In Hinduism, karma is a law or force at work in the cosmos that rewards beings for their good actions and punishes them for their bad actions.[1] The belief in karma is one of the central beliefs of Hinduism.
The Sanskrit word karma comes from the root kr’ and means “to act.”[2] Throughout Hinduism, the term “karma” is sometimes used when speaking of actions in general, but for thousands of years, its primary meaning has been the system of consequences for one’s actions that’s built into the structure of the world. Good deeds are referred to as punya, “meritorious,” and they bring pleasure and prosperity for the doer. Bad deeds are referred to as papa, “evil,” and bring pain and suffering upon the doer.[3]
Sometimes those desirable or undesirable consequences manifest relatively shortly after the deed that created those karmic “seeds.” But sometimes those “seeds” take a long time to sprout. In fact, the consequences of a person’s actions stretch beyond his or her present life. Karma is one of the centerpieces of Hindu beliefs about reincarnation (Sanskrit punar-janman, literally “birth-again”[4]). Hinduism teaches that anyone who doesn’t reach moksha, the Hindu term for spiritual enlightenment, in his or her present life is doomed to be reincarnated again and again until he or she finally reaches moksha. In the meantime, the karma that he or she has built up from previous lives determines the circumstances of his or her rebirth and the events that he or she will enjoy and suffer in that new form.[5]
For example, one’s karma determines the position one will be born into within the traditional Indian caste or class system. Whenever someone is born into the Brahmin caste, the highest caste, this is seen as a reward for good karma. By contrast, to be born a Shudra, the lowest caste, is seen as a form of penance for misdeeds in one’s past lives.[6] By the same token, getting to live a long life is a reward for good karma, and having one’s life cut short is a punishment for bad karma.[7] Good looks, intelligence, abilities, and wealthy parents are fruits of past meritorious deeds, and their opposites are penalties for past transgressions.[8]
These karmic fruits, whether good or bad, are always temporary. Sooner or later, they wear themselves out and are replaced by the fruits of more recent and/or more consequential actions.[9]
The Hindu belief in karma is sometimes compared to the ancient Greek belief in fate (Greek moira[10]). There’s something to that comparison, because according to Hindu beliefs about karma, one will always have to face the consequences of one’s past actions sooner or later; there’s no way around that. This lends karma a sense of being implacable and deterministic like fate. But in the classic Greek concept of fate, one has no ability whatsoever to alter one’s future fate, whereas in Hinduism, one does have the power to change one’s future karma by changing one’s present actions. Furthermore, the ancient Greek conception of fate left no place for any kind of final liberation from fate – any counterpart to the Hindu concept of moksha, the final liberation from karma and reincarnation.[11]
Karma and Dharma
But what determines which actions count as “good” and which actions count as “bad?” Which actions bring desirable karmic fruits, and which bring undesirable ones?
Hinduism’s answer is that actions produce good karma when they’re in accordance with dharma, and actions produce bad karma when they’re out of step with dharma.[12] Dharma is another one of the central concepts of Hinduism. The Sanskrit word dharma has no precise equivalent in the English language; it encompasses what we would refer to as “nature,” “religion,” “morality,” “social duty,” and more. Basically, dharma describes what the grand, divinely-created cosmic order is and provides people with rules for how to live in accordance with it.[13]
Dharma has two levels: a set of general principles for all Hindus to follow, and sets of more specific rules that pertain to specific social roles, including but by no means limited to the specific caste to which one belongs.[14]
At the level of universal principles for all Hindus, Hindu dharma holds that there are three roots of all vices: moha, “delusion;” lobha, “greed;” and krodha, “anger.” The Bhagavad Gita, an important touchstone for Hindu spirituality, calls them “the gates to hell.” Any and all actions motivated by these states generate bad karma for the person who performs them.[15]
Actions motivated by the opposites of these states produce good karma. Scholar of Hinduism Klaus Klostermaier provides a handy list of praiseworthy virtues that confer good karma: “firmness, forgiveness, restraint, abstention from stealing, purity, control over the senses, forbearance, knowledge, truth, and freedom from hatred and anger.”[16] Performing the public and private rituals of Hinduism correctly and with a pure heart also brings good karma.[17][18]
Samsara
While the term dharma refers to the proper order of the cosmos, Hinduism calls the cosmos itself samsara. The word samsara literally means “to wander,” which is a reference to the “wandering” of the Atman, the soul or “Self,” through its series of rebirths in different forms and in different realms in accordance with its karma.[19] So, the way Hinduism traditionally uses the term, samsara refers to “the cycle of rebirth” or “worldly existence itself.”[20]
Samsara includes not only the familiar world in which you and I live, but also heaven (Sanskrit svarga[21]) and various hells. Unlike, say, Christianity or Islam, which generally portray heaven and hell as places where souls remain forever, Hinduism’s heaven and hells are temporary stops on the soul’s winding journey. Eventually, the karma that has brought the soul to one of those places is exhausted and the soul is reincarnated somewhere else.
Rebirth in heaven is seen as the most desirable rebirth. Only those souls with the very best karma get a chance to live there. Hinduism pictures heaven as a kind of pleasure resort, whose residents spend their days enjoying all kinds of extraordinary delights that are unattainable for beings on earth.[22]
At the other end of the spectrum are the hells reserved for souls that have accumulated particularly bad karma. Hindu scriptures abound with graphic descriptions of the specific hells that await those who have committed evil deeds, much like Dante’s Inferno. To quote Klostermaier again, “people who have injured living beings have to suffer being cut with sharp blades for ages; people who have committed adultery are punished by being tied to a red-hot image that they have to embrace for many years; liars are hung with their mouth in pools of foul matter.”[23]
In between these two extremes are the various types of beings that we find on earth: humans, animals, plants, etc. The same soul can be reincarnated in any of these earthly, heavenly, or hellish forms. Thus, all beings have the same type of soul, just placed in different bodies depending on the soul’s karma.[24]
Yet no matter how seemingly pleasurable or painful one’s lot in samsara might be, any kind of life in samsara is inherently full of suffering. Even the best karma will only grant you a more favorable position within a basically bad situation. To be any kind of finite being separated from other beings and from the divine is a bad deal at bottom. The soul can never be truly satisfied with this state of affairs, and is always subtly searching for something more, something resoundingly fulfilling. Thankfully, the wheel of samsara isn’t a closed loop. There’s a way out of samsara and karma: moksha, enlightenment.[25]
Karma, Samsara, and Moksha
Hinduism teaches that the soul, the Atman, is ultimately one with Brahman, the divine absolute reality. Thus, in the end, there’s really only one soul, one Atman, one Self of all things. While we’re trapped in samsara, we fail to see this because we’re deluded by the everyday appearances of things (maya), which hide the reality underneath them. Moksha, which means “liberation,”[26] is the breaking of this spell and the realization of the divine oneness of all things. The soul that reaches this state is “liberated” from samsara and karma, because it has realized that they were ultimately illusions all along. Consequently, the soul will never be reincarnated again. Instead, when the body attached to it dies, it will spend eternity immersed in the bliss of Brahman.[27] As one of Hinduism’s sacred texts, the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, says,
On this ever-revolving wheel of life
The individual self goes round and round
Through life after life, believing itself
To be a separate creature, until
It sees its identity with the Lord of Love
And attains immortality in the indivisible whole.
He is the eternal reality, sing
The scriptures, and the ground of existence.
Those who perceive him in every creature
Merge in him and are released from the wheel
Of birth and death.[28]
Since moksha is release from karma altogether, a decisive break in the circle of samsara, storing up good karma by performing actions in harmony with dharma won’t necessarily help you to reach moksha. Moksha transcends all of that, and from the perspective of moksha, it’s all just frivolous child’s play in the end. Who cares whether you’ll be reborn in heaven, hell, or anything in between? It’s all suffering, and it all falls short of the true goal.[29]
So, then, should we all just throw up our hands and forsake the attempt to live in accordance with dharma? No. Hinduism has an ingenious solution to the tension between dharma and moksha.
According to the Bhagavad Gita, the trick is to act in accordance with dharma, but to renounce any and all attachments to the results of your actions, whether in this life or the next. Krishna, the central deity in the Gita, does everything he does in a perfectly serene and unattached way, which serves as a model for his human worshipers to follow. Actions performed in this way don’t produce karma for the doer, but instead help the doer to transcend his or her ego and to reach oneness with the divine. This approach is called nish-kama karma: action (karma) without attachment (kama).[30] As Krishna says in the Gita,
Whatever you do, make it an offering to me – the food you eat, the sacrifices you make, the help you give, even your suffering. In this way you will be freed from the bondage of karma, and from its results both pleasant and painful. Then, firm in renunciation and [spirituality], with your heart free, you will come to me.[31]
Even though dharma is part of samsara, if dharma is pursued properly, it can offer a path out of samsara and karma and into the bliss of moksha. This is the basis of “karma yoga,” one of the four main Hindu approaches to spirituality. Paradoxically, the cosmic order is set up in such a way that living in accordance with it can help you to transcend the cosmos.
The Spiritual Significance of the Belief in Karma
The nish-kama karma recommended by the Bhagavad Gita illustrates much of the spiritual importance of the Hindu belief in karma: it motivates you to pursue “liberation” from your ego through acting in harmony with dharma while renouncing the fruits of your actions. But it seems to me that we can add to that by connecting the Hindu belief in karma to certain widespread themes in religion and spirituality in general.
For one thing, the belief in karma establishes the principle that whatever you do unto others, you do unto yourself as well. That helps you to see how you and others really are one at bottom, and thereby facilitates the experience of enlightenment. As I discuss in the article Only Spirituality Makes Morality Rational, all religious morality serves this purpose. Compare, for example, a famous saying of Jesus from Christianity’s Gospel of Saint Matthew: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”[32] The belief in karma is Hinduism’s version of this same point.
Hinduism’s teachings on karma also help to address one of the weightiest arguments that calls into question the truth of the traditional religious worldview: if the divine is real and good, then why is life so full of suffering? Philosophically or theologically, this is known as the “problem of evil.” The reply that Hinduism could give to that question has two levels.
At the first, relatively superficial level, Hinduism could say: you suffer because of your own evil actions. Karma is justice. Nobody likes to hear this, because nobody likes be held accountable for his or her own misdeeds. But, Hinduism says, even if we can sometimes escape legal or interpersonal justice when we act in harmful ways, we can’t escape cosmic justice.
While that answer is sound for what it is within the terms of the Hindu worldview, Hinduism also gives another, deeper reply to the problem of evil: we suffer because we have yet to attain moksha. For now, we’re still trapped in samsara and karma, with all of the suffering that entails. In more universal terms, we suffer because we have yet to realize our oneness with the divine and the perfect bliss that accompanies the perception of that ever-present but hidden reality. The only way to fully overcome suffering is to reach enlightenment, and Hinduism – like other traditional religions – provides a set of time-tested means of doing just that (with the help of divine “grace,” of course). It therefore seems to me that it’s wildly irrational for us to reject religion and spirituality on the basis of the problem of evil when religion and spirituality offer the one and only practically viable solution to that very problem. (For more on this point, see The Problem of Evil and Its Solution.)
Of course, these points don’t even come close to an exhaustive account of the spiritual meaning of the Hindu doctrine of karma. Like all teachings from traditional religions, this belief has purposes and depths that no human has ever before fathomed, and which, in all likelihood, no human can fathom.
References:
[1] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 63-65.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Klostermaier, Klaus. 2007. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press. p. 289-290.
[7] Bartley, Christopher. 2015. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Hindu and Buddhist Ideas from Original Sources. Bloomsbury. p. 3.
[8] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 63-65.
[9] Bartley, Christopher. 2015. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Hindu and Buddhist Ideas from Original Sources. Bloomsbury. p. 3.
[10] Klostermaier, Klaus. 2007. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press. p. 176.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 70.
[13] Ibid. p. 5, 69-70.
[14] Klostermaier, Klaus. 2007. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press. p. 32.
[15] Ibid. p. 139.
[16] Ibid. p. 32.
[17] Ibid. p. 136-137.
[18] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 69-70.
[19] Ibid. p. 63-65.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid. p. 141.
[22] Ibid. p. 63-65, 141.
[23] Klostermaier, Klaus. 2007. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press. p. 143.
[24] Biardeau, Madeleine. 2002. Hinduism: The Anthropology of a Civilization. Transl. Richard Nice. Oxford University Press. p. 17.
[25] Davis, Richard H. 2024. Religions of Early India: A Cultural History. Princeton University Press. p. 124.
[26] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 65-66.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “The Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 160.
[29] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 65-66.
[30] Ibid. p. 173-174.
[31] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. The Bhagavad Gita. Nilgiri Press. p. 176-177.
[32] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 1423.