What karma actually is
The word karma means action — not consequence. The doctrine says that intentional actions (cetanā) create saṃskāras — impressions, residues — in the mind-stream, which condition future arising. Good actions condition positive future experience; harmful actions condition negative future experience. The mechanism is closer to habit-formation than to cosmic punishment: intentions build grooves, grooves shape future responses, future responses generate fresh intentions. The chain is not deterministic — the point of the teaching is that awareness can interrupt it.
Karma in Hinduism
The Bhagavad Gītā introduces the doctrine's most important refinement: niṣkāma karma — action without attachment to its fruit. Act rightly, without insisting on a particular outcome; the action accrues no binding karma when the doer is not invested in the result. This is karma yoga — the yoga of action — and it is why, in the Hindu framework, a soldier, a merchant and a monk can each follow the path without changing their station. Sadhguru's Inner Engineering works in this territory, as does Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi*. Ram Dass enacted it: the founding of the Seva Foundation to address blindness in the developing world was explicitly framed as karma yoga in practice.
Karma in Buddhism
The Buddhist teaching differs in one critical respect: there is no permanent self that accumulates karma. Rather, karma-influenced states arise in a stream of experience with no unchanging bearer. The 'person' who acted and the 'person' who experiences the consequence are neither identical nor entirely different — they are connected, as a flame passed from one candle to another is neither the same flame nor a different one. Theravāda, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna describe the mechanics of this differently, but all agree that intention is the operative force.
What it isn't
Karma is not fate, not punishment, and not a cosmic accounting system that balances every injustice in the fullness of time. The doctrine does not say your circumstances are deserved, or that the oppressed are suffering consequences of prior actions. It says that what you do with intention shapes what you experience — a claim about the architecture of mind, not a theodicy. The widespread New Age use of 'good karma' and 'bad karma' as moral scorekeeping retains the word while discarding the mechanism it described.
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