'Karma will get them' treats the universe as a referee keeping score. But in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain thought karma means action โ an impersonal law of cause, not a revenge machine.
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Someone cuts a queue, lies to a friend, gets away with something ugly โ and a voice says, half-comforting, half-vengeful: "don't worry, karma will get them." In that one line karma has become a cosmic enforcer, an invisible referee who watches, keeps score, and eventually punishes the people we think deserve it.
That picture would have puzzled the traditions that gave us the word. Karma is simply the Sanskrit for action. In Hindu, Buddhist and Jain thought it names a law of cause โ actions leave imprints, and those imprints shape what comes next, above all who you become. No angry god sits behind it. As Britannica puts it, karma is an autonomous causal law in which "no divine will or external agent intervenes."
Three things follow, and this piece unpacks each:
Karma did not begin as morality at all. In the oldest Vedic layer, karman meant ritual action โ a sacrifice performed exactly right yielded a result; performed wrong, it backfired. The word lived inside the fire altar, not the conscience.
The shift came in the Upanishads, around the middle of the first millennium BCE. There the sage Yajnavalkya, pressed in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad about what happens after death, gives one of the most quoted lines in Indian thought: a person "becomes good by good action, and bad by bad action" (BU 3.2.13). Notice what is happening. Action is no longer just shaping the harvest or the rain โ it is shaping the actor. The residue of what you do settles into the kind of person you are.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the Upanishads offer no tidy theory of karma; they extend an old ritual idea into moral causation almost in passing. But the seed is set: action carries consequences across time, and crucially, those consequences run through your own character. That is the root the later systems all grow from โ and it already has nothing to do with a god punishing villains on your behalf.
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Say "karma" and people assume one idea. In fact India's three great traditions built three different mechanisms under the same word โ agreeing it is about action, disagreeing sharply on what karma is and how it works.
| Tradition | What karma is | The way out |
|---|---|---|
| Hindu (Gita) | Action that binds when done for its fruits | Act from duty, release attachment to results (nishkama karma) |
| Buddhist | Intention โ cetana โ expressed in body, speech, mind | Purify intention; uproot craving on the Eightfold Path |
| Jain | Fine material particles that literally stick to the soul | Stop the inflow, burn off old karma through restraint and austerity |
For the Gita's Krishna, the trap is not action but attachment to its fruit; Britannica notes he teaches one need not renounce action, only "the desire for the results," acting without desire. For the Buddha the centre of gravity is inward: "Intention, I tell you, is kamma," he says in the Nibbedhika Sutta โ what counts morally is the will behind the deed. For the Jains, uniquely, karma is not metaphor but substance: subtle matter, drawn in by passion, coating the soul like dust on a wet surface. Same word, three worlds.
Strip the meme away and the same insight surfaces in all three systems: what shapes you is not chiefly what lands on you, but the quality of will from which you act.
The Buddhist hinge. The Buddha's definition is almost startlingly psychological: "Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, and intellect." Karma is cetana โ volition. The same physical act, done from greed or from compassion, plants opposite seeds in the mind. This is why karma is not a tally of deeds but a training of the heart.
The Gita's hinge. Krishna's nishkama karma points the same way from another side. You cannot control outcomes โ only your orientation. Act because it is right, surrender the fruit, and the action no longer binds you. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy frames this as duty done "without the motive of consequence."
The Jain hinge. Even here, where karma is literal matter, the binding force is inner: it is kashaya โ the passions of anger, pride, deceit, greed โ that make karmic particles stick. Cool the passions and the dust finds nothing to cling to. Three radically different metaphysics, one shared verdict: karma tracks the will inside the act, not a scoreboard of who wronged whom.
The pop version distorts all three traditions at once. Three corrections worth holding.
For most of its history karma was a discipline of self-cultivation โ a way of asking what your actions are turning you into. Somewhere on the way to the group chat it became a revenge fantasy aimed outward.
The drift is more than sloppy slang. Turned outward, karma becomes a way to enjoy others' misfortune and to look away from injustice that the living could actually fix โ "they had it coming" doing the work of a shrug. Turned inward, as the traditions intended, it asks a harder and more useful question: not whether the person who wronged you will suffer, but what the resentment you are nursing is quietly making you into. The first is gossip wearing a halo. The second is the idea the Upanishads, the Buddha and the Jain teachers were actually after.
Strip away the revenge fantasy and what remains is, if anything, more demanding. Karma in its source traditions is not a promise that the universe will punish your enemies. It is the claim that every action you take leaves a trace in the kind of person you are becoming โ and that this, not some external verdict, is the real consequence you live inside.
That is why the distinction matters. The meme outsources justice to the cosmos and invites you to wait, a little gleefully, for someone else's downfall. The real idea puts the work back in your hands: it asks not "will they get what they deserve?" but "what is this choice, this resentment, this habit making of me?" Hindus, Buddhists and Jains disagreed about almost everything in the mechanism โ intention, attachment, literal matter โ yet all three pointed the question inward.
Understood that way, karma is closer to a law of formation than a law of revenge. It reminds us that character is not a fixed inheritance but something we are quietly building with each act, and that the only ledger we can actually edit is our own. The vengeful universe of the WhatsApp forward is comforting because it lets us off the hook. The older idea is harder, and far more useful: you are not waiting to see what karma does to them โ you are, right now, deciding what your karma is making of you.
Chronology
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In the earliest Vedic layer, karman means ritual action: a sacrifice performed correctly yields its result, performed wrongly it backfires. The word lives inside the fire altar, with no moral or rebirth meaning yet attached.
In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the sage Yajnavalkya teaches that a person becomes good by good action and bad by bad action โ extending ritual karma into moral causation, where action shapes the actor across lifetimes.
The Buddha redefines karma as cetana โ intention โ declaring that intention itself is kamma, expressed through body, speech and mind. The moral weight shifts decisively from the outward deed to the will behind it.
In the Jain tradition systematised around Mahavira, karma is not metaphor but fine material particles that stick to the soul, drawn in by the passions, and shed only through restraint, austerity and non-violence.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches nishkama karma: do your duty but renounce the desire for its fruits. Action need not be abandoned โ only the craving for results that binds the doer to it.
Swami Vivekananda's lectures at the Chicago Parliament of Religions and his book Karma Yoga carry Indian ideas of action and detachment to a Western audience, beginning karma's long second life outside India.
On social media karma flattens into instant cosmic payback โ "karma will get them" โ a meme aimed outward at other people's downfall, stripped of the inward, character-shaping question the source traditions asked.
Understand why it happened, how we got here, and what might come next.