Instant Karma's Gonna Get You

It’s strange how our understanding of an idea we have known for ever turns out to be wrong. I’ve recently had that experience with the notion of karma and it’s that which I’m going to look at here. So definition first: the word ‘karma’ translates as ‘action’ and what is meant by this is any intentioned action whether it be a thought, word or deed. Although this is a Buddhist idea, the understanding that we live in an interconnected universe where each event is the cause of other events was already present at the time of the Buddha. What he did was take this generality and emphasise the relationship between our actions and the consequences these cause. Actions driven by ignorance and grasping cause bad outcomes, while those motivated by qualities such as wisdom, generosity and compassion cause good outcomes including the most important one of all - the creation a ‘perfect human rebirth’ - which is believed to be the most conducive rebirth for awakening. So we have karmic acts that create a karmic seed and this seed will come to fruition at some point in the future when the circumstances permit it. And this is the really significant bit; karma is not fatalism, we are not in a mechanical system where the consequences of our actions will automatically come back on us. We do have some free will and we can use this to make choices that either modify the consequences of our previous karma, create better karmic seeds for the future, or indeed, cancel it out entirely.

So where had I misunderstood this? My muddle was that I had come to believe that everything that happened to us, that we experienced, was caused by our previous karma. On one hand this made sense, I can see very clearly how what I have done in the past - and here I’m just talking about this life time - has created all sorts of consequences that I am now experiencing and how what I do with these experiences is forming my future. I’m cool with this and feel empowered by it because it means I am entirely responsible for my own experience. It gives me agency for change. However, where I am not comfortable is looking at people around me who are suffering in all sorts of horrible and seemingly unjust ways and saying this is the result of their previous actions. It seems cruel and could easily lead to a callous indifference - effectively saying, ’Well, they brought it on themselves.’

This misuse of the understanding of karma was in fact recognised by the Buddha himself who warned against it. Karma is not a stick to beat another person with, nor is it an excuse not to help each other when in distress. He also very clearly said - and this is the important bit - that not everything that happens to us is the result of our karma. While karma is part of the law of cause and effect there are other natural processes also in play that affect us. The mysterious ways of quantum mechanics and the laws of the universe, the impersonal workings of our own brains and bodies and climatic conditions are not all down to me and what I have been up to in the past. Together these natural processes all create an infinitude of unimaginable complexity that not even the Buddha claimed to be able to understand in full and in fact he named trying to do so as one of the unfathomable questions. It’s beyond us.

This all said, reading some of the accounts of karma, it can and does sometimes sound quite persecutory. Explanations for karma that use the inexplicable nature of human suffering cut both ways. On the one hand they do acknowledge the suffering someone else feels and their intention is to kindly offer a way that may eventually help, but at the same time they also imply that, for example, a child maimed by a bomb in Gaza has had this happen to them because of what they have previously done. For me this is a bridge too far and I can’t subscribe to it.

Furthermore, the whole idea of karma quickly becomes incomprehensible once we begin to look more closely. What exactly constitutes an intended action? I don’t know about you but I very rarely have perfectly clear intentions running through me. More often than not they are mixed. Something good invariably contains some self-interest and my malice is always tempered by the knowledge that it is better to be kind. And then I am more a collection of parts rather than a single being and these different parts are capable of having different intentions at more or less the same time. Bottom line; intentionality is clearer in the abstract than in emotional reality. And this leads to a real puzzle. Who is it that is creating and receiving the consequences of past karma anyway? Which ever way Buddhist philosophy cuts it, when we look for a continuing separate person he or she is just not there. Lots of experience but no experiencer. So who then has the karma and how are the seeds of this karma passed on?

Here my instinct is to remember that ideas in the abstract often break down in real life. Trying to understand karma in a ‘this equals that’ way is an impossible task and intentionality is equally evasive. Perhaps then better to go back to the intention behind the teaching in a more general or felt way. What I think, say and do does have consequences for myself and others - no doubt about this. And this being so it’s crucial that I take total responsibility for what I do. Doing so is not about being frightened about what I might be storing up for myself in the future, nor the miserly accumulation and hoarding of the ‘merit’ of good karma so that I can guarantee another perfect human rebirth or vacation within a heavenly realm in the future. Rather, it is about what is happening right now, in this present lifetime, in this present moment. In a world so very full of suffering, most of it dished out by very few onto so very many, it is utterly necessary to make choices that arise from a good and unclouded heart. Karma is about now.

NW. 29 May 2026