An Indian Philosophical Perspective on the Problem of Evil

Why does a good person suffer while someone who causes harm seems to prosper? This question has troubled philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people across every culture. In Western philosophy of religion, it is formalized as the “problem of evil” – the challenge of reconciling a perfectly good, all-powerful God with the undeniable presence of suffering and evil in the world. But Indian philosophical traditions approach this question from an entirely different angle. Rather than wrestling with a divine creator’s responsibility for suffering, they place the explanatory weight on human action, moral causation, and the long arc of spiritual evolution across multiple lifetimes. Understanding how Indian philosophy frames – and responds to – the problem of evil reveals a fundamentally distinct worldview, one with deep implications for how we understand suffering, justice, and liberation.

The Western framing: why it doesn’t translate 🔗

To appreciate what is distinctive about Indian thought, it helps to understand what it is departing from. The problem of evil, as classically formulated, is acute for monotheistic religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – which hold that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. If God has all power, all knowledge, and is wholly good, why does intense suffering exist? Western theodicies have attempted to answer this in several ways: the Free Will Defense argues that God permits evil as the cost of granting humans genuine freedom; John Hick’s Soul-Making Theodicy holds that suffering is necessary for moral and spiritual development; and Augustine’s privation theory treats evil not as a thing in itself but as an absence of good.

These responses, however sophisticated, share a common premise: a personal God who creates and oversees the universe and whose character must be defended in light of the world’s suffering. This framing simply does not map onto most Indian philosophical traditions. As scholars have noted, Hindu non-theist schools such as Samkhya, early Nyaya, and many within Vedanta do not posit an almighty, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, and the classical formulations of the problem of evil do not apply to them. Similarly, Buddhism and Jainism are non-theistic traditions that do not require a creator deity to explain existence at all. The problem, in other words, is not just answered differently in the Indian context – it is asked differently.

Karma: moral causation as the key framework 🔗

At the centre of the Indian response to suffering is the concept of karma. Derived from the Sanskrit word karman, meaning “act,” karma refers to the universal law of moral cause and effect. According to Britannica, karma serves two main functions within Indian moral philosophy: it provides motivation to live a moral life, and it serves as the primary explanation for the existence of evil. Every intentional action – physical, verbal, or mental – generates consequences that shape a being’s future experiences, whether in the present life or in lives to come.

This is not a punitive system imposed from outside. As Britannica notes, no divine will or external agent intervenes in the relationship between a moral act and its result – the law of karma represents a markedly non-theistic theodicy. The consequences unfold through an autonomous causal process, much like a natural law. Suffering, then, is not arbitrary, not a test from God, and not a sign of divine indifference. It is the intelligible result of past moral choices – one’s own choices, made perhaps in a previous life that one no longer remembers.

This shifts moral responsibility dramatically. The law of karma shifts moral responsibility for evil from God to human beings themselves: it is through our own actions and intentions that evil enters the world and returns to us. What might seem like unjust or “gratuitous” suffering – the kind that Western philosophers of religion find most troubling – is, within this framework, traceable to prior causes. As philosopher Arthur Herman argued, under the Indian theory of karma there is no strictly gratuitous suffering, because all suffering reflects the karmic consequences of past deeds.

Samsara: suffering within the cycle of rebirth 🔗

Karma does not operate in isolation. It is inseparable from the doctrine of samsara – the beginningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. According to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the combined beliefs in karma and rebirth constitute a fundamental premise of the great majority of India’s religious and philosophical traditions. Birth into a particular life situation – with its specific circumstances, exposures to suffering or wellbeing, social position, and psychological tendencies – is understood as the result of actions performed in previous lives.

This framework accounts for a puzzle that Western theodicy struggles with: why do the apparently innocent suffer? Within a single-life view, a child born into poverty or afflicted with illness seems to challenge any notion of divine justice. Within the samsaric framework, no existence is viewed in isolation. What appears as undeserved suffering in this life may be the consequence of actions carried out in a prior one. Samsara does not, however, offer a fatalistic or hopeless picture. Most schools view being in samsara as a condition of bondage that can ultimately be transcended through the accumulation of positive karma, ethical conduct, and spiritual discipline, leading eventually to liberation – moksha in Hindu traditions, nirvana in Buddhism.

Divergent schools, shared foundations 🔗

While karma and rebirth are common threads, Indian traditions differ significantly in how they elaborate these ideas – and their differences have important philosophical implications.

Hinduism: karma, dharma, and liberation 🔗

Within Hinduism, karma is deeply connected to dharma – the moral and cosmic order that governs right action. The Advaita Vedanta school, shaped by the 8th-century philosopher Adi Shankara, reframes evil as primarily rooted in avidya (ignorance) – specifically, ignorance of one’s true nature as non-different from Brahman, the ultimate reality. Shankara attributes evil and cruelty in the world to karma and to ignorance, delusion, and wrong knowledge – not to Brahman itself. On this view, the suffering we experience arises because we mistake the conditioned self for the ultimate self, generating desires, attachments, and conflict.

The 11th-century Vishishtadvaita philosopher Ramanuja took a theistic approach, arguing that God creates the conditions and potentialities within which beings act, but that the consequences individuals experience flow directly from their own karma. According to Shankara’s commentary on the Brahma Sutras, God cannot be charged with partiality or cruelty on account of his taking the factors of virtuous and vicious actions – karma – performed by an individual in previous lives into account. Both thinkers, despite their metaphysical differences, direct the cause of suffering back to human moral agency rather than divine will.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a modern synthesis emerged through the thought of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo. Their Integral Advaitic theodicy holds that the world has been created as an arena for moral and spiritual evolution, in which evil and suffering are as necessary as good. On this account, suffering is not pointless – it is the very engine of the soul’s growth toward liberation. The finite evils of any given life are understood as outweighed by the infinite good of universal salvation that eventually awaits all beings.

Buddhism: suffering, craving, and the pragmatic path 🔗

Buddhism approaches the problem from a distinctly non-metaphysical angle. Buddhism is relatively unconcerned with first causes; its emphasis is less on why evil and suffering are present in the world and more on a pragmatic inquiry into how best to respond to that suffering. The tradition does not require a theodicy in the traditional sense because it posits no creator God whose goodness needs defending.

Instead, the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths identify dukkha (suffering) as an intrinsic feature of conditioned existence, trace it to tanha (craving and attachment), and prescribe the Eightfold Path as the means of overcoming it. Mainstream Buddhism asserted that the universe never had a beginning and that all existence is an endless cycle of rebirths – a cosmology in which the problem of how a good God could permit evil simply does not arise. The Buddha’s role, in many Buddhist texts, is that of a physician rather than a metaphysician: diagnosing the illness of suffering and prescribing a cure.

Jainism: karma as a physical reality 🔗

Jainism offers perhaps the most materially precise account of karma among Indian traditions. Jain philosophers hold that harmful actions cause the soul to be tainted by karmic particles – fine material substances that settle on the soul (jiva) and weigh it down in the cycle of rebirth. Good and bad karmas are constantly flowing into the soul as a result of actions by body, speech, and mind. Crucially, Jainism also holds that it is possible to modify and eventually shed karmic accumulation through rigorous ethical discipline, non-violence (ahimsa), and ascetic practice, leading ultimately to liberation from samsara entirely.

Like Buddhism, Jainism completely rejects a creator God, meaning the problem of evil as Western philosophy poses it – how can a good God permit suffering? – is, from a Jain perspective, a non-question. Suffering exists because living beings have been acting in morally consequential ways since beginningless time, and the karmic residue of those actions shapes every aspect of their experience.

Key contrasts with Western theodicy 🔗

The differences between Indian and Western approaches are not merely theological – they reflect deep structural contrasts in how the two traditions understand agency, justice, and the nature of the cosmos.

Western theodicies are largely reactive: they emerge in response to a challenge posed against the belief in an omnipotent, benevolent God. The problem of evil, in the Western formulation, is a logical or evidential argument that threatens the coherence of theistic belief. Indian traditions, by contrast, do not begin from that defensive posture. Indian religions focus not on reconciling the existence of an all-powerful, all-benevolent God with the existence of evil, but rather on the path to spiritual liberation (moksha) – the state from which evil and suffering no longer affect one’s inner peace.

The sociologist Max Weber recognized this over a century ago, famously describing the Indian teaching of karma and transmigration as the most complete formal solution to the problem of theodicy. Whether one fully agrees with that assessment or not, the remark captures something important: the karmic framework provides a comprehensive account of why suffering exists, who bears responsibility for it, and how it can be overcome – all without invoking divine mystery or inscrutable divine will.

There are, of course, serious philosophical objections to the karma-based account. Critics like Whitley Kaufman have pointed out that if one cannot remember one’s past lives, the karmic explanation cannot actually be experienced as just – suffering for forgotten actions may feel as arbitrary as any other unexplained suffering. Scholars have also questioned whether a single, unified “theory of karma” can be reconstructed across the diversity of Indian philosophical schools, given how much the specific doctrine varies between Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. These are genuine and productive challenges that Indian philosophers have themselves engaged with extensively.

Evil as ignorance: a philosophical reframing 🔗

Perhaps the most philosophically distinctive contribution of the Indian tradition – particularly within Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism – is the reframing of evil not as a moral category but as a manifestation of ignorance. On this view, what we call “evil” is not so much a force opposed to good as it is the result of a fundamental cognitive error: the false identification of the self with the body, the ego, and the conditioned mind.

When a person acts in ways that cause harm – through greed, hatred, or delusion (what Buddhism calls the “three poisons”) – they do so because they have not yet realized their true nature. The Advaitic view holds that at the deepest level, the self (atman) is identical with Brahman, the ground of all being. Evil actions arise from the illusion of separation – the sense that the self is a bounded, independent unit that must compete with others. Liberation (moksha or nirvana) is not, then, simply an escape from suffering but the removal of the ignorance that generates suffering in the first place.

This reframing has a significant practical implication: the path to ending evil runs not through divine intervention or theological argument, but through personal transformation – ethical discipline, meditative insight, and the gradual purification of one’s understanding. In Hindu thought, neither evil nor error are final; all happiness and suffering is impermanent, and truth ultimately triumphs. The trajectory is always toward liberation, and every life – however difficult – contributes to that eventual goal.

What do you think? Does tracing suffering back to one’s own past actions – even actions from previous lives one cannot recall – genuinely resolve the problem of evil, or does it simply relocate the mystery? And if suffering is understood as a necessary stage in spiritual evolution rather than a random injustice, does that change how you think about moral responsibility in this life?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil_in_Hinduism
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/karma
4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/religious-studies/article/an-integral-advaitic-theodicy-of-spiritual-evolution-karma-rebirth-universal-salvation-and-mystical-panentheism/CBB14078D917CFA341314746BE43675A
5. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/karma-and-rebirth-indian-conceptions-of/v-1
6. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/756403
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_responses_to_the_problem_of_evil
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_philosophy
9. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/10/862