What Is Karma?
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
In common English, karma has come to mean something like cosmic payback, where bad people get what is coming to them. In the traditions the word comes from, it means something more precise and considerably less satisfying: action, and the consequences that follow from action.
The original sense of the word
The Sanskrit word karma simply means action or deed. The doctrine holds that intentional actions produce effects that shape future experience, either within this life or across lives in traditions that hold to rebirth.
Intention is central. In Buddhist thought especially, the mental state behind an act is what generates karmic consequence, so the same outward action performed carelessly, maliciously or compassionately produces different results.
Why it is not punishment
This is the biggest difference from the popular version. Karma in these traditions is generally described as an impersonal process, closer to a natural regularity than to a judge issuing sentences. There is no one deciding what you deserve.
The usual analogy is planting. A seed produces its own kind of plant, not because anyone is rewarding the planter but because that is how seeds work. Whether a deity is involved at all varies between traditions, and in Buddhism there is no such judge.
How different traditions treat it
The concept appears across several Indian traditions with real differences:
- •Hinduism links karma to dharma, duty appropriate to one's situation and stage of life
- •Buddhism emphasises intention and treats karma as one factor among several, not the cause of everything
- •Jainism has an unusually literal account, treating karma as a subtle physical substance that adheres to the soul
- •Sikh tradition holds karma alongside the possibility of divine grace
The problems people raise
Karma has been criticised, including from within these traditions, for how it can be applied to suffering. If misfortune results from past action, it becomes possible to treat suffering people as deserving it, which has been used to justify social inequality.
Teachers in these traditions have pushed back against that reading for a long time. Buddhist texts explicitly list several causes of suffering besides karma, including illness, weather and the actions of others, and warn against assuming any particular misfortune is karmic.
Karma in everyday English
The English usage is a genuine borrowing that has drifted a long way. Saying that karma got someone usually means a satisfying short-term comeuppance, which is close to the opposite of a doctrine concerned with long-term consequences and personal intention.
Neither usage is wrong in its own context. It is simply worth knowing that the casual English sense and the religious concept overlap far less than the shared word suggests.
Karma and rebirth
In the traditions where karma originates, it is usually tied to samsara, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Actions in one life are held to influence circumstances in the next, which is why the doctrine is often described as operating over very long timescales.
The stated goal in these traditions is not to accumulate good karma indefinitely but to be released from the cycle altogether, described as moksha in Hindu thought and nirvana in Buddhist thought. Good actions improve conditions within the cycle, while liberation requires something more than a favourable balance.
The takeaway
Karma means intentional action and the consequences that follow from it, treated as an impersonal process rather than punishment handed down by a judge, and the English sense of instant comeuppance is a considerable departure from the original.