Karma is not cosmic payback — it is a moral law three religions built

The most interesting thing about karma is that the traditions sharing the word disagree sharply on its mechanics.

The Buddha's reframing was radical: he located karma in the mind, not the ritual. In the Nibbedhika Sutta he is recorded saying, "Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect." And he taught all this while denying a permanent self (anatta) — leaving later Buddhists to puzzle over what exactly carries karma forward.

Mahavira (traditionally 599–527 BCE), last of Jainism's 24 tirthankaras, took the opposite road: for Jains, passions like anger and greed act as glue, making fine karmic particles physically cling to the soul.

Within Hindu thought, karma is not one undivided heap. It is usually sorted into three ledgers, and the distinction is exactly where the "karma equals fate" confusion comes from.

1. Sanchita — the entire store of karma accumulated across all your past lives. The full balance.
2. Prarabdha — only the slice of that store that has ripened and is being lived out now. This is the part people loosely call "destiny."
3. Kriyamana (or agami) — the fresh karma you are generating by what you choose to do today, which flows back into the store and shapes tomorrow.

The point is the third ledger. If everything were prarabdha — fixed, inherited, already in motion — life would be pure fate. But kriyamana is open. Present action is genuinely yours. That is why most Hindu schools insist karma is not a cage: it always leaves a live, unwritten column.

And in Vedanta the books are not even purely self-balancing — the Shvetashvatara Upanishad holds that a person can be freed from sorrow through the grace of Ishvara.

Most of what travels under the name "karma" online would not survive a reading of the actual texts.

The West has long had its own near-cousin of the idea. The Epistle to the Galatians puts it plainly: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Sow and reap, act and consequence — the image recurs across cultures.

But the idea has a darker shadow, and its most serious critic was B. R. Ambedkar. He argued that karma-and-rebirth could be used to justify social cruelty — to tell people their low status was earned by past-life sins, freezing the caste order in place. His reconstructed Buddhism, set out in The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957), pointedly rejected karma and rebirth read that way. Whether karma is a quiet form of the "just-world" belief — that people get what they deserve — is a live argument, not a settled one.

Strip away the rebirth machinery and a stubborn intuition remains, which is why karma keeps mattering far beyond the temples that house it. The intuition is that actions are not free of weight — that what we repeatedly choose slowly composes who we become. Yajnavalkya said it in the 7th century BCE; you can hear the same claim in a therapist's office today.

The lesson worth keeping is not metaphysical bookkeeping but its ethical core: attention to intention. The Buddhist move — that the moral heart of an act is the will behind it — survives translation into any worldview. It asks a question that does not need rebirth to bite: not "what will I get for this?" but "who am I becoming by doing it?"

That is also why the idea remains dangerous if misread. The same doctrine that can deepen a person's sense of responsibility can, in the wrong hands, be used to blame the poor for their poverty. A 2,700-year-old idea that still forces that argument is not a closed answer. It is a conversation we have not finished having.