What is karma and how does it work?

Karma (karma) is the Sanskrit word; in Pali it sounds as kamma. Literally it translates as “action, deed”.

What is kamma?

In AN 6.63 the Buddha says: “It is intention, monks, that I call kamma. Intending, one acts by body, speech and mind”. The key word here is intention (cetanā) - the volitional impulse that expresses itself in a deed of body, speech or mind. So the more precise meaning of “karma” in the Buddhist context is intention, or intentional action. The result of an intentional action, in turn, is the so-called vipāka, the “kammic fruit”. For example, cruel words said in anger and with the intention to insult will lead to obvious “negative” kammic fruits. A mosquito crushed by accident, though, will not turn into a kammic fruit based on killing: the person had no intention to kill.

Also, from the fact that deeds have consequences it does not follow that everything that happens is a consequence of deeds. The view “every experience is caused by past kamma” the Pali canon rejects outright (AN 3.61), and the suttas give no grounds for explaining other people’s illness or poverty by “their kamma”.

The kammic chain can be pictured like this:

• intention (cetanā) sets off a kammic action (kamma-patha);
• the action forms or reinforces a habit and a causal tendency;
• given the right conditions, the tendency bears fruit (vipāka).

The canon (in particular AN 6.63) distinguishes fruits experienced in this life, at the next birth and in a later existence. Sometimes this is spoken of as ripened kamma, whose fruit has already shown up in experience, and as unripened kamma - kammic potential already created but not yet fruiting. One could say it is a “seed” that has not yet met all the conditions needed to sprout.

Since kammic fruits are effectively determined by intention, Buddhism distinguishes two types of it:

• Unwholesome (akusala) intention - an intention born of one of the following:
  1. lobha - greed, clinging;
  2. dosa - hatred, aversion;
  3. moha - ignorance, delusion.
• Wholesome (kusala) intention - an intention born outside these defilements. An unwholesome intention will not yield a wholesome fruit, just as an apple tree will not grow from hogweed seeds.

What karma will a deed produce?

Karma is not retribution under whatever version of morality a society currently holds - that is, rather, a concept of Western religions. The law of kamma is a regularity of conditionality that shapes consequences:

• outwardly - as circumstances;
• inwardly - as inclinations, experiences, habits, clarity or cloudedness of mind;
• in the long run - as the direction of a future rebirth, to speak within the traditional Buddhist frame.

Nor does the canon give an exact calculus of the ripening of kamma. It is one of the four things the Buddha advised not to speculate about, lest one drive oneself to distress (AN 4.77). MN 136 warns that the whole of one’s kamma cannot be judged by the observed outcome: it happens that a person kills all his life and is reborn in a happy world, while another abstains and lands in a bad destination through a deed from the distant past.

What affects the kammic fruit?

The canon holds that the final kammic fruit and its “strength” are determined by a whole set of factors. Taking the killing of an animal as an example, for the act of killing to count as fully completed one usually lists:

1. there is a living being;
2. there is recognition of it as a living being;
3. there is the intention to kill;
4. there is effort directed at killing;
5. death occurs as the result of this action.

If some link is missing, the kamma may be incomplete or weaker. The same principle can be applied to other actions: object, recognition, motive, action, completion.

The courses of action

Clarifying how the law of kamma works, the suttas describe ten wholesome and unwholesome courses of action - kamma-patha (AN 10.176, MN 41). This is a list of deeds that lead to the formation of unwholesome kamma. Accordingly, if one does not commit these deeds (that is, follows the wholesome courses), no unwholesome fruits will form.

The wholesome courses are:

• bodily actions: not to kill, not to take what is not given, not to act wrongly in sensual pleasures (kāmesu micchācāra - first of all sexual misconduct: sex with those under the care of relatives, married, betrothed or protected by law);
• actions of speech: not to lie, not to divide people, not to speak harshly, not to chatter idly;
• intentions of mind: not to nurse covetous longing for anything, or enmity and ill will, and not to hold wrong views (denial of the law of kamma, of rebirth, of the Four Noble Truths).

Can karma or its fruits be changed?

A done deed cannot be rewritten, nor can karma be cancelled. But one can influence how it will manifest - for example, through remorse (not to be confused with self-flagellation out of guilt) and ceasing to repeat unwholesome deeds, as well as through acquiring wholesome merit.

If the wholesome courses of action are mostly about what not to do, the three bases for making merit (puñña-kiriya-vatthu, DN 33) define the formation of wholesome kamma:

• giving (dāna);
• virtue (sīla);
• development of mind (bhāvanā).

Such actions in the present do not erase the past, but they weaken its effect on us. A handful of salt makes a cup of water undrinkable, yet the same salt thrown into a full river will not change the taste of its water at all (AN 3.100).

The cessation of kamma

For all this attention to wholesome deeds and intentions, the goal of Buddhism is not to improve a person’s karma. Kamma is one of the factors of samsara - in essence, the motor that generates endless suffering. That is why a better rebirth cannot be the goal of a teaching that has set itself the task of ending that suffering. Wholesome karma and its fruits are seen only as necessary means for purifying the mind to the degree needed for the practice that leads to liberation.

That is why AN 6.63 calls the Noble Eightfold Path the way to the cessation of kamma. And arahants, beings who have fully realised the path, are described in the suttas as those who create no more new kamma and will have no new birth, which inevitably leads to suffering.

Where to read: MN 135, MN 136, MN 61.