Karma, rightly told

The teaching

As the Indian teaching on action and its fruit teaches it.

Action, intention and fruit

Karma is action, and every action has its fruit, phala, as a seed has its plant. The Buddha put the weight on the will: it is intention that he calls karma, for having intended, one acts by body, speech and mind. A harm done by accident is not the same karma as a harm done on purpose, and a deed willed but not done is already karma of the mind. The fruit is not handed down by a judge. It grows from the act itself as its ripening, vipaka, and it may ripen in this life, in the next, or in some life after that.

The ten courses of action

The Buddhist discourses count ten unwholesome courses of action. Three are of the body: killing, taking what is not given, and wrongdoing in sexual matters. Four are of speech: lying, divisive speech, harsh speech and idle chatter. Three are of the mind: covetousness, ill will and wrong view.

Their opposites are the ten wholesome courses, each a refraining and the good that stands against it: to protect life, to give, to keep faith in love, to speak truly, to heal quarrels, to speak gently, to speak to the purpose, to be content with one's own, to wish others well, and to see rightly. These are the seeds of a good rebirth, and still more of a good life now.

The lump of salt

Karma is not a fixed price list. The Buddha taught it with a lump of salt. Dropped into a cup of water, it makes the water undrinkable; dropped into the river Ganges, it leaves the river as sweet as before. In the same way the same small wrong, done by a person of little restraint and little wisdom, can bear heavy fruit, while done by one who has grown in virtue and wisdom it is felt lightly and soon spent. If a person had to reap exactly as they sowed, the discourse says, the holy life would be pointless, for no growth could change what is coming.

Not everything is karma

When the wanderer Sivaka asked whether everything a person feels comes from past action, the Buddha answered that those who think so go beyond what they know for themselves and beyond what the world holds true, and he named causes of pain that are not past karma at all. He also rejected three views because they leave nothing to do: that all one feels is due to past deeds, that all is due to the making of a supreme god, and that all happens without any cause. Each, he said, takes away the wish and the effort to do what should be done and leave undone what should not.

The traditions differ here. The Jains of the Buddha's day held that all feeling comes from past karma, and the Buddha argued against them. The Hindu schools give the shape of a life to karma ripening, while teaching that present effort is always free to act.

The four imponderables

The Buddha counted the exact working out of karma among four things not to be speculated about, with the range of a buddha's powers, the range of deep meditation, and the origin of the world. Anyone who tries to work it out, he said, will reap only madness and vexation. The teaching is meant to guide what one does now. It is not a key for explaining why someone else suffers.

Stored, ripening and new

The Hindu teachers divide karma by time. Sanchita is the whole store gathered over countless lives. Prarabdha is the portion that has begun to bear fruit and has shaped this life: its body, its family, its span. Agami, also called kriyamana, is what present acts are making now. The teachers explain them with an archer. The arrows in the quiver are the store; the arrow already loosed is the ripening portion, which cannot be called back; and the arrow on the string is the new karma, still in the archer's hand.

Knowledge of the self, the Gita says, burns all karma to ashes as a kindled fire burns wood. Yet the arrow in flight still lands: the ripening portion runs its course until the body falls, as a potter's wheel goes on turning after the potter has taken away his hand.

Action without clinging

The Gita does not teach escape from action, since no one can stay without acting even for a moment. It teaches a way of acting that does not bind. You have a right to the work alone, Krishna says, and never to its fruits; let the fruit not be your motive, and do not cling to doing nothing either. Act with an even mind in success and failure, which the Gita calls yoga, and offer what you do: whatever you eat, whatever you give, whatever discipline you keep, make it an offering. Action done so plants no seed of craving, and so it does not tie the doer to another birth.

Karma as fine matter

For the Jains karma is a fine matter that binds the soul, and they count eight kinds. Four obscure the soul's own powers: the karmas that cover knowledge, that cover perception, that delude, and that obstruct its energy. Four shape the embodied life: the karmas that bring pleasant and painful feeling, that fix the length of a life, that give the body its kind and form, and that set the family and standing into which one is born. How long a binding lasts and how hard it presses depends on how strongly the passions burned when the act was done.

The Jains picture the colouring the passions give the soul as six leshyas, from black, blue and grey to red, yellow and white, and teach them with six hungry travellers who come upon a fruit tree. The first wants to uproot the whole tree, the second to cut its trunk, the third its great branches, the fourth the small boughs that bear the fruit, the fifth to pick only the fruit, and the sixth to eat only what has fallen to the ground. All six are hungry. The darker the wish, the more it destroys to get what it wants.

Grace beside karma

The devotional traditions add that action is not the last word. In the Gita's closing teaching Krishna says: give up all duties and take refuge in me alone; I will free you from every wrong; do not grieve. The Sikh scripture holds the two together in a line of the Japji, Guru Nanak's morning prayer: by karma comes this garment, the body, and by grace the gate of liberation. In these teachings karma explains the shape of a life, and love and grace decide its end.

The teaching looks forward

The Dhammapada opens with the whole teaching in two verses. Mind goes before all things: speak or act with a corrupted mind, and suffering follows as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart; speak or act with a clear mind, and happiness follows like a shadow that never leaves. Its later summary is shorter still: to refrain from all evil, to do what is good, and to purify one's own mind, that is the teaching of the buddhas. Rightly told, karma looks forward. It asks what is being planted now.