Is Karma Real? What the Buddha Said You Can Know

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 28 October 2026

Checked against the primary texts · How we check · Report a correction

Is karma real? It depends which claim you mean. That habits of intention shape the person who acts is something people can check in their own lives. Whether deeds bear specific fruit across lives is the harder question. The Pali texts present it as something the Buddha saw on the night of his awakening (MN 4); he offered doubters a “sure bet” (MN 60) and warned against generalising even from true visions (MN 136). Teachers since have disagreed about whether it can be shown to anyone else.

This page sets out who holds what, and takes no side. It treats the Buddhist teaching; Hindu and Jain ideas of karma differ (see Buddhism vs Hinduism and Buddhism vs Jainism).

What kind of claim is karma?

In Buddhism, karma (Pali kamma) is intentional action; karma in Buddhism sets out how it works. Whether it is real depends on which version you mean.

Mark Siderits, writing on the Buddha for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, separates two. One is “the version of karma popular in certain circles today”, in which an act done out of hatred makes the agent “somewhat more disposed” to act that way again. The other, which he says the Buddha taught, is “the far stricter view that each action has its own specific consequence for the agent”, working “in such a way as to require rebirth as long as action continues.”

The first is a claim about character, which people can watch happen. The second concerns what lies beyond one lifetime. Arguments over whether karma is real often slide between the two.

The part you can check in this life

In the Dvedhāvitakka Sutta (MN 19), recalling how he sorted his thoughts into two kinds before his awakening, the Buddha describes a pattern readers can check against their own experience:

Think often in sensual, malicious or cruel ways, the sutta goes on, and the mind inclines that way. The sutta speaks of thoughts, not of kamma. Reading it as karma’s this-life side, where repeated intention becomes disposition, is our reading, close to what Siderits calls the popular version. Which intentions count as wholesome is set out on good and bad karma.

The Sīvaka Sutta (SN 36.21) uses the same standard of evidence. Some feelings stem from bile disorders: “You can know this from your own personal experience, and it is generally deemed to be true” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). It then applies the same words to feelings that are “the result of past deeds”. The sutta does not call karma’s results unknowable; it makes them one cause among eight, a list discussed on karma in Buddhism.

What the Buddha said about knowing the rest

A claim to have seen it

The early texts present karma across lives above all as something the Buddha saw, not only as a conclusion he reasoned to. In the Bhayabherava Sutta (MN 4), describing the night of his awakening, he says:

“This was the second knowledge,” the passage ends; the Mahāsaccaka Sutta (MN 36) gives the same account. Siderits names the difficulty for an outsider: karma and rebirth are said to be confirmable by those who have developed retrocognition, the recollection of past lives, through “advanced yogic technique”, but “this is of little help to those not already convinced that meditation is a reliable means of knowledge.”

A sure bet for those without a teacher

In the Apaṇṇaka Sutta (MN 60) the Buddha asks the brahmins and householders of Sālā whether they have a teacher in whom they have “grounded faith”. They say no, so he offers “this sure bet teaching”. Of the person who affirms an afterlife and the fruit of deeds:

The nihilist, by the same reasoning, holds “a losing hand on both counts”. This is not agnosticism. In the same discourse the Buddha says “since there actually is another world” (8.1) and “since action actually does have an effect” (16.1), and he runs similar reasoning on causality, on formless states of meditation, and on whether existence can wholly cease. The wager is a way in for people with no teacher to trust, in the vocabulary of right view.

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, the American forest monk, reads it this way in The Truth of Rebirth (2011): “These arguments don’t prove the efficacy of action or the truth of rebirth, but they do show that it is a safer, more reasonable, and more honorable policy to assume the truth of these teachings than it would be to assume otherwise.” The Kālāma Sutta ends with a shorter cousin, its four consolations.

True visions, false conclusions

The Mahākammavibhaṅga Sutta (MN 136) is the canon’s warning about evidence. It describes wrongdoers reborn in hell and in heaven, and the virtuous likewise. Ascetics with real meditative clairvoyance see one case and insist, “This is the only truth, anything else is futile.” The Buddha separates what he accepts from what he does not:

The good rebirth, he explains, came from a good deed done earlier or later, or from right view at death; the bad deed still ripens “in this very life, or in the next life, or in some subsequent period.” His summary:

Ṭhānissaro draws the lesson: “A meditator capable of seeing only one lifetime after death, seeing cases like these, would misunderstand the consequences of action.”

Results not to be worked out

The Acinteyya Sutta (AN 4.77) lists the results of deeds among four “unthinkable” things; it is quoted on Buddha quotes on karma. Our karma pages read it as a ban on reasoning backward from someone’s suffering to their past. Ṭhānissaro (The Truth of Rebirth, ch. 8) cites two other items on the same list, the range of a Buddha and of one in jhāna, against “the sort of conjecture that a materialist—or anyone else—might make” about what an awakened mind could know. The sutta itself only names the four.

What traditional teachers say

Bhikkhu Bodhi, the American Theravada monk and translator, concedes the point in “Does Rebirth Make Sense?” (Buddhist Publication Society, 2000–2001): “There is no logical way to prove the validity of rebirth and kamma. The naturalist might just be right.” He argues instead from moral intuition. The moral law “cannot be demonstrated experimentally in the same way that physical and chemical laws can be”, he writes, but “this does not mean it is not real.”

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu agrees that “the Buddha never claimed to offer proof for either the efficacy of action or for rebirth”, but gives the reason: “the evidence for these teachings lay beyond the ken of most of his listeners.” Faith as the Buddha meant it, he writes, was “an admission of ignorance about issues for which you don’t have empirical proof”, joined to a willingness to adopt a path’s assumptions. Before awakening, he writes, “it’s wisest to assume these principles as working hypotheses.”

The 14th Dalai Lama, in his statement of 24 September 2011, puts more weight on evidence. “For those who remember their past lives, rebirth is a clear experience”; for others “we need to use evidence-based logic to prove past and future rebirths to them”, and he says there are “many different logical arguments given in the words of the Buddha and subsequent commentaries”. The same statement says that “as long as you are a Buddhist, it is necessary to accept past and future rebirth” (whether that holds for everyone who calls themselves Buddhist is taken up on rebirth vs reincarnation). Of people who recall past lives today, he says: “Denying this is not an honest and impartial way of doing research.”

Secular and sceptical readings

The secular Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor has changed his position. In Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997), by his own account, he took “an explicitly agnostic stance”. Writing in Tricycle in 2016, he called that “a kind of ‘eel-wriggling’”, the suttas’ term for avoiding commitment. He adds that anyone who says they believe in rebirth “thereby affirms that they do not possess any actual knowledge of it”. He still says he does not know, but given evolution and neuroscience, “rebirth strikes me as highly improbable”. He now asks “Does this work?” rather than “Is this true?”, has “discarded agnosticism in favor of an ethical and therapeutic pragmatism”, and reads punabbhava, “again becoming”, as “the compulsive repetitive patterns of behavior that trap us”.

Ṭhānissaro also rejects agnosticism, for the opposite reason. Because every action wagers on its results, “simply stating, ‘I don’t know,’ is not an adequate response”; the attitude “may be honest on one level”, he grants, but ignores the assumptions behind every choice. Both men find “I don’t know” not enough; they reach opposite conclusions.

Siderits also rejects one interpretive escape: that the Buddha taught karma only as a teaching device he did not himself accept (a “noble lie”), because “he also taught it to quite advanced monastics”. The movement itself is described on secular Buddhism; whether rebirth is required is answered on rebirth vs reincarnation.

What science can and cannot test

As Buddhism and science explains, meditation research studies what practice does. Whether deeds bear fruit across lifetimes is another matter: Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu holds that “the material sciences actually have no way at all of proving the issue one way or the other”, and Bhikkhu Bodhi that the moral law “cannot be demonstrated experimentally”.

What psychology can study is the belief itself. Reviewing the field in 2019, the psychologists Cindel White and Ara Norenzayan wrote that research directly investigating belief in karma is “currently underrepresented”. Among the studies they summarise, American students and online adult samples behaved more prosocially after writing about an ongoing situation they wanted to turn out well, such as an important test, a job interview or a medical procedure, than people who wrote about their daily routine (Converse, Risen and Carter, 2012); helping others in hope of a good outcome is a strategy known in this research as “karmic bargaining”. In another study (Young and colleagues, 2011), Hindu and Christian participants equally blamed a pedestrian’s accident on past misdeeds when the researchers specified one; when none was specified, Hindu participants still did, whereas Christian participants rejected that explanation. Studies like these measure what believing in karma does, not whether karma is true.

The nearest research on the claim itself concerns rebirth, not karma. The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies says, in its own account, that some children “usually between the ages of 2 and 5” speak of a previous life, and that it has collected “over 2500 cases of the reincarnation type” in 50 years, most outside the United States. The psychiatrist Ian Stevenson (1918–2007), who documented such cases, “believed the evidence was sufficient to permit a reasonable person to believe in reincarnation”, his colleague Emily Kelly told the BMJ for its 2007 obituary. The obituary adds that his colleagues “say that his work has been denigrated even though he followed rigorous scientific studies, documented his findings, and published them.” Stevenson himself, in a 2006 essay quoted in the same obituary, wrote: “Let no one think I know the answer. I am still seeking.” These are the researchers’ own claims, and even on their own terms they concern memory of a past life, not whether particular deeds bore particular fruit.

Batchelor warns that proving rebirth “by doctrinal arguments or empirical research into the experiences of young children” risks “exactly the kind of thicket of views that the Buddha constantly warned against.” The Dalai Lama, as above, counts such recall as evidence. The disagreement between them is open.

How many people believe it

Belief is not evidence, but it shows how the question is lived. Pew Research Center surveyed 10,390 adults in five places between 2 June and 17 September 2023 (report published June 2024):

The survey did not define karma. Nearly three in ten Japanese adults declined to answer, which Pew says may indicate less familiarity with the term. The figures say nothing about Theravada Asia or the West. See Buddhism in Japan and Buddhism in Korea.

When karma is turned against people who suffer

Whatever a reader concludes about the evidence, the texts close off one use of karma: reading a person’s illness or misfortune back to their past. The Sīvaka Sutta makes past deeds one cause among eight. On the same reasoning, MN 136’s “effective but appear ineffective” suggests that a life seen from outside does not show its karma. Why karma is neither fate nor a verdict on anyone is set out on karma vs fate and karma in Buddhism. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu’s practical rule is that when others suffer and you can help, “you focus not on their karmic past but your karmic opportunity in the present.” How karma has been used in history to justify social distinctions is taken up in Buddhism and social justice.

If you are asking because of an illness or a loss, see Buddhism and illness and Buddhism and grief. These teachings are offered for reflection, not as treatment.