How Does Karma Work?

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Karma—like the principle the word stands for—is everywhere. Its sheer ubiquity can make us assume we know what it means. In fact, though, it’s one of the slipperiest concepts to get the mind around, despite its central role in Buddhist teachings and practice. As with so many widespread ideas, part of the challenge lies with oversimplified views that take hold in the group mindset we all share in. For example, it’s common to hear someone say, “It’s my karma,” which implies a kind of fatalism, a predestined outcome we’re sentenced to. Another common expression, delivered with a satisfied snarl—“Karma is a [rhymes with itch]”—is all about someone getting their just desserts.

The notions expressed in these thoughts have some partial truth to them, but they really don’t help us much when it comes to effectively applying the principle of karma to practice on the Buddhist path, where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. In trying to suss out how to bring a beneficial and useable understanding of karma to Buddhist practice, it’s helpful to have a little background on what the concept means, where it comes from, and how it emerged in the development of Buddhism.

The word karma comes from a Sanskrit term that means “action.” It refers to actions and their corresponding results. As the late Thai Buddhist teacher Ajahn Buddhadasa put it in his book Under the Bodhi Tree, “The idea that doing good deeds leads to good results and doing bad deeds leads to bad results was a general teaching that existed before the Buddha’s time. The Buddha did not deny or object to such karma doctrines.” He did go beyond them, though, to arrive at something subtler and more nuanced.

The idea of karma as a kind of cosmic justice existed in the Upanishads, ancient Indian texts that helped to firmly establish the doctrines of Hinduism. In addition to the notion that deeds carry consequences in this life, the Hindu doctrine of karma includes the notion that consequences are carried into future lives. Theistic religions in the West have a similar notion, in that the consequences of one’s deeds are carried into an afterlife, but the afterlife in that case occurs in a nonmaterial realm, and a divine deity keeps track of one’s deeds and misdeeds. In the same way that Western theistic religions assume a soul continues into the afterlife, the karmic doctrine in Hinduism assumes that a person, in the form of a soul or atman, continues into the next life.

By contrast, the idea that the same person is repeatedly reborn or ascends to a permanent state is labeled in Buddhism as eternalism, which the Buddha rejected, while also rejecting the other extreme of nihilism, the notion that actions don’t matter, since in the end we all just dissolve into nothingness. Famously, the Buddha counseled a middle way between these kinds of extremes. 

The Vital Role of Cause and Effect

Instead of picturing karma as a cosmic or divine moral principle, Buddhists redefined karma as the relationship between an individual’s intentional actions and their results. Actions emerging from wholesome intentions lead to beneficial results; unwholesome ones lead to harmful results; actions arising from mixed intentions produce results that are both harmful and beneficial.

This simple equation seems straightforward—until you try to apply it to actual life situations. If you think only about material causes and effects, karma will seem mysterious and even dubious. Why did that creep who behaves so selfishly receive a big promotion? Why did that kind person, who spent so much time helping others, have a stroke at such a young age?

The teachings on karma are not particularly concerned with figuring out why bad things have occurred for some and less so for others in a given time period. It’s ludicrous to say that someone being ground down by poverty or oppression is experiencing that because of something they did previously. The Buddhist teachings on karma are focused on guiding us to the causes of liberation and away from the causes of suffering.

In a discussion on karma for Buddhadharma, Ajahn Amaro affirmed that karma is “good news.” It’s good news, because it means our experience has a reliability to it. In that same discussion, the late Buddhist teacher Robin Kornman noted, “Nothing is inherently good or inherently bad, but some things lead naturally to states of suffering and some things lead naturally away from suffering, and that’s how you define good or bad karma.” While Buddhism doesn’t posit a fixed moral code of precisely what is good or bad in all circumstances, it does ask us to examine our experience and discern what kinds of actions tend to lead to more suffering and what kinds tend to lead to less. In the same way we know that if we bang our head into the wall, we’re likely to bruise, we can discover that aggressive thoughts will likely lead to aggressive behaviors that are harmful.

We might ask ourselves how that all works. In his book Karma: What It is, What It Isn’t, Why it Matters, Traleg Kyabgon emphasizes that the actual workings of karma are extremely subtle, so there is no point in understanding the workings of cause and effect in a simplistic mechanical way. The model provided by the Buddha was one of careful examination of experience within the context of meditative stability. In short, we see how thoughts form and what consequences flow from them, at ever subtler levels. Through this type of meditative examination, we gradually begin to recognize the karmic chain reactions that produce suffering.

When an image or thought of a desirable object—a new phone, for example—arises in your mind, it might be followed by a proliferation of thoughts about the good qualities of that phone: why it would be better than the one you have now; how you’ll pay for it; and so on. Next, the intention to buy the phone arises, and that’s followed by the intentional action of making the purchase. After you possess the phone, the novelty will soon wear out. You might notice negative qualities you had overlooked. Before too long, the phone will become old and a source of suffering rather than joy. The karmic process works in the same way for undesirable objects. Our rejection and avoidance of them compels us just as much as our desire for a shiny new thing does. It is these karmic chain reactions—like dominoes falling one after another—that are continually propelling us round and round in the cloudy cyclic existence we call samsara. 

Karmic chain reactions are based on ignorance. They depend on not recognizing what is going on in our minds. When that first positive or negative image arises, if we recognize it as a mental projection, there is much less chance that it will overpower us. We can still buy a new phone or avoid an unpleasant encounter, but we won’t be driven by the compulsive karmic processes that always end badly. A phone is just a phone. 

The Buddha was not particularly interested in philosophy. He was much more of a physician than a metaphysician. He was interested in diagnosing the sources of dukkha (agitation, anxiety, uneasiness, and so on) and how this suffering could be eliminated. As Traleg Kyabgon emphasizes in his book, the Buddha was very practical and encouraged us to likewise be practical. As he posited in the first noble truth, throughout our lives, we have avoided the fact that we’re in a perilous condition: We are trapped in a web that’s causing us (and others) undue pain and suffering, and we’re not making any progress in freeing ourselves from that trap. Discovering how to free ourselves is far more important than making an intricate diagram of all the workings of the samsaric trap we find ourselves in. As Buddhist teacher Judy Lief wrote about karma, “Like all Buddhist teachings, it’s taught not to discourage students but to inspire them to go forward. At its simplest, its logic is threefold: What’s your situation? How did you get here? What are you going to do about it?”

The Storehouse Consciousness

One of the things that most puzzles people about the Buddhist presentation of karma is that karma is taught as something that doesn’t just fade away by wishing it would. Results of an intentional action may not mature for a long time, even for many lifetimes, it is said, but when the appropriate conditions occur, the results inevitably arise.

While trying to create a cosmological map of the workings of karma is not the principal aim of these Buddhist teachings, the Mahayana school known as Yogacara provides a useful explanation of how karma works. Using the metaphors of seeds and a storehouse, they explain that intentional actions plant seeds in a foundational consciousness, the alaya-vijnana, which is often called the storehouse consciousness. The seeds are not substantial. They’re imprints or tendencies. The alaya-vijnana is not a container or an ongoing permanent self, but it does have a certain continuity. When causes and conditions for the ripening of seeds appear, they manifest as our inner experience, setting off the compulsive karmic chain reactions that we looked at earlier. 

Our conscious mind may mistake the alaya-vijnana for a permanent self, but it is simply an ever-changing dynamic collection of tendencies and dispositions, whose maturation produces a deep undercurrent of mental activity that drives further actions, planting further seeds, and so on—ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

To update a traditional analogy, imagine you detect a faint rancid smell in your car one day and think nothing of it. As the days go by, though, eventually the smell is quite overpowering. Looking under the seat, you find a small milk carton left by your child that has spilled out onto the carpet. That smell persists even after you throw out the carton and clean up the spilled milk. Imprints of our actions left in the storehouse consciousness are like that smell; they will have effects until they dissipate. 

Look Forward

Viewing karma as the simple cause of current circumstances can lead to dangerous, damaging misconceptions. For example, as Judy Lief writes, 

People sometimes use a fatalistic interpretation of karma to justify oppressive hierarchies like the caste system, or they use it as an excuse to blame people for their own misfortunes, rather than trying to help them.

When the idea that one’s current situation is the result of one’s past actions is joined with a blame–punishment mentality, it’s a deadly combination. In the cancer retreats I lead each year, I see the pain this kind of approach causes. Instead of “What can I do to help?,” cancer patients report that they hear things like “You must have brought this on yourself. Maybe you repressed your anger and that gave you a tumor. Or maybe you drank too much coffee!”

Zen teacher Norman Fischer has similarly encountered this kind of approach from students who may even engage in “scrupulosity,” extreme obsession with sins and wrongdoing. In the Buddhadharma panel on karma, he emphasized how karma as cause is most helpfully discussed in terms of an understanding of nonself. He tells students, “The situation you’re in is not your fault, but it’s absolutely your responsibility to take care of it going forward.” 

When they come back with the argument that it’s absurd to say it’s not their fault if they did the actions in the past that led to this situation, he counters, “The person who did those things in the past is no longer here. However, the person in this present moment has a huge responsibility to take volitional action from this moment forward. The Buddha taught a path of action and responsibility in a very realistic way.”

It is this forward-looking approach, focusing on the karma of effect—including approaching our karmic stumbles with perspective and a sense of humor rather than a guilt-driven mentality—that provides the most helpful path to alleviating suffering.

Intentions, Vows, Actions 

Ajahn Amaro points out that while the effects of past actions cause tendencies, “the ripening of karma is never fixed.” The Buddhist view is not that “life is created according to an inescapable, determined pattern. Karma preconditions our present experience, but what we do with that is entirely based on the choices we make—and the degree of wisdom or good-heartedness, or greed, hatred, and delusion, we bring to our experience in the present moment.” Seeds are planted, but how they grow depends on the conditions surrounding them as we go forward in life.

Our relationship with karma begins, then, as we noted above, at the level of our intentions. The karmic quality of our action going forward is governed by intent, and there is no objective scorekeeper who determines the quality of our intent, so part of our practice is to become deeply aware of our intentions, where we’re coming from, so to speak. This is one of the reasons Buddhism emphasizes taking vows. Vowing to do good plants a seed of deep intent, which we can continually nourish, creating a kind of perfume that will influence our actions in a positive direction. 

Confession practice, which Buddhist monastics have engaged in for centuries, is also informed by the workings of karma. Confession practice isn’t guilt- or blame-based. It’s based, rather, on clearing out the psychic basement so to speak, to be honest about the imprints left there, and to vow to counteract them. The practice is not to view the past with self-recrimination or nostalgia; it’s to be present- and future-oriented. Anyone, lay or monastic, can acknowledge their mistakes.

Cessation

On one level, Buddhist teachings on karma are meant to help us cultivate healthy states of mind and avoid negative ones. But the bigger picture is that no matter how careful and attentive we are, positive karma will eventually run out. There is no freedom or lasting happiness in samsara. Therefore, on a deeper level, these teachings are about finding liberation from karma altogether.

The feelings of solidity produced by the persistence and compulsiveness of karmic momentum fool us into believing that a solid self is experiencing all this action. That imagined self, however, is a patchwork, filled with gaps. The gaps occur naturally, and in them we experience moments of openness and even awe. Meditation practice and our cultivated healthy states of mind allow us to slow down and experience more gaps in the propulsive karmic processes. In these gaps, we can glimpse our projections for what they are and experience moments of cessation, until more seeds ripen and new chain reactions take off. As we continue to practice meditation and cultivate healthy states of mind, we can gradually exhaust delusive tendencies and karmic momentum.

The complete exhaustion of karmic seeds is what we generally call enlightenment. It may be a distant goal, but in every moment, there are possibilities to emerge fresh, not driven by karmic imprints and intensity. Those moments of freedom warm the heart and are liberating for us and everyone we encounter.