Karma

Origin

The word karma appears already in the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE) with the simple sense of ritual act, but its philosophical meaning is forged in the Upanishads from the eighth century BCE. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad gives the classical formulation: "as one acts, so one becomes; the doer of good becomes good, the doer of evil becomes evil." From there the doctrine spreads through every Indian school. The Bhagavad Gita (c. third century BCE) distinguishes three modes of action: karma yoga (action without attachment), jnana yoga (knowledge), and bhakti yoga (devotion). Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (c. 400 CE) describe karma as the seed-bed (samskara) that drives rebirth.

Karma reached the West in the nineteenth century. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's Theosophical Society (founded 1875) made karma and reincarnation central tenets of its synthesis. Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy refined the model with Christian-Rosicrucian elements. The 1960s and 1970s New Age movement absorbed the term into everyday English, often diluted into the proverb "what goes around comes around." Modern academic study (Wendy Doniger, Gananath Obeyesekere) has restored attention to its complex doctrinal forms across the dharmic religions.

Classical doctrine and Western reception

In the classical Hindu system, karma operates across three temporal layers. Sanchita karma is the accumulated store of all past actions across all lifetimes. Prarabdha karma is the portion of that store that is ripening in the present life and that one must experience. Agami karma (or kriyamana) is the karma being created now by current actions, which will bear fruit later. Liberation (moksha) requires the exhaustion of prarabdha and the cessation of agami through detached action. Buddhism reframes karma as intention (cetana): only volitional acts generate karmic seeds, and the dissolution of self-grasping ends the chain.

Western adaptation tends to simplify the model. Theosophy and New Age teachings often present karma as a moral accounting system that rewards good and punishes bad behaviour, sometimes within a single lifetime. This reading borrows the vocabulary of Indian thought while keeping a fundamentally Christian moral framework. The classical doctrine is more austere: karma is not punishment but mechanism, comparable to gravity rather than to a judge. Sophisticated modern teachers (Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ram Dass) try to recover the original sense, emphasising mindfulness of intention rather than moralistic bookkeeping.

In practice

You work with karma primarily through awareness of intention. Before acting, pause long enough to feel the motive: is it driven by craving, aversion, or clarity? The Buddhist practice of yoniso manasikara (wise attention) trains this discrimination. Karma yoga, the path of action in the Bhagavad Gita, asks you to perform your duty without attachment to the fruit: do what is right because it is right, not for the reward. In daily life this means choosing work that aligns with your dharma and offering its results without clinging.

Meditation purifies the karmic seedbed. Sitting practice exposes the habitual patterns (samskaras) that generate reactive action, and over time loosens their grip. Tibetan Vajrayana adds purification practices such as Vajrasattva recitation. In the Western esoteric reading, you can journal recurring life-patterns and trace them to underlying intentions, working consciously to change the root rather than the symptom. Combine with Saturn work in astrology, the planet traditionally associated with karmic lessons, and with the life path number in numerology to map your specific karmic terrain.

Symbolic depth

Karma connects to many Western symbolic systems. In the tarot, the Justice card and the Wheel of Fortune express the karmic principle: action returns to its source, and the wheel turns according to law rather than caprice. The Judgement card marks the moment of karmic accounting at the threshold of liberation. In Kabbalah, the sephira Gevurah (severity) and the principle of middah keneged middah ("measure for measure") express a parallel doctrine of cosmic justice.

At the deepest level, karma points beyond moral mechanics to the nature of selfhood. If every act shapes the future actor, then "you" are nothing but the cumulative trace of past intentions, a river of conditioning rather than a fixed soul. Liberation is therefore not a reward earned by good karma but the recognition that the karmic agent was never solid to begin with. Continue with dharma, samsara, reincarnation, and akasha. The full glossary offers further pathways.

Also known as

• law of action
• cosmic causality
• cause and effect
• moral law
• karmic law