The Indian religious worldview emerging about the time of the Buddha centered on three interrelated notions: rebirth, karman, and liberation. These concepts informed the cosmology, eschatology, and soteriology of the developing traditions, which taught that sentient beings have been reborn repeatedly in diverse forms of life, in places ranging from various hells to the highest heavens, over vast tracks of time. This process of rebirth is guided and even generated by the force of a person's actions (karman), which possess the power of inevitably working their consequences. Thus, deeds in the present will unfailingly bear their fruit in this or a future life, and present conditions, pleasurable or disagreeable, including one's form of existence, length of life, social station, and personal appearance, are the effects of deeds performed in the past. The span of one's existence through cycles of birth and death (saṃsāra) stretches...