Karma and rebirth

What it is

Two linked ideas that underlie most of the religious thought of South Asia.

Karma (Sanskrit karman, "action") is the principle that morally weighted action produces consequence for the one who acts. Not reward and punishment handed down by a judge — a regularity in how things work, closer in form to a law of nature than to a verdict.

Rebirth (punarjanma) is the claim that this consequence is not settled within one life. Saṃsāra — literally "wandering through" — is the round of birth, death and rebirth that results, and it is universally treated as the problem, never the prize. The goal in every one of these traditions is to get out.

That last point is the one most commonly lost in Western use, where reincarnation is often imagined as an attractive prospect. Nothing in the source traditions treats it that way.

Where it came from

The idea is not in the earliest layer of the Vedas. The Ṛgveda, roughly 1500–1200 BCE, is concerned with sacrifice, the gods, and a world of the fathers after death — not with rebirth.

Karma and rebirth appear together in the Upaniṣads, from around the seventh century BCE. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka contains the earliest developed statement, and presents it as new and somewhat secret teaching. Where it came from before that is genuinely unsettled: candidates include non-Vedic śramaṇa movements, indigenous traditions absorbed as Vedic culture spread east, and internal development out of the logic of ritual. Nobody knows.

What is clear is that once it appeared, it became the shared inheritance of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, and every one of them then modified it.

How it is used

As an explanation of inequality; as a motive for ethics; and, in every one of these traditions, as the thing to be escaped rather than optimised.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the four traditions disagree deeply, and the disagreements are the interesting part.

Hinduism — in the Brahmanical synthesis — has an enduring self, the ātman, which transmigrates. Karma attaches to it, carries across lives, and conditions the next birth. Release is mokṣa, and the schools differ sharply on what release consists of. It is set out under Hinduism and, in its non-dualist form, under Vedānta.

Buddhism denies exactly that self, which creates the tradition's most famous internal problem. If there is no ātman — if anattā holds — then what is reborn? The canonical answer is: nothing persists, but the causal stream continues. The stock image is a flame passed from one candle to another: the second flame is neither the same as the first nor a different one. Whether that is a solution or a restatement of the problem has been argued for two and a half thousand years, and the Abhidharma literature is largely the attempt to make it work.

Jainism makes karma physical. It is not a moral accounting but a subtle material substance that adheres to the soul and weighs it down, and this is why Jain practice is so exacting: the point is both to stop new karma arriving and to burn off what has already stuck. It is the most mechanically literal of the four, and its ethics of non-harm follow directly from it — see Jainism.

Sikhism keeps karma and rebirth and subordinates both to grace. Liberation comes through divine grace and remembrance of the Name rather than through the exhausting of one's own karmic account, which changes the whole structure of the problem.

We can say the "intention" refinement was a real innovation. In the older Brahmanical framing, karma is generated by ritual action. The Buddha's move — stated flatly in the Nibbedhika Sutta, where he says that intention is what he calls karma — relocated it to the mental act. That shifted the whole system from ritual correctness to moral psychology, and it is one of the sharpest breaks in Indian religious history.

We can say the doctrine has been used to justify caste, and that this is contested inside the traditions. If present circumstance follows past action, birth into a low position can be presented as deserved. That inference has been drawn, repeatedly, over centuries, and it has done enormous harm. It has also been rejected forcefully from within — most prominently by B.R. Ambedkar, who read the karma-caste linkage as the mechanism of oppression and led a mass conversion to Buddhism in 1956 partly on those grounds. Modern Hindu reformers reject the linkage too, arguing it confuses a metaphysical principle with a social hierarchy. Both the use and the rejection are real parts of the tradition's history and neither should be edited out.

We can say the Western version is substantially different from any of them. The popular idea that karma is a cosmic feedback system delivering comeuppance within one lifetime — "karma will get them" — has no real counterpart in the source material, where the whole point is that the accounts do not settle within a life. The Theosophical transmission in the nineteenth century, and New Age usage after it, softened rebirth into a broadly positive process of soul development. That is a modern construction, and knowing it is one is the most useful correction this article can offer.

And we can say the ethical objection deserves a straight answer. The charge is that karma makes suffering deserved and therefore licenses indifference to it — a structural problem it shares with the law of attraction, for related reasons.

The traditions' own answer is that the doctrine is addressed to the actor, not to the observer. It tells you what to do with your own conduct; it does not license a judgement about anyone else's circumstances, and the Buddhist traditions in particular treat compassion for suffering as obligatory regardless of its cause. Whether the doctrine can be held consistently without sliding into the indifference is a live question, and the traditions have produced serious literature on both sides of it.

We cannot say whether any of it is true. The empirical programme that tried to test the rebirth half is described under reincarnation research, and what it found is set out there. What can be said is that this is one idea only at the level of vocabulary, and that the traditions sharing the word disagree about the self, the mechanism, the escape route, and whether anything survives at all.

Further reading

• Wendy Doniger (ed.), Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions (1980).
• Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma (2002) — comparative and unusually good on the ethicisation of rebirth.
• B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957), for the argument from inside.