most notably the one based on karman, are developed.