The Hindu and Buddhist concepts of karma are quite similar, although Hinduism makes a further distinction between different types of karma, such as present karma, latent karma, and future karma. In the understanding of both thought systems, the law of karma describes the connection between actions and the resulting forces, as follows: wholesome actions lead to wholesome states while unwholesome...

see how the fate of the goddess had evolved following the eradication of her raison d’etre. Attendants at the shrine informed me that she continues to function, but as the goddess of chickenpox. In Bengali, the word for smallpox is also used for the spring season—boshonto, pronounced “bawshontaw”—an association that arises from the seasonality of smallpox epidemics in Bengal prior to the eradic...