Question

Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.

India is renowned for its diversity. Dissimilitude abounds in every sphere, from the physical elements of its land and people to the intangible workings of its beliefs and practices. Indeed, given this variety, India itself appears to be not a single entity but an amalgamation, a "construct" arising from the conjoining of innumerable, discrete parts. Modern scholarship has, quite properly, tended to explore these elements in isolation. (In part, this trend represents the conscious reversal of the stance taken by an earlier generation of scholars whose work reified India into a monolithic entity, a critical element in the much maligned "Orientalist" enterprise.) Nonetheless, the representation of India as a singular "Whole" is not an entirely capricious enterprise, for India is an identifiable entity, united by, if not born out of, certain deep and pervasive structures. Thus, for example, the Hindu tradition has long maintained a body of mythology that weaves the disparate temples, gods, even geographic landscapes that exist throughout the subcontinent into a unified, albeit syncretic, whole.

In the realm of thought, there is no more pervasive, unifying structure than karma. It is the "doctrine" or "law" that ties actions to results and creates a determinant link between an individual's status in this life and his or her fate in future lives. Following what is considered to be its appearance in the Upanishads, the doctrine reaches into nearly every corner of Hindu thought. Indeed, its dominance is such in the Hindu world view that karma encompasses, at the same time, life-affirming and life-negating functions, for just as it defines the world in terms of the "positive" function of laying out a doctrine of rewards and punishments, it also defines the world through its "negative" picture of action as an all but inescapable trap, an unremitting cycle of death and rebirth.

Despite, or perhaps because of, karma's ubiquity, the doctrine is not easily defined. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty reports of a scholarly conference devoted to the study of karma where, although the participants admitted to a general sense of the doctrine's parameters, considerable time was spent in a "lively but ultimately vain attempt to define...karma and rebirth". The base meaning of the term "karma" (or, more precisely, in its Sanskrit stem form, karman, a neuter noun) is "action". As a doctrine, karma covers a number of quasi-independent concepts: rebirth (punarjanam), consequence (phala, literally "fruit," a word that suggests the "ripening" of actions into consequences), and the valuation or "ethic-ization" of acts, which marks them as either "good" (punya or sukarman) or "bad" (papam or duskarman).

In a general way, however, for at least the past two thousand years, the following passage (from the well known text, the Bhagavata Purana) has held true as a statement of the main elements of the karma doctrine: "The same person enjoys the fruit of the same sinful or meritorious act in the next world, in the same manner and to the same extent, according to the manner and extent to which that (sinful or meritorious) act has been done by him in this world." Even so, depending on the context in which the doctrine appears, ranging from its use across a wide range of literary sources to its use at the popular level, not all these elements may be present, though in a general way they may still be implied.

Question: Consider the following statements:
1. Meaning of karma is contextual.
2. Meaning of karma is not unanimous.
3. Meaning of karma includes many other quasi-independent concepts.
4. Karma also means actions and their rewards.
Which of the statements are true?

• A. 1, 2, 3
• B. 2, 3, 4
• C. 1, 3, 4
• D. All the four are true

Hint:

Check each of the four statements one at a time against a separate sentence in the passage; do not assume any one is false.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is D

With a set of four statements to verify, the safer method is to hunt down one supporting line from the passage for each statement separately, rather than picking an answer choice first and working backward.

1. Meaning of karma is contextual: the passage closes by saying that depending on "the doctrine's context", not all elements of karma may be present, which is a direct statement that meaning depends on context; true.
2. Meaning of karma is not unanimous: the passage calls the scholarly attempt to define karma "vain", and says the doctrine "is not easily defined", both of which point to disagreement rather than one settled meaning; true.
3. Meaning of karma includes many other quasi-independent concepts: the text lists rebirth, consequence, and ethic-ization together as "a number of quasi-independent concepts" inside the doctrine; true.
4. Karma also means actions and their rewards: the passage opens by calling karma the link between "actions to results", and later explains "phala" as the fruit or consequence of an action, so actions and rewards are both part of its meaning; true.

Since every one of the four statements finds direct textual support and none is contradicted, none can be dropped from the list.

Let us summarize:

• Each statement maps to a separate, clearly stated line in the passage.
• When a passage-based question gives four claims and each is separately verifiable, check for the "all of the above" style option before assuming a partial list is correct.

So all four statements, 1, 2, 3 and 4, are true, matching the option that says all four are true.