Doctrines

Karma

Also Known As Kamma · action and its fruitOriginal Term karman (Sanskrit, action)

Action, Rebirth and Consequence

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Karma." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/doctrines/karma.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Karma. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/doctrines/karma

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-karma,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Karma},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/doctrines/karma},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Origin 800 BCE to 500 BCE

Karma means action, and by extension the consequence that action carries. The general principle is shared: what is done conditions what follows, across lives as well as within them. Beneath that the traditions differ enough that a single account of karma would misrepresent all of them.

It is not divine judgement. In the classical formulations nobody sits in judgement, no sentence is passed, and no record is kept by an official. The process is closer to a natural regularity than to a court, and it is impersonal in the way that a law of physics is impersonal. Some Hindu theistic schools do bring God in as the agency that dispenses the fruits of action, on the argument that unconscious residues cannot arrange their own consequences, but that is a specific theological addition made in the face of a recognised difficulty, not the default meaning of the word.

Buddhism makes karma a matter of intention. The Buddha's reported identification of action with volition is the pivot of the Buddhist account, and it moves the whole subject inward: an act done without intention does not carry the same weight, and the mental disposition rather than the outward event is what conditions the future.

Jainism is the outlier and the most concrete. Karma there is a subtle material substance which flows into the soul and adheres to it, obscuring its innate qualities in something like the way dust obscures a surface. This is not a metaphor within the system. It explains why Jain practice is organised around stopping the influx and shedding what has accumulated, and why Jain asceticism is more severe than its neighbours: if the problem is accreted matter, then austerity is a technique for removing it.

The popular English use, in which karma means an ironic comeuppance arriving promptly, has almost no relation to any of these.

Facts

Belief

Defining Doctrinal Position

Buddhist teaching ties karma to intention rather than to the act alone, and holds that its effects can be altered by later action rather than being fixed like fate; Hindu and Jain formulations vary in how mechanically karma is held to operate. 2

Status

Status Within the Tradition

Standard teaching, not formally defined 1Hinduism

The received law of action and consequence

Doctrinal Category

Action, Rebirth and Consequence 1

Tradition

Scriptural Basis

The concept is expounded across the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Pali Canon, each within its own doctrinal framework. 1

Origins

Origin Period

800 BCE to 500 BCE 1

Held By

Hinduism; Buddhism; Jainism; Sikhism 1

The Claim

That intentional action generates consequences for the actor, binding future experience, whether in this life or across rebirths, to past deeds. 2

Learn More

Action and Its Fruit, Not Divine Judgement

Karma means, literally, "action," and in its doctrinal sense it is the principle that actions carry consequences that return to the actor. It is emphatically not reward and punishment handed down by a god: it is closer to an impersonal law of the moral universe, in which deeds ripen into results across this life and future ones, without a judge deciding each case.

The idea appears in developed form in the older Upanishads, which forge the link between action, rebirth and the moral quality of a life, the Brihadaranyaka teaches that a person becomes good by good action and bad by bad. The Bhagavad Gita then reframes the problem: since all embodied life involves action, the way out cannot be inaction but karma yoga, acting without attachment to the fruits, so that deeds no longer bind. From these roots karma became the shared grammar of the Indian religions, and, precisely because it is shared, a term the traditions fill with substantially different content.

Three Traditions, Three Mechanisms

The atlas keeps the traditions' accounts distinct, because they disagree about what karma is and what carries it.

In Hinduism, broadly, karma attaches to the enduring self (atman) and binds it to the round of rebirth; its store can be worked off, and various paths, disciplined action, knowledge, and above all loving devotion, can offset or dissolve it, some schools holding that God's grace can cancel karmic debt outright. In Buddhism, karma is redefined as intention: "It is intention (cetana) that I call karma," the Buddha says in the Anguttara Nikaya; what ripens is the moral quality of the will behind an act. Because Buddhism denies a permanent self, it must explain how karma is carried without a soul to carry it, and answers with an unbroken causal continuity rather than a transmigrating substance. In Jainism, karma is the most literal of all: a kind of subtle matter that actually flows into the soul (jiva) and sticks to it, weighing it down, so that liberation requires both stopping the inflow and burning off the accumulated matter through austerity. The same word thus names a moral law, a psychology of intention, and a physics of the soul.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Affirmed By

Karma: action determines future rebirth

Reconciliation: affirmed Belief -> contested Doctrine concept (Karma).

Belongs to Tradition

Buddhism

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Hinduism

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Jainism

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Mahayana