Buddha Quotes on Karma: 20 Real, Sourced Lines

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 17 September 2026

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The Buddha defined karma in a single sentence: “It is intention that I call deeds” (AN 6.63). Karma is not fate, not cosmic payback, and not a verdict on anyone’s life — it is what you intend, acted out in body, speech and mind. Below are twenty of his sayings on it, each traced to a verse or discourse with the translator named.

That sourcing is the whole point. Buddhist quotes about karma are the most-forged genre on the internet, and the forgeries all lean the same way — towards a tidy universe that pays people what they are owed. The Buddha taught something less comfortable and far more usable. For the doctrine itself, see karma in Buddhism; this page is for the words.

Unless noted, the English is Bhikkhu Sujato’s, whose SuttaCentral translations are dedicated to the public domain, which is what makes it possible to print this many verses in full rather than paraphrase them.

What the Buddha said karma is

This is the definition, and everything else on the page depends on it. The Pali is cetanāhaṁ, bhikkhave, kammaṁ vadāmi — cetanā, intention or volition, is what the word kamma names. Note what the sentence does not say: it says nothing about reward, punishment, or the universe keeping score. It relocates karma from the world to the will. Our page on “Intention is kamma” takes the verse apart line by line.

The same sentence in the rendering most people have met. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu keeps the Pali kamma untranslated; Sujato turns it into plain English, “deeds”. Both are defensible and the difference is instructive: the moment kamma stays foreign, it starts to sound like a force. Translate it and it goes back to being the ordinary word it is — what you do.

The opening of the Dhammapada, and the most quoted karma verse there is. The Pali word Sujato renders “intention” is mano — usually “mind”; Acharya Buddharakkhita has “Mind precedes all mental states.” Sujato’s choice deliberately ties the verse to cetanā in AN 6.63. The two images are worth holding apart: a cartwheel grinds along behind the ox, arriving late; a shadow never leaves at all. See “Mind precedes all mental states” for the verse on its own.

Teaching his son Rāhula, the Buddha asks what a mirror is for, gets the answer “for checking your reflection”, and turns it into a method: check an act before it, during it, and after it, asking whether it harms you, harms others, or harms both. This is karma as a practice rather than a belief — the working form of right intention.

How karma ripens — the timing quotes

The canonical answer to “how long does karma take”, and it is deliberately loose: three windows, no schedule. Vipāka, the word for “result”, is a ripening — fruit on a tree, not an invoice in the post. The third window, “at some later time”, is what makes karma unfalsifiable as a prediction and useless as a threat, and it is why the Buddha treated it as a reason to act well now rather than a system to calculate with.

Two domestic images, both about delay. Fresh milk does not sour the moment it is drawn; a banked fire under ash looks out entirely. The verse is aimed at a specific error — reading a wrongdoer’s present comfort as proof that nothing follows. It says nothing about when, which is exactly the discipline: you are asked to give up the satisfaction of watching.

The verse that demolishes “instant karma” — and, in its second half, the one that matters most to anyone doing the right thing and getting nothing for it. The Pali at SuttaCentral carries the traditional story-title Anāthapiṇḍikaseṭṭhivatthu, attaching the pair to the householder Anāthapiṇḍika, whom the Buddha names foremost of his lay donors (AN 1.249). Goodness unripened looks exactly like goodness wasted; that is the whole difficulty, and the verse names it rather than soothing it.

A matched pair, and the Dhammapada almost always works in pairs. The point is scale, not severity: karma is made mostly of acts too small to notice, and the same water-pot fills either way. It is the canon’s argument for habit over grand gestures — and the reason good and bad karma is a question about ordinary Tuesdays.

The same deed, two different results — because results depend on the person who did it. The discourse goes on to its famous simile: a lump of salt makes a cup undrinkable and the Ganges nothing at all. The Buddha’s stated reason for teaching it is that if a deed produced a fixed result, “the spiritual life could not be lived” — a settled account cannot be changed.

The hardest line in the collection, and the necessary counterweight to the one above. Results are not fixed, but they are also not evaded by distance — you cannot leave your intentions behind by moving. Read together with verse 173 further down, the Dhammapada’s position is precise: you cannot outrun what you have done, and you can outgrow it.

The quotes that undo the fatalism

If you read only one quotation on this page, read this one. The wanderer Moḷiyasīvaka asks the Buddha about teachers who hold that everything a person feels comes from past deeds. The Buddha answers with eight causes — and the verse numbers them, putting the result of deeds eighth. Of the everything-is-karma teachers he says: “So those ascetics and brahmins are wrong, I say.” Seven of the eight are causes operating in the present — the body, the weather, how you look after yourself, what you put yourself through. Illness is not a verdict; and a person cannot be read backwards from their misfortune.

The same fatalism refuted on different grounds — not “it doesn’t fit the facts” but “it destroys ethics”. If your present choices are already determined by past ones, nothing is worth doing and nothing is worth refusing. The Buddha ran the identical argument against divine determinism and against pure chance. On the free-will question this opens, see karma vs fate and Buddhism and free will.

The Pali is kammavipāko … acinteyyo — the working-out of results is not a thinkable object. This is the canon forbidding precisely the move most karma talk is made of: reverse-engineering someone’s past from their present. It does not say results are unreal. It says the ledger is not open for inspection, and that people who insist on reading it come to grief.

Na jaccā vasalo hoti … kammunā vasalo hoti — not by birth, by deeds. The Buddha says it to a fire-worshipping brahmin who has just called him a lowlife at his own doorstep, and it turns the word back on conduct. Here karma is a weapon against inherited hierarchy, not for it — which is worth sitting with, since the fatalistic reading does the exact opposite and tells people their station is earned.

Owning your karma — and nobody else’s

The most-quoted and most-misused sentence on karma in the canon. Read as a claim about other people it becomes a theology of desert — the poor earned poverty, the sick earned sickness. Read with SN 36.21 and AN 4.77 standing beside it, it is a statement about responsibility, not diagnosis. The discourse also answers a question about inequality rather than defending it.

The same formula, one grammatical person over — and that is the whole lesson. The canon’s standing instruction is to review this about yourself — often, it says, setting no schedule — as the fifth of the five remembrances. In the first person it is a spur; in the third person it is a sentence passed on someone else. The Buddha only ever prescribed the first.

Suddhī asuddhi paccattaṁ — purity and impurity are paccattaṁ, individual, each one’s own. Against a religious world of purificatory bathing and sacrifice, this says no rite performed by anyone else reaches the place where your intentions are formed. Our page on “No one can purify another” follows the verse into the practical question of who can actually help you.

Attā hi attano nātho. The Pali nātha covers lord, protector and refuge at once, which is why Buddharakkhita gives “protector” where Sujato gives “lord” — see “You are your own protector”. The second half is the condition most quotations drop: self-rule is what a well-tamed self yields. Until then there is no lord, only a crowd of impulses.

Quotes on changing your karma

Karma reduced to three moves, in the order they can actually be done: stop the harm, build the good, then work on the mind that produces both. The verse is the heart of the Ovāda-pāṭimokkha, the exhortation chanted at Magha Puja. Our page on “Avoid evil, cultivate good” covers why the third clause is the one that changes anything.

The canon’s clearest statement that a past is not a life sentence. The Pali verb is pidhīyati, covered over — the deed is not deleted, it is outweighed. And the verse is not anonymous: it appears word for word in the Aṅgulimāla Sutta as the words of a reformed serial killer, and SuttaCentral’s Pali carries the story-title Aṅgulimālattheravatthu.

Aṅgulimāla has become an arahant and is being stoned in the street by people who remember what he was. The Buddha does not tell him it is unfair, and does not tell him it is deserved either. He tells him what it is — the ripening, arriving small and now — and tells him to bear it. It is the least sentimental teaching on consequence in the canon, and the most humane.

Where the traditions read these lines differently

These are Pali texts, and every Theravada school holds them. Where the traditions part is on Dhammapada 165 — whether “no one can purify another” is the last word.

Theravada keeps both sides of it. Purity is personal, and yet merit can be given away: in AN 10.177 the Buddha tells the brahmin Jāṇussoṇi that a gift dedicated to a departed relative can reach them, in one kind of rebirth at least. Mahayana schools make that transfer structural rather than exceptional. On Dennis Hirota’s account for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a bodhisattva’s practice is undertaken with the liberation of all beings foremost in mind, so their “merit is always freely and selflessly given to beings in samsaric existence” — not a favour granted in one kind of rebirth, but the shape of the vow itself.

The sharpest break is Pure Land. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Japanese Pure Land philosophy (Dennis Hirota) describes that tradition characterising the older methods of practice as “self-power” and turning instead to the nembutsu as the act embodying “Other Power” — “Amida Buddha’s wisdom-compassion functioning in the world”. On Shinran’s reading, being unable to purify yourself is not a personal failure; it is the ordinary human situation, and it is what Amida’s vow is for.

So the honest statement is not “Buddhism says you purify yourself.” It is that this Pali verse says so, that Theravada has never read it as forbidding help, and that a great deal of Mahayana was built on the conviction that it cannot be the whole story.

Karma quotes the Buddha never said

Search “buddha quotes on karma” and most of what comes back has no address. Three of the most-shared:

• “What goes around comes around.” A modern English proverb. It translates no verse or discourse in the Pali Canon, and it means something the Buddha did not teach — that the world returns what you send, rather than that intentions shape the one who has them.
• “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Attributed to the Buddha everywhere and traceable to nothing; it appears in none of the collections. The genuine teaching on anger is Dhammapada 5.
• “The mind is everything. What you think you become.” A slogan built out of Dhammapada 1, not a translation of it. Compare the real renderings above: Sujato’s “Intention is the leader of things” and Buddharakkhita’s “Mind precedes all mental states.” Neither says you become your thoughts.

Checking one takes a minute. A real line has a reference — Dhp 165, AN 6.63, SN 36.21 — and a named translator behind the English; put a distinctive phrase into the search box at SuttaCentral or Access to Insight and it will surface with its chapter and verse. An invented one surfaces only more quote pages. That test, and the Buddha’s own version of it, is set out on our Buddhist quotes hub.

For what these lines add up to, read karma in Buddhism, karma vs fate, and what actually carries over in rebirth. The single-word definition sits in the glossary entry for karma.