Karma

karma can be traced back to ancient India, where it was first used in the Hindu religion. The term "karma" comes from the Sanskrit word "karman," which means "action" or "deed." In Hinduism, karma is one of the central tenets of the religion, and it is believed that all actions have consequences, both in this life and in future ones.

The idea of karma was also present in other ancient Indian religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism. In Buddhism, karma is seen as the force that determines our future existence, while in Jainism, karma is seen as a physical substance that is accumulated through our actions.

Understanding Karma

In its simplest form, karma can be understood as the idea that our actions have consequences. This means that if we do something good, something good will happen to us, while if we do something bad, something bad will happen to us. However, the concept of karma is more complex than this, as it involves not only our actions but also our intentions and the context in which our actions take place.

In Hinduism, karma is understood as a cycle of cause and effect. This means that every action we take creates a ripple effect that will eventually return to us. The consequences of our actions are not always immediate, and they may not even occur in this lifetime. Instead, they may manifest in a future life, or they may have an impact on the world around us that we cannot even imagine.

In Buddhism, karma is understood as a force that determines our future existence. It is believed that our actions in this life will determine the circumstances of our next life. If we live a virtuous life, we will be reborn into a higher state of existence, while if we live an unvirtuous life, we will be reborn into a lower state of existence.

In both Hinduism and Buddhism, karma is seen as a way of explaining the inequalities and injustices of the world. It is believed that everyone is responsible for their own actions and that the consequences of those actions will eventually catch up with them.

In the Western world, the concept of karma has become popularized in recent years, and it is often used to describe the idea that what goes around comes around. This understanding of karma focuses more on the idea of cause and effect and less on the idea of rebirth or future existence.

Karma is a concept that has been present in various spiritual and religious traditions throughout history. It is often used to describe the idea that the consequences of our actions have a way of returning to us, either in this life or in a future one. The concept of karma is complex and involves not only our actions but also our intentions and the context in which our actions take place. It is seen as a way of explaining the inequalities and injustices of the world and as a reminder that we are responsible for our own actions.

The earliest evidence of the term’s expansion into an ethical domain is provided in the Upanishads, a genre of the Vedas (sacred scriptures) concerned with ontology, or the philosophical study of being. In the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, the Vedic theologian Yajnavalkya expressed a belief that later became commonplace but was considered new and esoteric at the time: “A man turns into something good by good action and into something bad by bad action.” Although within the Vedic ritual tradition “good action” and “bad action” may have included both ritual and moral acts, this moral aspect of karma increasingly dominated theological discourse, especially in the religions of Buddhism and Jainism, which emerged about the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. Both of these religions embraced ascetic modes of life and rejected the ritual concerns of the Brahman priests.

The connection between the ritual and moral dimensions of karma is especially evident in the notion of karma as a causal law, popularly known as the “law of karma.” Many religious traditions —notably the Abrahamic religions that emerged in the Middle East (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)—place reward and punishment for human actions in the hands of a divine lawgiver. In contrast, the classical traditions of India—Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, much like the Vedic sacrificial theology that preceded them—view karma as operating according to an autonomous causal law. No divine will or external agent intervenes in the relationship of the moral act to its inevitable result. The law of karma thus represents a markedly nontheistic theodicy, or explanation of why there is evil in the world.

Once a divine judge is taken out of the equation, a new question arises: within a causal sequence, how can an act produce an effect at a future time far removed from the act’s performance? Different Indian moral philosophies provide different answers, but all acknowledge some kind of karmic residue resulting from the initial act. Jainism, for example, regards karma as a fine particulate substance that settles on the soul (jiva) of one who commits immoral actions or has immoral thoughts, making it impure and heavy and miring it in the material world of rebirth. The Vedic ritualistic tradition that preceded Hinduism contributed the concept of the apurva, the latent potency created within the soul by ritual and moral actions. Much like a seed, an apurva sprouts into new realities in the distant future. Other traditions—e.g., Yoga and Buddhism—provide psychological explanations in which karmic residue produces dispositional tendencies (samskaras) and psychological traces (vasanas) that determine the future births and personality traits of an individual. Each of these examples demonstrates how the concept of karma provided a bridge between cause and effect separated by time.

The doctrine of karma implies that one person’s karma cannot have an effect on another person’s future. Yet, while karma is in theory specific to each individual, many aspects of Indian religions reflect the widely held belief that karma may be shared. For example, the doctrine of the transfer of merit, whereby one person can transfer his good karma to another, is found in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Ancestral offerings and other rituals for the departed show that acts done by the living are believed to influence the well-being of the dead. Finally, pious activities, including pilgrimages, are often performed for the benefit of living or deceased relatives.