Karma (action and its fruit)

Karma (Pali kamma, literally "action") is the principle that our actions carry moral consequences which ripen over time, helping to shape our future experience and even our future lives. This is a pan-Indian idea: Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism all hold versions of it, each in its own form. It is not a system of reward-and-punishment handed down by a judge, and it is not blind fate — it is more like a natural law of moral cause and effect woven into how reality works.

The distinctively Buddhist move was made by the Buddha himself, who recentered karma on intention. "It is intention (cetanā) that I call karma," he said: what makes an action morally weighty is the will or motive behind it, not the outward form of the deed or the performance of a ritual. This was pointed in his own setting, where some traditions stressed correct ceremony or ritual purity. By contrast, Buddhism locates the moral force of an action in the mind — in whether a deed springs from greed, hatred, and delusion or from generosity, kindness, and clarity.

Two clarifications keep this accurate. First, karma is not fatalism: it is one stream of causes among many, and present choices genuinely matter, so a person is never simply trapped by the past. Second, in Buddhism karma operates without any permanent soul carrying the account from life to life. There is only a continuous, ever-changing stream of cause and effect — no fixed self that "owns" the karma, but a flowing process in which wholesome and unwholesome intentions condition what comes next, in this life and beyond.