The Word Karma Meant Before It Meant Payback

Quotations are from F. Max Müller's translation of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (Sacred Books of the East vol. 15, 1884) and K. T. Telang's of the Bhagavadgita (SBE vol. 8, 1882), both public domain.

The word is karman, from the Sanskrit root kṛ, "to do" or "to make," and its plain meaning is "work" or "deed."¹ Nothing in the word itself says anything about consequences. A karman is something done, and in the oldest Indian texts, the hymns of the Rigveda, where the word "appears approximately 40 times," it refers chiefly to ritual actions,¹ the correct performance of the sacrifice. A priest's karman was his liturgy. The Satapatha Brahmana, a later ritual text, calls sacrifice "the greatest of works,"¹ and that is still the word's home ground: doing the rite properly, so that the rite does what rites do.

How a word for "deed" became a word for "what you deserve" is the story of a single passage.

The Sentence Where It Changed

The passage is in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest of the philosophical texts appended to the Vedas, and it comes in the middle of a discussion of what happens to a person at death. Müller's translation:

"Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be: a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad. He becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds."²

That is the moment the word turned. "Acts" and "deeds" here are karman, and the sentence says that deeds do not merely accomplish things in the world; they shape the doer. The next section goes further, and tells us why:

"And here they say that a person consists of desires. And as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap."²

Desire, will, deed, harvest: four links. The chain starts inside the person, in what he wants, and ends in what he becomes. The Upanishad then quotes a verse: "To whatever object a man's own mind is attached, to that he goes strenuously together with his deed; and having obtained the end of whatever deed he does here on earth, he returns again from that world to this world of action."² The "world of action" is this one, and the cycle of return is what later tradition calls rebirth.

Notice what this passage does not say. It does not say that a court sits and judges. It does not say that bad deeds are punished by someone. It says that a person is made of what he wants, and that what he does out of wanting makes him more of what he is. Karma in the Upanishad is not retribution. It is formation: the self is a sculpture that its own actions carve.

What the Gita Did With It

Six or seven centuries later, the Bhagavad Gita took the doctrine and gave it the twist that most surprises a modern reader. If deeds shape the doer, and the chain begins in desire, then the way to escape the chain is not to stop acting, which is impossible, since "nobody ever remains even for an instant without performing some action,"³ but to act without the desire that starts the chain. Krishna's instruction to Arjuna, in Telang's English:

"Your business is with action alone; not by any means with fruit. Let not the fruit of action be your motive to action. Let not your attachment be fixed on inaction."³

And, a verse later, the sentence that would have puzzled anyone who thought karma was about getting what you deserve: "Wretched are those whose motive to action is the fruit of action."³

Read that against the popular sense of the word. The everyday "karma" is entirely about fruit: do good, get good; do bad, get bad; the universe will see to it. The Gita's teaching is that the person who acts for the sake of the fruit, good fruit included, is "wretched," because he has bound himself to the chain of desire and return. The way out is action without attachment: do the deed because it is the deed to be done, and let the fruit fall where it falls. In the Gita, then, karma is not a ledger to be kept in credit. It is a bond to be loosened, and it is loosened by ceasing to care about the balance.

The Other Traditions

Two neighbouring views sharpen the picture. The Buddhists, who took the word into Pali as kamma, moved the centre of gravity one link back along the Upanishad's chain, to the will: "Intention, I tell you, is kamma," says one discourse,¹ so that a deed done without deliberate volition carries no moral charge. The Jains went the other way and made karma a substance, "karmic dirt," subtle particles that "adhere to souls through mental, verbal, and bodily vibrations"¹ and must be scrubbed off by austerity. The three views disagree about a great deal, and they agree about one thing: none of them has a judge. In all three, whatever karma is, it operates "independent of any deity or any process of divine judgment."¹ There is no one keeping the score. There is only the doing and what the doing does.

How the Word Got Here

The word entered English in the nineteenth century, and it entered through Theosophy, the movement that did more than any other to carry Indian vocabulary into Western spiritual life. In Theosophical hands it became "the Law of Cause and Effect operating in the realm of human life,"¹ as one Theosophist put it, and that phrase, "cause and effect," is the bridge to the modern sense. A law of cause and effect sounds like physics, and physics has no judge either; but a law that operates "in the realm of human life" is easily heard as a law that gives people what they have coming, and from there it is a short step to "what goes around comes around," which is where the word lives now.

Wikipedia's summary of the scholarship notes that karma is "often misunderstood as fate, destiny, or predetermination."¹ The popular sense is not quite that. It is something closer to cosmic justice, an assurance that the rude driver will get his, and that assurance is what the sources most conspicuously fail to provide.

Where the Modern Sense Fits, and Where It Breaks

It fits in one place. The Upanishad does say that a man of bad acts becomes bad, and the Gita does teach that action binds; so the popular intuition that deeds have consequences for the doer is in the texts, and is their central claim. Anyone who says "karma" meaning "what I do shapes what I become" is speaking the old language.

It breaks in three places. First, the consequences in the sources are to the doer's own nature, not to his circumstances: the bad man becomes bad, which is a different thing from the bad man's car breaking down. Second, there is no one administering the consequences, so the modern flavour of satisfaction, of the universe taking one's side, has no source to rest on; the texts describe a process, not a verdict. And third, the Gita reverses the direction of concern entirely. The modern speaker invokes karma in order to think about fruit, about who will get what. The Gita invokes it in order to stop thinking about fruit at all. "Your business is with action alone."³ A person who wishes karma on an enemy is, by the Gita's measure, the one in trouble.

The Answer

What did the word mean before it meant payback? It meant a deed, and then it meant the way deeds make the doer, and then it meant the bond that such making creates and the freedom that comes from acting without caring how the bond turns out. None of those is a scorekeeper. The nearest the sources come to the modern sense is the Upanishad's "whatever deed he does, that he will reap,"² and even there the harvest is a self, not a reward. The rest, the justice and the comeuppance and the satisfying symmetry, was added later, mostly in English, by people who wanted a universe that kept accounts. The texts offer something harder and, on their own terms, more useful: a universe in which you are what you have been doing, and can begin, without waiting for the returns, to do otherwise.