The best first path in the archive — six ideas that almost everything else here builds on, in the order they make most sense.
If you read only one path first, read this one. It gathers the handful of ideas that nearly every other page in the archive assumes, and it puts them in an order where each one prepares the next. Nothing here requires prior knowledge; the aim is to give you a sturdy frame you can hang everything else on.
Complete newcomers, and anyone who has picked up scattered terms — karma, dharma, moksha — and wants to see how they actually fit together rather than as isolated buzzwords. It is deliberately the gentlest on-ramp in the archive.
We begin at the beginning, with rita, an early Vedic intuition of cosmic order, because it is the soil the later ethical concepts grow from. From there we move to dharma, duty and right conduct, which partly inherits rita's territory. Then karma, the principle linking action to consequence, and samsara, the cycle those consequences drive. The sequence resolves in moksha, liberation — release from the whole cycle — and finally opens onto the Upanishads, the texts where these ideas are first thought through philosophically.
Each stop answers a question the previous one raises. Order invites the question of duty; duty raises the question of consequences; consequences imply a cycle; a cycle invites the question of escape; escape sends us to the texts that theorised it. Followed in sequence, the concepts stop being a glossary and become an argument.
These are ideas people have held and debated, presented descriptively rather than asserted as fact — the stance set out in keeping mythology and history apart. Read them as a map of a tradition's questions, and let the links carry you outward wherever your curiosity pulls.