Karma is the Sanskrit word for action, and in Hindu philosophy it names both the act and the consequence the act stores. The root is kṛ (“to do”). The doctrine holds that every intentional act produces an unseen residue (karmaphala or adṛṣṭa) that ripens at a later time, in this life or a subsequent one. The Bhagavad Gita, the Brahma Sutras and the Yoga Sutras all treat karma as the operating mechanism that links action to rebirth and rebirth to liberation.
The principal scriptural sources
Karma appears across multiple text-layers. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5 contains one of the earliest explicit statements: yathākārī yathācārī tathā bhavati, “as one acts, as one behaves, so one becomes”. The Bhagavad Gita devotes chapters 3, 4 and 5 to karma-yoga, the path of action without attachment. The Brahma Sutras 3.2.38 discuss how karmic fruits are awarded by Ishvara (the Lord). The Yoga Sutras 2.12–14 explain how karma stores in karmāśaya (the karmic deposit) and ripens as jāti (birth), āyus (lifespan), and bhoga (experience).
The three categories of karma
- Sanchita karma: the entire accumulated stock from all past lives, the unactivated reservoir. Vast and not currently fruiting.
- Prarabdha karma: the portion of sanchita karma that has been allocated to the present life and is currently fruiting. This is the karma you cannot escape by spiritual practice; it must be lived out.
- Agami karma (or Kriyamana): the karma being generated by current actions, which will ripen later.
Adi Shankara’s commentary on the Brahma Sutras explains that jnana (knowledge of Brahman) burns sanchita karma but leaves prarabdha karma to play out in the realised being’s remaining lifetime, which is why even a liberated person continues to inhabit the body until it falls. The Yoga Sutras call this final stage prārabdha-bhoga.
The Gita’s reframing of action
The Gita’s intervention into the karma doctrine is the concept of niṣkāma-karma, action without attachment to results. Gita 2.47 states: karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana, “you have a claim to action alone, never to the fruits”. The mechanism is that attachment to the fruit creates the binding samskara (impression). Acting with full effort but releasing the claim on outcome cuts the binding. Gita 4.18 phrases this as seeing inaction in action: karmaṇy akarma yaḥ paśyet.
Karma and rebirth
Karma does not work as cosmic punishment. It works as a memory system. Each act lays down a samskara in the subtle body; the aggregate samskara-stock determines the body, family, lifespan and tendencies of the next birth. The Chandogya Upanishad 5.10 gives one of the oldest descriptions of the post-death path: those who have done good acts travel by the path of light (devayāna) and those who have done base acts return through the path of smoke (pitṛyāna) to a new womb. Modern Hindu commentary often softens this into a “you reap what you sow” maxim, but the technical doctrine is more specific.
Common misreadings
- “Karma is fate”: No. Karma is a doctrine of moral causation, not fate. Prarabdha is determined, but agami (current choice) is open. The system holds both determinism over consequence and freedom over present act.
- “Bad karma punishes you”: Karma is mechanism, not a judge. There is no entity issuing verdicts. The Yoga Sutras frame it as natural causation, like seeds and harvests, not legal sentencing.
- “Karma justifies inequality”: The classical texts do connect current circumstance to past karma, but the same texts insist that one’s response to circumstance, the agami being generated now, is what determines the future. The doctrine is forward-facing, not backward-justifying.
For what it’s worth, the most operationally useful framing of karma is the Yoga Sutras one: every act lays down a samskara, samskaras condition future action, and the practice is to thin the samskara-stock through detachment and meditation. Read this way, karma is less a cosmic ledger and more a description of habit-formation extended across lifetimes.
Common questions
Can karma be erased?
According to Vedanta, sanchita karma is burned by knowledge of Brahman (jñāna); the seeds are roasted and cannot sprout. Prarabdha karma cannot be erased; it must be exhausted by living through it. Agami karma is the only category over which the practitioner has direct ongoing control, which is why the Gita emphasises niṣkāma-karma as the daily practice.
Does karma apply only to humans?
In the classical scheme, karma in the binding sense is generated only in human birth, because only the human form has the moral discrimination (viveka) to act with intent. Animal births are largely bhoga-yoni, existences where prarabdha is exhausted but little new karma is laid down. This is why the texts call human birth durlabha, hard to obtain.
What is karma-yoga?
Karma-yoga is the path of action offered as worship, with no claim on the fruit. The Gita chapter 3 frames it as the practice for the active person who cannot retreat to contemplative life. The act is performed, the fruit is surrendered to the divine, the actor remains free of the binding the act would otherwise produce. It sits alongside jñāna-yoga (knowledge), bhakti-yoga (devotion), and rāja-yoga (meditation) as one of the four yogas.
One limitation worth noting
The karma doctrine is internal to Hindu (and Buddhist, Jain) cosmology and is not a falsifiable scientific claim. Whether moral acts have unseen consequences that ripen across lifetimes is not something one can confirm or refute empirically. Treating it as a working assumption for ethical practice is one thing; treating it as a literal accounting system that delivers exact outcomes is a category that the texts themselves often avoid.
For the textual layers, see the Karma entry on Wikipedia. The Yoga Sutras passages on karmasaya are at Wisdomlib’s Yoga Sutras.
