Selfishness, greed, ignorance and sin — Hinduism

What the specification asks for

Paper 1, Section 1, 1.3 (Hinduism). Assessed on AO1 (knowledge and understanding) and AO2 (analysis and evaluation), weighted equally. Incandio is aligned to this specification. It is not published by, endorsed by or affiliated with Pearson, and it reproduces none of Pearson's indicative content — the point numbers are given so you can check every unit against your own copy.

1 · Understand it

A boy takes the last of something from his brother and feels he has come out ahead. Every tradition on this course has an account of what has gone wrong in him. Hinduism's is the strangest and the most interesting: nothing has gone wrong with his will at all. He has simply made a mistake about who benefited.

What it means

The specification names two terms and they work together. Avidya is ignorance — specifically, not knowing what you really are. Maya is the appearance of separateness: not that the world is unreal, but that it is not ultimately as it seems.

Put them together and the Hindu diagnosis of wrongdoing appears. If the true self is one and the same in every being, then the sense of being a distinct person set against other distinct people is precisely the appearance maya produces. Ahamkara — the ego, literally the I-maker — is that sense of separateness at work, and it is what drives selfish action.

So papa, the nearest Hindu word to sin, is not disobedience. Wrongdoing accrues karma, which conditions what follows, and karma is a law of cause and effect rather than a verdict. Nobody weighs the evidence and nobody passes sentence. Adharma is failing in your duty, which is a different failure again, and neither of them is an offence against a lawgiver in the way sin is in the Abrahamic traditions.

One structural consequence, and it is examinable: there is no inherited sin in Hinduism. Nobody is born guilty. Each person carries their own karma, which is a burden of a completely different sort — theirs because they made it, not because they were born into somebody else's.

The correction to make early, because a learner who has met the word will have met it wrong: maya does not mean everything is an illusion. Advaita, the school that presses the concept hardest, holds that the world is real at its own level and is not ultimately as it appears. Translating maya as illusion has the tradition saying something it has consistently denied.

Why believers hold it

The argument is short and worth following exactly. If the same self is present in the person you harm, then harming them for your own advantage is not wicked in the first instance. It is incoherent. You have injured the very thing you were trying to benefit. Cruelty, on this account, is a category error about who is who.

That is why the remedy is knowledge, and why jnana marga exists as an entire path rather than as an intellectual hobby. If the problem is a false picture, then instruction, discrimination and finally realisation are the cure, and no amount of repentance would touch it, because there is nothing to be forgiven for in the sense that word usually carries.

Set that beside the Christian and Jewish diagnosis and the contrast is exact rather than approximate. Those traditions locate the problem in the will: a person knows and chooses otherwise. Hinduism and Buddhism locate it in perception. Every difference in the cure follows from that one difference in the diagnosis, which is why this unit is the cleanest four-way comparison the specification offers.

Now the objection the diagnosis has to survive. People do wrong knowing perfectly well that it is wrong, and often knowing exactly whom it will hurt. An account that makes wrongdoing a mistake has to explain that, and the Hindu answer is that maya is not the sort of ignorance information dispels. It is a misperception that persists through knowing the facts, which is also why liberation is described as rare rather than as a matter of being told.

And the cost that has to be admitted. If circumstances follow from past action, misfortune starts to look deserved, and that inference has historically been used to justify caste disadvantage. Hindu teaching also requires compassion and giving regardless of cause, and reformers have argued exactly that — but the misuse is real, and an evaluation that does not reach it has not reached the hard part.

Where it comes from

• The Upanishads (shruti) — Chandogya Upanishad 6:8:7 (translated)

  Tat tvam asi — That thou art.

  One of the mahavakyas, the great sayings: the atman within is one with Brahman, the ultimate reality.

  What it is doing here: Is the premise the entire diagnosis depends on: if the identity holds, selfishness really is a mistake about the facts rather than a failure of resolve.

• Hindu teaching — Karma, samsara and moksha; Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita (translated)

  Karma — action and its consequence; samsara — the cycle of rebirth; moksha — release from it.

  Action produces consequence, which shapes future existence within the cycle of rebirth; the goal is release.

  What it is doing here: Supplies the consequence side without a judge, which is what makes the Hindu account of wrongdoing impersonal where the Abrahamic account is relational.

• Hindu teaching — Ahimsa; Mahabharata and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (2:30) (translated)

  Ahimsa — non-violence, non-harming.

  The principle of not harming living beings, in action, word and thought. The first of the yamas.

  What it is doing here: Shows what the diagnosis obliges in practice, so that the analysis of wrongdoing produces a rule and not only an explanation.

Where it bites

It shows in the weight Hindu ethics puts on examining a motive rather than only an action, and in the Gita's instruction to act from duty without attachment to what the action gets you — a practice aimed at the ego rather than at the deed.

It shows in why yoga and meditation count as moral practices and not only calming ones: if wrongdoing comes from a wrong view, anything that clears the view is ethical work. And it shows in the tone of Hindu moral teaching, which is more often about seeing correctly than about resisting temptation.

What people get wrong

People think: Karma is God punishing you for what you did wrong.

Actually: Karma is a law of cause and effect, not a verdict. Nobody weighs the evidence and nobody passes sentence; the action itself conditions what follows. The examiners record this exact error, and it also imports a judge into a system that was built to work without one.

People think: Maya means everything is an illusion.

Actually: It means the world is not ultimately as it appears, which is a weaker and far more defensible claim. Advaita teachers have consistently rejected the inference that the world therefore does not matter. Translating maya as illusion hands critics an objection the tradition does not hold.

People think: Hindus believe people are born sinful.

Actually: There is no inherited sin in Hinduism and nobody is born guilty. Each person carries the karma of their own past action. Importing original sin here makes Hinduism sound like Christianity with different names, and the difference in diagnosis is exactly what the comparison questions are for.

What the examiner expects you to understand

• Use avidya and maya by name; the specification names them, and an answer about selfishness in general is capped as generic.
• Never describe karma as divine punishment — it is the single most frequently recorded error on Hindu material.
• For the six-mark question, run the chain rather than listing: ignorance produces the appearance of separateness, which makes selfishness look rational, which is why the cure is knowledge.
• The strongest evaluation available is that making wrongdoing irrational has to explain why intelligent people keep doing it, so put the objection and then answer it.
• If the caste use of karma comes up, engage with the history rather than only the doctrine; an answer that quotes teaching against a social record has not met the point.

2 · Grade 9 Notes

Core belief / issue

The specification names avidya and maya. Hinduism's diagnosis of wrongdoing is not disobedience but ignorance: avidya is not knowing what you really are, and maya is the appearance of separateness that produces the mistake. If a person believed their atman were identical with everyone else's, selfishness would be incoherent — so greed is a symptom of a false picture rather than a fault of will.

Key terminology

Incandio's mark schemes credit the religion's own vocabulary; spelling variants are accepted, a vague paraphrase is not.

Avidya (also avidyā)

Ignorance; specifically not knowing the true nature of the self.

Maya (also māyā)

The appearance or illusion of separateness; not that the world is unreal but that it is not ultimately as it seems.

Ahamkara (also ahankara)

The ego or 'I-maker'; the sense of being a separate self, which drives selfish action.

Papa (also paap)

Wrongdoing or demerit; the nearest Hindu equivalent to sin, and it accrues karma rather than offending a lawgiver.

Adharma

Acting against dharma; failing in one's duty.

What Hinduism teaches

• shared — Avidya — ignorance of one's true nature — is the root of wrongdoing rather than a corrupt will.
• shared — Maya is the appearance of separateness that makes selfishness seem rational.
• shared — Wrongdoing accrues karma, which conditions future circumstances; it is not primarily an offence against a lawgiver.
• shared — There is no inherited sin: a person is not born guilty, and each carries their own karma.

Why it teaches this

The reasoning is that if the same self is in everyone, then harming another is harming oneself, and only a mistake about that could make cruelty seem advantageous. So the Hindu account makes wrongdoing irrational rather than wicked — and the remedy is knowledge, which is why jnana marga exists as a whole path. That is a genuinely different diagnosis from Christianity's and it produces a different cure.

Sources of authority

• The Upanishads (shruti) — Chandogya Upanishad 6:8:7 (translated)

  Tat tvam asi — That thou art.

  One of the mahavakyas, the great sayings: the atman within is one with Brahman, the ultimate reality.

  How to use it: If the self and the ultimate reality are one, then harming another harms what you are — which is the metaphysical root of ahimsa rather than a moral rule added on top.

  What it does not settle: Advaita reads the identity as complete; Vishishtadvaita holds the soul distinct while dependent on God. Presenting one as 'the' Hindu view is inaccurate.

• Hindu teaching — Karma, samsara and moksha; Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita (translated)

  Karma — action and its consequence; samsara — the cycle of rebirth; moksha — release from it.

  Action produces consequence, which shapes future existence within the cycle of rebirth; the goal is release.

  How to use it: Karma is a law rather than a judge: no one is sentencing you, and that is exactly why it answers the problem of suffering differently from Christianity or Islam.

  What it does not settle: Karma is NOT divine judgement and moksha is NOT nirvana. Both confusions appear in the examiner reports and both cost accuracy marks.

• The Bhagavad Gita (smriti) — Bhagavad Gita 2:47 (translated)

  Let right deeds be your motive, not the fruit which comes from them.

  Nishkama karma — acting according to duty without attachment to the outcome. Krishna's answer to Arjuna's refusal to fight.

  How to use it: It separates the rightness of an act from its results, which is why a Hindu answer on war or on wealth need not be consequentialist.

  What it does not settle: Its context is a battlefield, and using it on war without acknowledging that Arjuna is being told to fight misses the difficulty.

• Hindu teaching — Ahimsa; Mahabharata and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (2:30) (translated)

  Ahimsa — non-violence, non-harming.

  The principle of not harming living beings, in action, word and thought. The first of the yamas.

  How to use it: Because all beings share in the one reality, ahimsa follows from metaphysics rather than from sentiment — which is a stronger answer than 'Hindus are peaceful'.

  What it does not settle: It is not absolute pacifism in the tradition — the Gita has Krishna urge Arjuna to fight, and kshatriya duty complicates it. That tension is the evaluation.

Different interpretations

• Maya read as illusion and read as the world being real but not ultimately real; the second is more careful and is what Advaita actually holds.
• Avidya read as intellectual ignorance and read as a deeper misperception that knowing facts does not remove; the second is why realisation rather than study is the goal.
• Karma read as an impersonal law and read as administered by God in theistic Hinduism; both are held, and Vaishnava traditions take the second.

Differences within Hinduism

Avidya, maya, karma and the absence of inherited sin are shared. The genuine disagreement is whether knowledge alone liberates or whether grace is involved, and it maps onto the philosophical schools.

• Advaita Vedanta — Avidya and maya are the whole problem; liberation is the removal of ignorance and nothing else is needed.
• Vaishnava — Ignorance is real and grace matters too: devotion to Vishnu is the route, and God's grace assists.

Application to the issue

It shows in the emphasis on self-knowledge in yoga and meditation; in the moral weight given to intention and to acting without attachment to results; in the practice of examining one's own motives; and in the way Hindu ethics treats selfishness as a symptom of a wrong view rather than as a failure of resolve.

Arguments supporting

• Diagnosing wrongdoing as ignorance makes it curable. — A mistake can be corrected in a way a corrupt nature cannot. (hinduism)
  Answered by: People frequently do wrong knowing it is wrong, which an ignorance account must explain away.
• Karma without a judge is coherent without the problem of a punishing deity. — Consequences follow from actions without anyone administering them. (shared)
  Answered by: An impersonal mechanism that tracks moral desert precisely is not obviously simpler than a judge.

Arguments challenging

• Humans will always do wrong, whatever the diagnosis. — No society has eliminated cruelty. (catholic)
  Answered by: Hinduism claims liberation is possible for an individual and does not claim it will be universal, so the record does not refute it.
• Karma can be used to blame the suffering. — If circumstances follow from past action, misfortune looks deserved. (non-religious)
  Answered by: Hindu teaching also requires compassion and daan regardless of cause, but the misuse is real and has historically supported caste.

Secular / non-religious perspective

Non-religious accounts explain wrongdoing through evolution, upbringing and circumstance, and reject sin while keeping harm. Humanists tend to find the ignorance diagnosis interesting but incomplete, arguing that people often act badly with full knowledge and that the explanation has to reach motivation as well as perception.

Examinable throughout Paper 1. Nothing here earns a mark on Paper 2.

Evaluation

The hinge: Whether wrongdoing is a failure of knowledge or of will. Hinduism and Buddhism both answer knowledge, and Christianity and Judaism answer will — which is the cleanest four-way comparison on this specification.

Defensible conclusions

• The avidya diagnosis is elegant: it makes selfishness a mistake about the facts, which explains why the remedy is realisation rather than repentance.
• It struggles with clear-eyed wrongdoing, which is exactly the case the doctrine of a corrupt will was designed for.
• Karma's implication about deserved suffering is the doctrine's real cost, and the honest position is that Hindu tradition has both used it and resisted it.

Not defensible

• Saying maya means the world is unreal; it means the world is not ultimately as it appears.
• Describing karma as God punishing you — the examiners record this exact error.

Exam use

• Identify · 3 marks — Three Hindu beliefs about the causes of wrongdoing. Short phrases only.
• Outline · 4 marks — Two developed. 'Hindus believe wrongdoing comes from avidya (1) — ignorance of the true self, which makes selfishness seem rational when it is not (1).'
• Explain · 6 marks — Explain Hindu beliefs about the causes of wrongdoing: avidya, maya, ahamkara, karma, and the absence of inherited sin.
• Evaluate · 12 marks — 'Humans will always sin.' Hinduism denies the premise about human nature, which is a strong structural reply.

Common mistakes

• Describing karma as divine punishment.
• Translating maya as 'everything is an illusion', which the tradition does not hold.
• Importing original sin into Hinduism.

“Karma is God punishing you for what you did wrong.” — Karma is a law of cause and effect, not a verdict. No one weighs the evidence and no one sentences you; the action itself conditions what follows.

Write instead: Karma is the principle that intentional action produces consequences which shape future experience. In Buddhism it turns on intention specifically. Sikh teaching holds karma alongside God's hukam and God's grace. Sikhism is the genuine middle case: karma operates, and liberation comes by God's grace rather than by accumulated merit. Saying so is a strong distinction.

“Hindus worship thousands of separate gods.” — Many Hindus understand the deities as forms or aspects of one ultimate reality, Brahman. Describing them as separate rival gods misrepresents the tradition's own account of itself.

Write instead: Many Hindus hold that Brahman, the one ultimate reality, is worshipped through many forms — Vishnu, Shiva, the Goddess and their avatars. Some are strictly monotheistic in practice; others are more comfortable with plurality. The specification's 1.5 explicitly names monotheism and polytheism and asks why people believe in one God or many, so the question is live and the accurate answer is that Hinduism does not fit either label cleanly.

Grade 9 insight

On the Hindu account, cruelty is not merely wrong but INCOHERENT — if the same atman is in the person you harm, then harming them for your own benefit is a category error about who benefits. A Level 4 answer draws out what that costs. An argument that makes wrongdoing irrational has to explain why intelligent people keep doing it, and Hinduism's answer, that maya is precisely the kind of error knowledge does not automatically dispel, is a real answer that also explains why liberation is described as rare.

Carry on through Hinduism

• Previous unit: 1.2 · Human nature and the human condition
• Next unit: 1.4 · Free will, determinism and predestination
• Selfishness, greed, ignorance and sin in the other religions: Buddhism · Christianity · Islam · Judaism · Sikhism
• All of Hinduism · Incandio Religious Studies · The 4RS1 specification