Musubi belongs to a family of concepts anthropologists have long grouped together and compared across cultures: culturally specific terms for a diffuse, impersonal but real generative power underlying ordinary phenomena, of which the Polynesian concept of mana is the best known and the term against which most such comparisons are made.
Mana, as described in Polynesian and Melanesian contexts, is a power that can inhere in objects, persons and words, can be accumulated or lost, and explains why some tools work well and some leaders command authority, an account structurally close to musubi's role as the diffuse generative principle by which things come into being. The comparison has been substantially revised since its early twentieth-century heyday: anthropologists including Roger Keesing argued that "mana" as a general category was significantly an artifact of how early Western ethnographers translated and generalized a term with more specific and variable meanings in its actual Pacific contexts, a caution that applies equally to musubi, which only became a comprehensive theological principle through a specific and traceable process of modern Japanese systematization rather than functioning as an ancient unified doctrine.
The more defensible comparative claim is narrower: many traditions independently develop vocabulary for an impersonal generative power distinct from personal deity, and musubi and mana are genuine instances of that pattern, but treating either as evidence of a single universal category of primitive religious thought, the use to which the comparison was often put a century ago, considerably overstates what the evidence supports.