The Human Archives
Endless Knot — garment design
Endless Knot, 5 of 10 in CausalityIdea 1 of 3: The Geometry of Karma
Causality 008—005

Endless Knot

2500 BCE

From the archiveCausality10 artifacts
From the record · 01 / 03

The Geometry of Karma

Western physics tends to view causality as a line: A causes B, which causes C. Eastern philosophy views it as a knot. The Endless Knot (Srivatsa) demonstrates this visually. Follow any line in the diagram, and you will eventually return to where you started. It represents a radical idea: that nothing exists independently. Everything is the result of something else — and that something else is the result of something before it. Buddhists called this pratītyasamutpāda — which you don't need to pronounce, but whose meaning is exact: everything depends on everything else.

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Western physics tends to view causality as a line: A causes B, which causes C. Eastern philosophy views it as a knot. The Endless Knot () demonstrates this visually. Follow any line in the diagram, and you will eventually return to where you started. It represents a radical idea: that nothing exists independently. Everything is the result of something else — and that something else is the result of something before it. Buddhists called this pratītyasamutpāda — which you don't need to pronounce, but whose meaning is exact: everything depends on everything else.