What is Karma?

What is karma? In Buddhist philosophy, karma is the principle of cause and effect applied to the activity of mind. The Sanskrit word simply means action — but in the dharma it carries something more specific: action as cause, and the imprints that action leaves behind. Everything we do — with body, speech, and mind — plants something. Those seeds ripen when conditions allow, and what grows from them shapes the next moment, the next year, the next lifetime.

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Karma is not fate or destiny. It is not harsh or cold, and it is not a cosmic scoreboard deciding whether you deserve a parking space or a diagnosis. Karma is a principle of profound responsiveness. The future is not determined — it is cultivated. And a garden can always be tended differently.

This is also why, in the tradition, understanding karma clearly is considered the central pillar of the four common preliminaries — the basic thoughts that turn the mind toward dharma. Nothing opens without this ground. So let’s explore it together.

Karma the Basic Principle: You Are a Garden

When we plant a carrot, a carrot grows. Not an apple tree. Not randomly — a carrot. The seed doesn’t care whether you wanted an apple. It simply becomes what it was always becoming. Karma works the same way. We don’t always get to choose the harvest, but we always choose the planting.

Karma can be understood from three perspectives, each one deeper than the last. The first is the most practical: a framework of avoidance, or to do no harm. With the body: taking life, stealing, causing sexual harm. With speech: lying, slander, divisive talk, idle chatter that fragments rather than connects. With the mind: ill will, envy, and views that deny cause and effect entirely. These aren’t commandments handed down from outside. They are a map of where the deepest weeds grow — the actions that leave the heaviest imprints, the ones most difficult to work with later.

The tradition is especially clear about five actions of immediate consequence: harming one’s parents, harming an arhat or bodhisattva, injuring a teacher or a representation of the Buddha, or causing a schism in the sangha. What these share is that they sever or corrupt the channels through which wisdom and compassion move across generations. The weight isn’t merely personal — it damages something the dharma depends on.

Working With Karma: The Poker Table Test

Because karma is causal and not fated, it can be worked with. This is the part that changes everything.

The tradition identifies four factors that amplify any karmic action — positive or negative. First, that you are fully conscious of what you are doing. Second, that you intend it. Third, that you carry it through. Fourth, that you feel good about it afterward. Strip any one of these away and the imprint is lighter. Stack all four and it goes even deeper.

Here is where it gets interesting — and where a thought experiment sharpens the edge of this teaching considerably.

Consider bluffing at poker.

Everyone at the table agreed to the game. The deception is part of the rules — it is, in fact, the whole point. You look at your hand. A 2 of clubs. A 3 of hearts. Worthless. You push everything forward anyway. All in. You keep a straight face. You pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and rake in the chips. Is that karma? Does it count?

On one level, the social frame seems to protect you. Consent is real and it matters — Buddhist ethics takes it seriously. The traditional definition of a harmful lie involves creating a false impression in a mind that did not agree to be deceived. And everyone at this table agreed. The rules were written down before a single card was dealt. That is genuine consent, clearly negotiated. Nobody was ambushed.

So consent can genuinely protect the other person. But here is what it cannot do: it cannot reach inside your mind and clean out what just happened there.

You knew your hand was weak — factor one, full awareness. You planned the bluff before the action — factor two, clear intention. You pushed the chips in — factor three, completed action. And when you won, you felt the satisfaction of having pulled it off — factor four, complete. That imprint is fully formed. The table’s permission structure was never the variable karma was tracking.

And this is where consent requires one more careful look. Consent only does its protective work — even for the other person — when it has been clearly and explicitly negotiated. Poker works as a clean example precisely because there is no ambiguity. Everyone bought in knowingly. But most real-world situations where people invoke we both know what this is are far murkier. The colleague who assumes the other person is playing the same game. The negotiator who reads silence as agreement to be outmanoeuvred. The friendship where sharp humour is just how we are — except one person never quite agreed to that framing. In all these cases, the person causing harm is borrowing the moral shelter of poker-style consent without having actually built it. They assumed the frame rather than established it. And an assumed frame is not a negotiated frame.

This is where the teaching becomes precise. Even if consent could protect the other person, you have to have actually obtained it — not decided they probably gave it. The moment you are determining for someone else that they have consented, you are already deep in the territory that karma tracks most carefully: the gap between what you told yourself and what you knew.

Which brings us back to the poker table and the question the cards are really asking. The other players pulled wool over their own eyes the moment they sat down. But you still practised comfortable deception. And the mind that practises something, even in a game, even with full consent on all sides, gets better at it. The bluff doesn’t stay at the table. It comes home with you.

Am I fooling them — or have I been fooling myself all along?

Science has started paying attention to exactly this dynamic. A 2023 study found that simply priming people with karmic thinking — just holding the concept in mind — measurably reduced dishonesty in anonymous experiments, even when lying would have been financially rewarded and no one was watching. No social permission structure. No audience. What changed was only the internal frame. Which confirms what the dharma has always said: karma operates from the inside, not the outside. The table’s rules were never the point.

Tending the Garden: Working With What’s Already Planted

For negative karma already planted, Gampopa gives us four antidotes in the Jewel Ornament of Liberation: genuine regret for what was done, active effort to repair its harm where possible, a sincere resolve not to repeat it, and a renewal of refuge — a re-orientation toward what is good and true. See it clearly, feel its weight, decide differently, and do the opposite.

The balance should not be fifty-fifty. If the scales of a life were perfectly even — equal good and harm — that would be a kind of tragedy. We are aiming for something far more lopsided than that 100 to 1!

And never forget: it is precisely because of karma that the positive imprints of meditation lead to enlightenment. Meditation is the cause and enlightenment is the effect. We can use the same mechanism that creates confusion to dismantle it. Premeditated kindness — deliberate, wholehearted, fully conscious generosity — lands differently than an accidental good deed. The universe is not just tracking what you do. It is tracking the quality of awareness you bring to it.

The View From the Top: There Is No Karma

Now — and only now that we have walked through all of this — I want to complicate everything I just said.

The Chittamatra school, the Mind Only school of Buddhist philosophy, teaches that there is only mind. When we press on this — if there is only mind, is there even mind? — we find ourselves in interesting trouble. The Madhyamaka school goes further still: even the concept of mind has no intrinsic existence. It is a designation, a label applied to a process, not a thing that stands independently. And if mind itself is like that, then karma — which is an activity of mind — is also like that.

This does not mean karma doesn’t matter. It means karma, like everything else, is empty of inherent existence. It arises dependently. It functions conventionally, powerfully, with real consequences. And yet it points beyond itself, the way a signpost points beyond itself to a destination it can never quite be.

When we examine the chain of cause and effect closely, we can easily see the fault in the logic when we ask: what came first, the seed or the tree? This dependent existence is dualistic in its very nature. We must eventually find a way past this dualism — past the black and white, and even past the grey that sits between them. Beyond even the middle way.

The Boat and the Mountain

Imagine you are hiking in the mountains and you come to a river. It is too deep to wade, moving too fast to swim. You need a boat. Karma is the boat. You use it — gratefully, carefully — to cross to the other side. But once you reach that shore, you don’t strap the boat to your back and carry it up the mountain. You leave it on the shore, with gratitude, and continue.

Karma is a tool. An extraordinarily precise and powerful tool. We use it until we don’t need it. And the way we stop needing it is by using it well.

This is the agency that karma returns to you — not the illusion of control over what has already ripened, but the absolute certainty that what you do right now is a real cause with real effects, and that no one else is holding the pen.

Freedom

What I love most about karma — what gets lost in every pop-culture version of the idea — is that it is fundamentally a teaching about freedom.

Karma means the future is not fixed. It means that what you do next matters. It means that no situation, however bleak, is a permanent sentence. It means that seeds can be planted even in winter, even in difficult soil, even by imperfect hands.

It also means there is no one else to blame. Not fate, not a capricious god, not the cruelty of the universe. When I sit with this honestly, it is both sobering and quietly exhilarating. I am the author. The story is still being written. I can choose, starting now, what goes on the next page. Not just for myself — because everything is interconnected, because your actions ripple out in ways you can’t see or predict — doing better for yourself and doing better for the world are not separate projects. They are the same project, written in the same ink.

Karma, action, causality — no matter how we call it, we can associate it with freedom. A full and complete understanding of karma gives us the freedom to be the master of our own adventure. We decide if our film is a comedy or a tragedy.

Understanding karma clearly — the seeds we plant, the imprints we leave, the consequences that ripple forward in ways we cannot always trace — naturally opens one more question that cannot be avoided. If every action conditions the next moment, and if these conditions will not last forever, then what is the quality of experience that all this action is generating? Not in some distant future lifetime, but right now, in the texture of ordinary daily life? This is where the teaching on karma opens into the teaching on suffering — not as something grim, but as the most honest possible answer to the question of why we practise at all.

“What we are today, the different realms we have gone through and will go through, results from the karma that conditions the projections of mind and thereby forms its illusions.”

— Kalu Rinpoche, Luminous Mind