"Herakleitean fire and karma reifying projections (cosmisations) of - or constructed from - (inter alia) money, which is no merely a metaphor, a way of illustrating karma and Herakleitean fire but a component of them; and this is why money and karma (and money and Herakleitean fire) came into being roughly simultaneously and in the same place. It can not emphasised too strongly that I am not proposing the reduction of karma to money... ...I suggest merely that one of the factors in the emergence of the core concept in northern India from the middle of the first millennium was the simultaneous advent there of monetisation."
Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.208