Karma has entered English as a word for cosmic payback — what goes around comes around, with the universe keeping score. That is not the Buddhist doctrine, and the gap between the two is wide enough to be worth closing carefully.

The definition #

Karma (Pali kamma) means “action.” The Buddha’s technical definition narrows it decisively:

“It is volition that I call karma. Having willed, one acts by body, speech, and mind.” (Anguttara Nikaya 6:63)

Karma is intention — the mental act of willing. Physical and verbal behaviour are how intention expresses itself, and they matter, but the karmic weight is in the volition.

Richard Gombrich has argued that this definition was a genuine innovation and a deliberately provocative one. The brahminical tradition used karman for ritual action: the correct performance of sacrifice produced results. The Jains used it for action of any kind, with physical harm accruing regardless of intent. The Buddha took a term everyone used for external action and redefined it as an internal event — which, as Gombrich puts it, ethicised the universe.

What follows from the definition #

Intention determines karmic weight. Two people perform the same physical act; the karma differs according to what was intended. The canon works through this with surgeons and killers, and the Jains are shown losing an argument on exactly this point.

Accidents are not karma. Stepping on an unseen insect, or harming someone while genuinely trying to help, does not generate the karma of killing or harming. It may generate other things — carelessness has its own consequences — but not that.

Mental action counts. Sustained cultivation of resentment is karmically active whether or not it is ever expressed. This is one reason meditation is treated as ethically significant rather than as a private exercise.

There is no judge. Nothing decides cases. The tradition describes karma as a natural regularity, like the way a seed of a particular kind produces a particular plant — which is the tradition’s own favourite image, and the source of the language of “planting seeds” and “fruits” (phala, vipaka).

How it is classified #

The Abhidharma sorts karma along several axes, and the categories are practically useful.

By ethical quality. Kusala, wholesome, rooted in non-greed, non-hatred, non-delusion. Akusala, unwholesome, rooted in greed, hatred, delusion. The two words are worth noting — they mean “skilful” and “unskilful” as much as “good” and “bad,” which frames ethics as competence rather than obedience.

By door of expression. Bodily, verbal, and mental.

By timing of result. Karma that ripens in this life; karma that ripens in the next; karma that ripens in some subsequent life; and karma that becomes defunct, never ripening because the conditions for it do not arise.

By function. Generative karma, which produces a rebirth; supportive karma, which reinforces a result already operating; obstructive karma, which weakens it; and destructive karma, which cuts off a weaker karma’s result entirely.

The last category matters. Karma is not a fixed quantity of debits and credits. Results can be diminished, obstructed, or prevented by subsequent action, which is precisely why the path is possible.

The salt crystal #

The Lonaphala Sutta (AN 3:100) gives the tradition’s clearest statement that results are not proportional to acts in any simple way.

A lump of salt dropped into a cup of water makes the water undrinkable. The same lump dropped into the Ganges does not. The same karma, the Buddha says, produces very different results depending on the person who does it — specifically, on whether that person is undeveloped in body, virtue, mind, and wisdom, or developed.

The discourse goes further: a person of developed character may experience as a minor difficulty in this life a karma that would, for an undeveloped person, produce rebirth in hell.

This is the doctrinal basis for something practitioners often find surprising: what most determines how karma ripens is not the act but the character of the continuum it ripens in. Cultivating that character is more consequential than accounting for individual deeds.

What karma does not explain #

This is where popular presentations go furthest wrong, and where the canon is most explicit.

The Sivaka Sutta (SN 36:21) lists eight causes of experienced feeling: disorders of bile, of phlegm, or of wind; an imbalance of these; changes of climate; careless behaviour; external assault; and the ripening of karma.

Karma is one of eight. The Buddha then names the view that “whatever a person experiences is caused by what was done before” as a wrong view that goes beyond what is known and beyond what is accepted in the world.

The Devadaha Sutta (MN 101) makes the same argument against the Jains at length: if all present experience were caused by past action, then present effort would be pointless, and the entire path would be incoherent.

So: a person who is ill, poor, or harmed may be experiencing karmic result, or may be experiencing illness, injustice, or another person’s cruelty, which have their own causes. The doctrine does not license the inference from suffering to desert.

The misuse #

It has been misused anyway, throughout Buddhist history and across every tradition. The inference from a person’s condition to their past conduct has been used to explain caste, poverty, disability, gender, and low birth, and to justify leaving them alone.

The clearest modern rejection came from B. R. Ambedkar, who removed rebirth-karma from his presentation of Buddhism precisely because he saw it functioning in India as the ideological support of caste.

A reader can hold the doctrine and refuse the inference, and the texts give the grounds for doing so. But it is worth being clear that the inference is common, that it causes harm, and that “it’s their karma” is usually a way of declining to help rather than a piece of Buddhist analysis.

Karma and freedom #

Karma is not determinism, and the tradition attacks deterministic views in the strongest language it uses about anything. Makkhali Gosala, who taught that beings’ destinies are fixed and that effort accomplishes nothing, is described as the most harmful of all teachers.

The structure is this: past karma conditions the situation you find yourself in — your body, your circumstances, your temperament, the tendencies that arise. It does not determine your response. The response is present volition, which is fresh karma.

This is why the tradition can hold both that your circumstances are conditioned and that you are responsible. Conditions are given; what you do with them is not.

Merit #

In practice, across Buddhist Asia, the operative concept is punna — merit, the accumulation of wholesome karma.

Merit is made by generosity (above all, supporting the monastic community), by keeping the precepts, and by mental cultivation. It can be dedicated or transferred to others, particularly to deceased relatives — a practice that fits awkwardly with strict karmic individualism and has been the subject of considerable commentarial ingenuity.

The merit economy is, historically, what most Buddhists have actually been doing most of the time. Presentations that treat it as peripheral superstition are describing modern reformed Buddhism rather than the tradition. See Buddhist Modernism.

Can karma be exhausted? #

Yes — this is what liberation consists of.

An arahant continues to act but generates no new karma, because the actions of one in whom greed, hatred, and delusion are extinguished do not have the karmic function; they are described as kiriya, merely functional. Existing karma continues to ripen while the body lasts — the Buddha still had headaches and a bad back — and ceases at parinibbana.

Mahayana adds mechanisms for purification: confession practices, the recitation of dharanis, the six perfections performed with emptiness, and the dedication of merit. The underlying logic is the same — karma is conditioned, and what is conditioned can be affected.

Common questions #

Is karma fair? The tradition does not describe it as a system of justice administered by anyone. It describes it as a regularity, like gravity. Whether a universe with that regularity is fair is a question the texts do not take up in those terms.

Can I know my past karma? The tradition holds that highly developed practitioners can recollect past lives — it is the first of the three knowledges — and that tracing the working-out of karma in detail is among the four “unconjecturable” matters that will bring vexation to anyone who tries.

If there is no self, whose karma is it? The continuum’s. Karma is not owned by an entity; it is a property of a causal stream. The Milindapanha’s answer to the analogous question about rebirth applies here: not the same person, not a different one.

Do good intentions excuse bad outcomes? Intention determines karmic weight, not whether an outcome was good. A well-intentioned action that causes harm generates no karma of harming, and the harm is still real and still requires repair. The doctrine is about the actor’s mind, not about the ethics of the whole situation.

Is karma the same in Hinduism? The word and the broad framework are shared; the content differs. Brahminical usage tied karman to ritual duty, and the Bhagavad Gita’s teaching on acting without attachment to fruits addresses a different problem. The Buddhist redefinition as intention is distinctive.

Sources & further reading #

Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 1 — the most careful account of what the doctrine claims. Bhikkhu Bodhi (ed.), In the Buddha’s Words (Wisdom, 2005), ch. 5 — the key discourses, including the salt crystal. Richard Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought (Equinox, 2009), ch. 4 — on the redefinition of karma as intention. Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi (trans.), The Middle Length Discourses (Wisdom, 1995), MN 101 and MN 135 — the argument against determinism and the discourse on the results of action. Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford, 1998), ch. 5.