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Some ideas resist translation not because no one has tried, but because the receiving language was never built to hold them. English developed inside a broadly dualistic, materialist worldview — subjects act on objects, things either exist or they don’t,

Moksha — liberation from the entire cycle of birth, action, and rebirth — is, by most comparative accounts, a fairly rare achievement in the history of religious thought. Most traditions offer reward or punishment in a single afterlife; relatively few

Can a person be completely fulfilled — not mostly content, not usually at peace, but with no trace of sorrow, anxiety, or lingering niggle left anywhere? It sounds like a rhetorical question, the kind answered with a resigned “of course

Bring up karma in conversation and the objections arrive almost immediately. Where’s the proof? Are you saying people who died in a bombing deserved it? Is there really evidence of life after life? These are fair questions, and they are

Dharma sounds like it needs a Sanskrit dictionary to unpack, but it turns out to be something everyone already understands intuitively — we just don’t usually call it by that name. The fastest way to see this is to ask

Every civilization has had to decide, in one way or another, what to do with eros — the current of attraction and desire that runs through ordinary life whether religion accounts for it or not. Looked at broadly, two distinct