What Is Karma in Buddhism? Meaning, Intention and Results

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 1 June 2026 · Updated 21 September 2026

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

Karma in Buddhism (Pali kamma; Sanskrit karma) means intentional action. The Buddha located it not in the outward deed but in the intention behind it (Pali cetanā), expressed through body, speech and mind. It is an ethical principle of cause and effect working over time — not fate, not punishment, not a verdict on anyone’s suffering.

What Does Karma Actually Mean in Buddhism?

The Pali word kamma (Sanskrit karma) plainly means “action” or “deed” — Bhikkhu Sujato renders it in English simply as “deeds” throughout the Nibbedhika Sutta (AN 6.63). The distinctively Buddhist move is not in the word itself but in where its weight falls — karma sits near the centre of the core teachings of Buddhism.

That move is to ethicise the word and relocate it in the mind. What makes an act karmically significant is the volition driving it: greed, hatred and delusion on one side; generosity, kindness and clarity on the other. Two outwardly identical acts can therefore carry entirely different weight (see good and bad karma). Karma is a pattern of conditioning, not a balance in an account: intentions become tendencies, and tendencies become character.

The Buddha’s Definition: Why Intention Is the Hinge

The clearest canonical definition is one line from the Nibbedhika Sutta (AN 6.63):

Bhikkhu Sujato renders the same line, “It is intention that I call deeds. For after making a choice one acts by way of body, speech, and mind.” The Pali is Cetanāhaṁ, bhikkhave, kammaṁ vadāmi. Two translators, one point: karma is rooted in cetanā, volition — a line we take apart on “intention is kamma”.

The rest of the discourse is less quoted. Deeds have a source — “Contact is their source” — and a result that is “threefold, I say: in this very life, on rebirth in the next life, or at some later time” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). Karma also ceases: “From the cessation of contact is the cessation of kamma,” with the eightfold path named as “the path of practice leading to the cessation of kamma” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Karma is not the last word in Buddhism; it is a problem the path is designed to solve.

How Does Karma Work in Practice? The Salt-Crystal Simile

If karma worked mechanically — one wrong act, one fixed penalty — nothing done afterwards could matter. The Loṇaphala Sutta (AN 3.99, numbered AN 3.100 on SuttaCentral) says so plainly: if “in whatever way a person makes kamma, that is how it is experienced,” then “there is no living of the holy life, there is no opportunity for the right ending of stress” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). What the Buddha affirms is subtler. Two people, one small wrong:

The second person is developed in those ways — “unrestricted, large-hearted, dwelling with the immeasurable” — and for them the same deed “is experienced in the here & now, and for the most part barely appears for a moment” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Hence the image the sutta is named for: a lump of salt makes a cup of water undrinkable, while the same lump in the Ganges changes nothing. The deed is the salt. You are the water. What practice changes is not the record but the capacity of the person carrying it.

The Aṅgulimāla story shows the same logic in a life. Struck on his alms round, the reformed bandit is told to bear it: “The fruit of the kamma that would have burned you in hell for many years… you are now experiencing in the here-&-now!” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Results still arrive; their weight is not fixed.

Karma Is Not Fate, Punishment or a Caste Theory

Three misreadings, each with a canonical answer.

Not fate. In the Tittha Sutta (AN 3.61) the Buddha examines the view that “whatever a person experiences — pleasant, painful, or neither pleasant nor painful — that is all caused by what was done in the past,” and rejects it. His objection is ethical: “When one falls back on what was done in the past as being essential, monks, there is no desire, no effort [at the thought], ‘This should be done. This shouldn’t be done’” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Determinism leaves no room for the choice that makes karma karma (see karma vs fate).

Not punishment, and not a diagnosis of someone else. In the Sivaka Sutta (SN 36.21) the Buddha lists the causes of what we feel: bile, phlegm, internal winds, a combination of bodily humours, the change of the seasons, uneven care of the body, harsh treatment — and, eighth, the result of kamma. Those who insist that everything a person feels is caused by past action “slip past what they themselves know, slip past what is agreed on by the world” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Illness, accident and poverty are not karmic verdicts (see why we suffer).

Not a warrant for inherited rank. The Buddha turned kamma against birth-status, not the other way round. Asked in the Vāseṭṭha Sutta (MN 98) what makes a brahmin, he answers in verse: “You’re not a brahmin by birth, nor by birth a non-brahmin. You’re a brahmin by your deeds, and by deeds a non-brahmin” — “deeds” there is kammunā, by kamma (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). Dhammapada 393 makes the same point without the word: “Not by matted hair, nor by lineage, nor by birth does one become a holy man. But he in whom truth and righteousness exist — he is pure, he is a holy man” (trans. Acharya Buddharakkhita). Even where the canon does tie birth-rank to kamma — the Cula-kammavibhanga Sutta (MN 135), below, gives “the way leading to a low birth” as “to be obstinate & arrogant”, refusing honour to those who deserve it — the cause named is a person’s own conduct, never their ancestry.

Karma and Rebirth: What Actually Carries Over?

In the traditional view karma conditions the next life too. The Cula-kammavibhanga Sutta (MN 135) is the standard statement:

Subha has asked why human beings differ — short-lived and long-lived, sickly and healthy — and the Buddha answers with seven paired paths. A person “given to killing & slaying” reappears “in the plane of deprivation, the bad destination, the lower realms, hell”, or, coming instead “to the human state, then he/she is short-lived wherever reborn”; one who abstains is “long-lived wherever reborn” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu).

Note which way the sutta runs. Each answer is a road travelled forward, from a named deed to a named result — “This is the way leading to a short life: to be a killer of living beings.” What it does not license is the reverse inference: reading back from someone’s misfortune to a deed they must have committed. SN 36.21 and AN 3.61, quoted above, rule that backward move out.

AN 6.63 sorts deeds by where their results are felt: “in hell”, “in the realm of common animals”, “in the realm of the hungry shades”, “in the human world”, “in the world of the devas” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). That is five destinations; the six-realm map adds the jealous demigods (asuras) — see six realms.

The hard question is what does the carrying, since Buddhism denies a permanent self (non-self; Pali anattā, Sanskrit anātman). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the problem sharply: “If there is no constituent whatever that moves from one life to the next, how could the being in the next life be the same person as the being in this life?” The mainstream answer, it says, is that “rebirth without transmigration is logically possible,” because ultimately “there are just impersonal entities and events in causal sequence” (Mark Siderits) — though one minority school, the Personalists (Pudgalavādins), did affirm the person, “but their view was rejected by most Buddhist philosophers.” This is the distinction between rebirth and reincarnation.

How Theravada, Mahayana and Tibetan Traditions Read Karma

The intention-centred core is shared; the emphasis each tradition puts on karma is not.

Theravada works from the Pali discourses above: kamma is cetanā, and AN 3.99 explains why the same deed lands differently on different people.

Mahayana, in its Yogācāra strand, answers the continuity question with a mental mechanism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Vasubandhu describes the “store consciousness” (ālayavijñāna), which “is constantly replenished, because new ‘seeds’ (bīja) are created every time we enact a morally significant action (karma)”. No self is needed to hold the balance. Already in his Abhidharma work, the entry notes, Vasubandhu’s short answer to how a deed can reach its doer was that “the past action inaugurates a causal series, which eventuates in the result at a later time via a number of intermediate steps” (Jonathan C. Gold).

Tibetan schools study that same Indian Abhidharma; Vasubandhu’s Commentary on the Treasury of the Abhidharma is “to this day the primary resource for knowledge of” non-Mahāyāna philosophy “among Tibetan and East Asian Buddhist schools” (Jonathan C. Gold). Its fourth chapter opens, in Adam Pearcey’s translation for Lotsawa House, “From karma the various worlds arise”. Beside it sits a couplet Lotsawa House publishes as attributed to Padmasambhava: “My view is higher than the sky, / My attention to the karmic process finer than grains of flour” (trans. Adam Pearcey). Lines from named masters, not a summary of what every Tibetan school holds — but they mark the register: vast view, fine-grained ethics.

Making Merit, and Giving It Away

Merit (Pali puñña), the good that wholesome action accumulates, is common ground rather than a dividing line — as our full guide to merit sets out. The Pali texts are cheerful about making it: the monks are told “don’t be afraid of acts of merit,” and the training is “develop giving, a life in tune, a mind of good-will” (Itivuttaka 22, trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Nor is giving merit away a later Mahayana invention. In the Tirokuḍḍa Sutta (Khuddakapāṭha 7, also Petavatthu 1.5) families set out food and drink for departed relatives — “May this be for our relatives!” — and are told that “just as the rivers full swell the ocean seas / so too what is given here aids the departed ghosts” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). That discourse underlies the practices described under hungry ghosts.

What differs is the weight the dedication carries. In Mahayana it is constitutive rather than occasional: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says “giving or transferring merit (Jp. ekō) is a direct expression of the nature of bodhisattvas” (Dennis Hirota) — the assumption behind Ullambana and Buddhist funerals. Japanese Pure Land shifts the source: in Hōnen’s account what counts is Amida’s merit, not the practitioner’s, since the nembutsu “has been prepared for beings as effective practice—already fulfilled by Amida” (Hirota). Made, dedicated, received: the emphasis really does differ.

What Karma Is Not: Common Misreadings

• “Karma will get them.” AN 6.63 makes karma your own intention, not an enforcement agency.
• “They must have done something to deserve this.” SN 36.21 rules that out; blaming the sufferer is the worst misreading of all.
• “Good karma cancels bad.” AN 3.99 describes dilution by a changed person, not cancellation.
• “Karma explains everything.” SN 36.21 names seven other causes of feeling before kamma.

Living With Karma Day to Day

If karma is intention, the practice is attention to intention — noticing, before you speak or act, what is actually moving you. The Dhammapada opens with it:

Verse 2 completes the pair: act with a pure mind and “happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow” (trans. Acharya Buddharakkhita). The useful question is forward-facing — what am I about to do, and why? — not backward-facing accounting. And the point is not to accumulate better karma indefinitely but, as AN 6.63 says, to walk the eightfold path that leads to karma’s cessation. For the Buddha’s own words on all of this, gathered and sourced line by line, see Buddha quotes on karma.