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Karma & Rebirth

What karma actually is in Buddhism, how it differs from fate and from popular usage, and what it means to say there is rebirth without a soul.

by The editorial team · reviewed 2026-09-17

Karma and rebirth are the two Buddhist doctrines most familiar to people who know nothing else about Buddhism, and the two most reliably misunderstood. In ordinary English usage “karma” has come to mean something like cosmic justice, an impersonal accounting system that rewards and punishes. “Rebirth” is generally assumed to mean reincarnation: a soul moving from body to body.

Buddhism teaches neither of these. It teaches something more specific, more demanding, and considerably more interesting.

Karma is intention #

The Buddha’s definition is unusually direct. In Anguttara Nikaya 6:63 he says: “It is volition (cetana) that I call karma. Having willed, one acts by body, speech, and mind.”

The word karma (Pali kamma) means simply “action,” and the definition narrows it to intentional action. The mental act of intending is the karma; bodily and verbal behaviour are its expression.

This has consequences that immediately distinguish it from the popular picture.

Unintentional harm is not karma in the technical sense. Stepping on an insect you did not see is not the same act as stepping on one you did. This is a real difference from Jainism, which held that harm accrues regardless of intention — and the disagreement is recorded in the canon, where the Buddha argues the point with Jain interlocutors directly.

Thoughts are karma. Mental action is included explicitly. Sustained cultivation of hatred is karmically consequential even if nothing is said or done.

Karma is not a ledger. There is no one keeping accounts, no judge, and no mechanism of reward and punishment. The tradition presents karma as a natural regularity — intentional actions incline the mind in a direction, and the mind so inclined encounters a world accordingly.

See Understanding Karma for the mechanics, the classifications, and what the tradition does and does not claim about how results come about.

Rebirth without a self #

The harder doctrine is rebirth, because Buddhism simultaneously denies that there is a self.

Anatta holds that there is no permanent, unchanging, independent entity to be found among or behind the five aggregates. If that is so, the obvious question is what is reborn — and the tradition’s answer is: nothing.

What happens is that a process continues. The standard analogies:

A flame passed from one candle to another. The second flame is not the first flame, and it is not a different flame arising independently. It is causally continuous with it. Nothing travels; the process propagates.

Waves on water. One wave conditions the next without anything moving from one to the other.

A person at fifty and at five. Conventionally the same person, with no single constituent surviving from one to the other, and no persisting essence to point to. Rebirth is this relation, extended across a discontinuity.

The classic formulation is from the Milindapanha: it is neither the same person nor a different one. Both alternatives are rejected, and the middle position between them — continuity without identity — is the doctrine.

See Rebirth and Samsara Explained.

Why these matter together #

Karma and rebirth are not two doctrines but one system, and neither works without the other.

Karma requires rebirth because the timescales do not otherwise work. Many intentional actions plainly do not ripen within a lifetime, and any account restricted to a single life has to explain either why the results are not observed or why the doctrine should be believed anyway.

Rebirth requires karma because otherwise there is nothing to determine the continuation. It is the karmic momentum of a continuum that conditions the next arising, and without it rebirth would be arbitrary.

Together they produce the situation the tradition calls samsara: a beginningless circulation through the six realms, driven by craving and sustained by action, from which nirvana is the exit.

What karma does not explain #

The tradition is more careful here than popular presentations suggest, and the carefulness matters.

Not everything that happens is karmic. The Sivaka Sutta (SN 36:21) lists eight causes of experienced feeling: bile disorders, phlegm disorders, wind disorders, imbalance of the humours, changes of climate, careless behaviour, external assault, and the result of karma. Karma is one of eight. The discourse explicitly rejects the view that everything a person experiences is caused by past action, and names it as a wrong view.

This forecloses the most damaging misuse of the doctrine — the inference that a person’s suffering is deserved. It is also frequently ignored, and the inference has been drawn throughout Buddhist history to justify caste, poverty, and disability. Ambedkar’s rejection of rebirth was motivated substantially by this.

Karmic results are not predictable in detail. The Acintita Sutta (AN 4:77) lists the precise working-out of karma among four things that are “unconjecturable” and that will bring vexation to anyone who speculates about them. The tradition claims the general principle, not the capacity to trace particular effects to particular causes.

Karma is not fate. Present action is not determined by past action. If it were, the path would be impossible, and the canon attacks deterministic views — particularly those of the fatalist Makkhali Gosala — in the sharpest terms it uses about anything.

The modern problem #

A significant number of modern Buddhists, especially Western converts, accept karma in some psychological form and do not accept literal rebirth.

The position has articulate defenders. Stephen Batchelor’s secular Buddhism argues that rebirth is inherited Indian cosmology rather than the Buddha’s distinctive contribution, and that the Four Noble Truths stand without it.

It also has serious critics, including Bhikkhu Bodhi and Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who argue that the texts treat rebirth as foundational rather than incidental — it is the content of the second of the three knowledges on the night of the awakening, it is what “the end of birth” in every liberation formula refers to, and the six realms presuppose it throughout.

A reader is entitled to their own conclusion. What is not sustainable is the claim that the tradition is neutral on the question: it is not, and every school has held rebirth to be literally true.

What the Buddha changed #

Karma was not a Buddhist invention. The word and the broad framework were common to the religious culture of the Ganges basin, and the Buddha’s contribution was a redefinition sharp enough that Richard Gombrich calls it the ethicisation of the universe.

Brahminical usage applied karman primarily to ritual action: correctly performed sacrifice produced results, and the efficacy lay in the precision of the performance.

Jain usage applied it to action of any kind, understood almost physically — karma as a fine material substance adhering to the soul, accrued by activity regardless of intent. Hence the Jain emphasis on minimising action altogether, and on austerity as a way of burning off what has accrued.

The Buddha took a term everyone used for external action and relocated it entirely in the mind: it is volition that I call karma. The consequences are substantial. Ritual precision becomes irrelevant. Accidental harm is not the same act as deliberate harm. And moral life becomes a matter of the mind’s disposition rather than of correct performance or of quantity of activity.

The canon records him arguing this with Jain interlocutors directly, and the Upali Sutta (MN 56) has a prominent Jain layman change his allegiance over precisely this point.

The classifications #

Useful because they are what makes karma tractable rather than fatalistic.

By ethical quality — kusala and akusala, rooted in non-greed, non-hatred, non-delusion or in their opposites.

By door — bodily, verbal, and mental.

By time of ripening — in this life; in the next; in some subsequent life; or defunct, never ripening because the conditions for it do not arise. The last category alone rules out any picture of an exact ledger.

By function — generative karma produces a rebirth; supportive reinforces a result already operating; obstructive weakens it; destructive cuts off a weaker karma’s result entirely.

That fourth scheme is the important one. Results can be diminished, obstructed, or prevented by subsequent action. Without that, the path would be impossible.

The salt crystal #

The clearest canonical statement that results are not proportional to acts, from the Lonaphala Sutta (AN 3:100).

A lump of salt dropped into a cup of water makes it undrinkable. The same lump dropped into the Ganges does not. The same action, the Buddha says, produces very different results depending on the person who performs it — specifically on whether that person is developed in body, virtue, mind, and wisdom.

The discourse goes further: a karma that would send an undeveloped person to a lower realm may be experienced by a developed person as a minor difficulty in this life.

The practical implication surprises people. What most determines how karma ripens is not the size of the deed but the character of the continuum it ripens in — which means that cultivating that character does more than auditing individual acts.

The eight causes, and why they matter #

The single most important corrective in this whole area, and the one most often omitted.

The Sivaka Sutta (SN 36:21) lists eight causes of experienced feeling: disorders of bile, of phlegm, or of wind; an imbalance of these; changes of climate; careless behaviour; external assault; and the ripening of karma.

Karma is one of eight. The Buddha then explicitly names the view that “whatever a person experiences is caused by what was done before” as a wrong view — one that goes beyond what is known and beyond what is accepted in the world.

This forecloses the doctrine’s most damaging misuse: the inference from someone’s suffering to their desert. That inference has been drawn throughout Buddhist history, to explain caste, poverty, disability, and misfortune, and it is why Ambedkar removed rebirth-karma from his presentation of Buddhism altogether.

The texts give the grounds for refusing it. They are routinely ignored.

Sources & further reading #

Bhikkhu Bodhi (ed.), In the Buddha’s Words (Wisdom, 2005), chs. 2 and 5 — the primary sources on karma and rebirth, arranged thematically. Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 1 — the most careful treatment of what karma does and does not claim. Richard Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought (Equinox, 2009), ch. 4 — on the Buddha’s redefinition of karma as intention, and why it was radical. Bhikkhu Analayo, Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research (Wisdom, 2018) — a careful survey, including of the evidence claims. Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (Spiegel & Grau, 2010) — the best-argued case for setting rebirth aside.

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