Karma, in plain words
People tend to use karma as a threat. That will come back on you. Karma is going to catch up with him. So it is easy to think of it as a kind of cosmic punishment, waiting.
The word is Sanskrit and it means action. At its simplest, karma is cause and effect. Every word, thought and action sends some energy out into the world, and what we have sent out shapes what is happening to us now.
You have heard it put other ways. What goes around comes around. You get what you give. Poetic justice. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Karma is one of the most important ideas in Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism, and the different schools within them explain it in different ways. That is a big part of why it confuses people. What follows is the general idea.
Intention counts most
The general theory goes like this. When you act with good intentions, those intentions come from the mind, and they leave a trace, an imprint, in the mind. Act out of greed, or do something unkind, and that leaves an imprint too.
So the outcome depends less on the act itself and more on the reason behind it. Two people can do the same kind thing, one out of real care and one to be seen doing it, and the tradition would say they are leaving very different marks.
The dictionary version is the one that worries people. It describes karma as the sum of everything a person has done in one life, deciding what happens to them in the next. However you read it, the responsibility sits with each of us. Your karma is entirely your own making.
The four laws
- Results are like their cause. Cause harm or suffering and harm or suffering comes back to you.
- Nothing happens without a cause. Things do not appear out of nowhere. There is always a reason behind them.
- Once an action is done, its result is never lost. Actions, and what comes of them, do not just disappear.
- Karma grows. Once an action is imprinted in the mind, it easily becomes a habit.
The hopeful part
Seen this way, karma is the result of old beliefs, old attitudes and old choices. They keep playing out, over and over, until we become aware of them and decide to choose something else.
Nothing about that is fixed. By the time you are over 50 you have a good long list of old habits to look at, and any one of them can be changed.
From the archive. First written for my journal years ago, and rewritten for life after 50.
