Karmaकर्म

Karma (Sanskrit karman, Pāli kamma, “action, deed, work”) is the principle, shared by almost all Indian religions, that intentional actions have consequences for the one who performs them — consequences that may ripen not only in this life but in future lives. Good actions lead to happiness and good rebirths; bad actions lead to suffering and bad rebirths. Karma is thus at once a law of moral causation, an explanation of why the world is so unequal, and the engine of Saṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death from which the Indian schools seek liberation (Mokṣa). The idea has been understood very differently by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains — as a ritual mechanism, a psychological process, a physical substance, or an instrument of God’s justice — and it has passed into English as a word for “what goes around comes around”.

Origins

Ritual action

In the The Ṛg Veda and the ritual texts that follow it, karman means above all ritual action: the correct performance of the sacrifice, which produces results — rain, cattle, sons, heaven — automatically, by its own power. The ritual theorists of the brāhmaṇas held that the sacrifice, rightly done, compels the gods; the gods themselves gained their immortality by sacrifice. This idea of action that produces an unseen result later in time would persist in the Mīmāṃsā school’s notion of apūrva, the “unprecedented” potency created by a ritual act that bears fruit later.

The Upaniṣads

The moral and cosmological doctrine of karma appears first in the early Upaniṣads (c. 700–500 BCE), and at first as a secret teaching. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, when Ārtabhāga asks the sage Yājñavalkya what remains of a person after death, when speech goes into fire, breath into wind and the eye into the sun, Yājñavalkya takes him by the hand: “Ārtabhāga, my friend, we cannot talk about this in public. Let us go and discuss it in private.” What they discussed, the text says, was action: “A man becomes good by good action and bad by bad action” (3.2.13). Later in the same Upaniṣad comes the classic statement:

As a man acts, as he behaves, so he becomes. Doing good, he becomes good; doing evil, he becomes evil… A man is made of desire. As his desire is, so is his will; as his will is, so is the action he does; and as the action he does, so he becomes. (4.4.5)

The Chāndogya Upaniṣad adds that “those whose conduct here has been pleasant will quickly enter a pleasant womb — a Brahmin, a Kṣatriya or a Vaiśya; those whose conduct has been foul will enter a foul womb — a dog, a pig or an outcaste” (5.10.7). Here, already, karma explains birth into a social class.

Where did the idea come from? Some scholars think rebirth and karma came from the śramaṇa movements of the eastern Ganges plain — wandering ascetics outside the Vedic fold, including the forerunners of Jainism and Buddhism — or from non-Vedic peoples; others see a development within Vedic ritual thought. What is certain is that by the time of the Buddha (5th century BCE), karma and rebirth were taken for granted across North India.

The mechanism of karma

Seeds and fruits

Indian texts describe karma in agricultural terms. Actions are seeds (bīja) that ripen into fruits (phala) when conditions are right. The traces that actions leave in the mind are called saṃskāras (impressions) or vāsanās (latent tendencies); they shape future character as well as future circumstances. Vedānta distinguishes three kinds of karma: sañcita, the vast store of accumulated karma from past lives; prārabdha, the portion that has begun to bear fruit and has produced this present life, which must be exhausted; and kriyamāṇa or āgāmi, the karma being created now, which will bear fruit in the future. An often-used image: the archer cannot recall the arrow already shot (prārabdha), but he can choose not to shoot the arrows still in his quiver.

What determines a rebirth

Karma determines three things, according to the Yoga Sūtras (2.13): one’s birth (species and station), one’s span of life, and one’s experiences of pleasure and pain. In the classic picture, beings may be reborn as gods, humans, animals, ghosts or hell-beings, depending on their deeds; the human birth is rare and precious, because only humans can act to win liberation.

Is anyone in charge?

How does karma “know” when and how to ripen? Indian philosophers debated this intensely. The Mīmāṃsā and Jain schools held that karma works by its own power, without need of a God. The Nyāya philosophers argued that karma, being unconscious, cannot direct itself to the right person at the right time: there must be an intelligent overseer, Īśvara (God), who dispenses the fruits of karma — this was one of their main arguments for the existence of God. The theistic Vedāntins agreed; Rāmānuja held that karma is the will of God, rewarding and punishing. Ādi Śaṅkara said God gives the fruits of action just as rain makes each seed grow according to its kind: God is not responsible for inequality; karma is.

Karma in Buddhism

The Gautama Buddha transformed karma by locating it in the mind. “It is intention (cetanā), monks, that I call karma,” he said (Aṅguttara Nikāya 6.63). “Having intended, one acts by body, speech and mind.” An unintended act — stepping on an insect unknowingly — carries no karmic weight; a malicious thought, even without action, does. This was a deliberate rejection of both the ritualism of the Brahmins (for whom karma was correct ritual) and the Jains (for whom any act of harm, intended or not, binds karma).

The Buddha also insisted that karma is not fate. Not everything a person experiences is the result of past karma; illness may come from bile, phlegm, the weather, carelessness or violence by others as well as from past deeds. And present intention can always change the future. In the Dhammapada, “Mind precedes all things; mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with a corrupt mind, suffering follows, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox.”

The deepest problem for Buddhist karma is how it works without a self. If there is no permanent soul (Anattā (No-Self)), who receives the fruit of an action in a future life? The Buddhist answer is that rebirth is like the lighting of one candle from another: the second flame is neither the same as the first nor different from it, but causally connected. The Questions of King Milinda develops this in dialogue. Later Buddhist philosophers, especially the Yogācāra school, explained the continuity through a “storehouse consciousness” (ālaya-vijñāna) carrying karmic seeds.

Karma in Jainism

For the Jains, karma is literally matter. The universe is filled with fine particles of karmic matter. When the soul acts with passion — anger, pride, deceit, greed — these particles flow in (āsrava) and stick to it, like dust to an oiled body, weighing it down and obscuring its innate omniscience and bliss. Jains classify eight main types of karma: those that obscure knowledge, perception and energy, those that cause deluding passions, and those that determine body, lifespan, status and feelings. Liberation requires both stopping the inflow (saṃvara) by careful, non-violent conduct and burning off existing karma (nirjarā) by austerity. Because any harm to any living being binds karma, the Jain ethic of ahiṃsā is uniquely strict.

Karma in the Bhagavad Gītā

The The Bhagavad Gītā offers the most influential answer to a practical problem: if every action binds, and one cannot stop acting, how can one ever be free? Its answer is karma-yoga, the discipline of action. It is not action that binds, but desire for its fruits. One must act — no one can remain inactive even for a moment — but act without attachment, offering the results to God:

Your right is to action alone, never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction. (2.47)

Selfless action, performed as duty or worship, leaves no binding trace. This teaching made karma a path to liberation rather than only an obstacle, and it shaped the modern activism of Tilak, Gandhi and Vivekananda.

Philosophical problems

Karma has been criticised from within and outside India on several grounds.

Blaming the victim. If suffering is the result of past deeds, the poor, the sick and the oppressed seem to deserve their lot. B. R. Ambedkar argued that the doctrine had been used to make the lower castes accept their degradation as just; the Buddha’s own insistence that not all suffering is karmic was, he said, a liberating corrective. Defenders reply that karma explains suffering but does not justify cruelty: compassion is itself good karma.

Free will. If one’s character and circumstances are the fruit of past karma, is present choice free? Most Indian schools answer that karma shapes tendencies and situations but does not determine choice — “karma is the hand of cards; how you play it is free will”.

Infinite regress. Every life is explained by a previous life, and so on without beginning. Most schools accept that saṃsāra is beginningless (anādi); critics see this as an evasion.

Verifiability. The materialist Cārvāka (Lokāyata) school mocked the whole idea: there is no evidence of past or future lives; “when the body is reduced to ashes, how can it ever return?” The economist and sociologist Max Weber, on the other hand, called karma “the most consistent theodicy ever produced by history” — an explanation of evil that needs no unjust God.

Karma today

Karma remains a living belief for hundreds of millions of Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs. In the West, through Theosophy, the counterculture and popular culture, “karma” has become a loose word for moral payback (“instant karma”, “karma will get them”), usually within a single life — a simplification of a doctrine that, in its homeland, was always also about the long chain of lives and the hope of escape from it.

Karma in conversation

Two lines carry most of the doctrine: Yājñavalkya’s “as a man acts, so he becomes” — karma as the shaping of character, not just of fortune — and the Gītā’s “your right is to action alone, never to its fruits”, which turns karma from a chain into a discipline.