What Is Karma?
Karma means intentional action—actions of body, speech, and mind—and the ways those actions help condition future thoughts, emotions, habits, perceptions, actions, relationships, and circumstances.
The word intentional is important. Karma refers specifically to actions shaped by volition, motive, or choice—not everything that happens or every movement of the body.
An accidental action can still have consequences and contribute to conditioning. It may affect another person, alter a relationship, produce regret, or influence later behavior. However, it does not have the same karmic significance as a deliberate action.
All actions may have consequences, but karma specifically refers to intentional action.
Karma is not fate, punishment, or a cosmic system of reward. It is the process by which intentional actions become part of the causes and conditions shaping what follows.
What Is Dependent Arising?
Dependent arising means that all things and experiences arise through causes and conditions.
Nothing exists completely independently or arises from a single cause.
A plant depends on seed, soil, water, sunlight, temperature, and time. An emotion may depend on perception, memory, habit, bodily state, and interpretation.
Their Relationship
Karma is one expression of dependent arising.
Intention → action → experience → reaction → conditioning → future experience
Intention shapes an action. The action has consequences that become part of our internal or external experience. We then react, and that reaction may strengthen or weaken existing habits and tendencies.
This conditioning influences how future situations are perceived and how we are likely to respond.
For example, repeatedly reacting with anger strengthens the tendency toward anger. That tendency affects how later situations are perceived and makes another angry reaction more likely.
Practicing patience creates different conditions: greater restraint, clearer perception, and a greater likelihood of responding patiently again.
Dependent arising is broader than karma. It includes intentional actions, accidental events, physical conditions, social influences, biological processes, perceptions, and countless other causes shaping experience.
Other Examples of Dependent Arising
- Perception depends on an object, the senses, attention, and consciousness.
- Emotions depend on thoughts, memories, bodily conditions, habits, and circumstances.
- Relationships depend on communication, expectations, past actions, and mutual responses.
- Money, laws, roles, and identities depend on shared agreement and social conditions.
- The Twelve Links describe the dependent arising and continuation of suffering.
Links to Other Buddhist Concepts
The Twelve Links of Dependent Arising
The Twelve Nidanas, commonly called the Twelve Links of Dependent Arising, provide a more detailed explanation of how suffering arises and continues.
Each link describes a condition that contributes to the arising of the next:
Ignorance → formations → consciousness → name and form → six sense bases → contact → feeling → craving → grasping → becoming → birth → aging and death
The simplified sequence used above—
Intention → action → experience → reaction → conditioning → future experience
—is not a replacement for the Twelve Links. It is a practical way of seeing the same general principle operating in everyday experience: each event becomes part of the conditions from which the next event arises.
A particularly important point occurs after feeling. A pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral experience may condition craving, aversion, or indifference. These reactions can develop into grasping, further action, continued conditioning, and suffering.
Awareness can interrupt this process. By experiencing a feeling without automatically reacting, we weaken the chain of conditions that would otherwise lead toward grasping and suffering.
Emptiness
Dependent arising also helps explain emptiness.
Because things arise through causes, parts, relationships, and conditions, they do not possess independent, permanent existence.
Things arise dependently; therefore, they are empty of independent existence.
Why It Matters
Karma explains why our intentional choices matter.
Dependent arising explains why experience is shaped by many conditions and why change is possible.
The Twelve Links of dependent arising explain suffering/discontent and how conditioned experience can develop into craving, grasping, and suffering.
Because thoughts, habits, suffering, and behavior arise through conditions, they are not fixed. By changing intentions, actions, reactions, and habits, we change some of the conditions shaping what comes next.
Karma is not fate. It is the ongoing process by which intentional actions participate in shaping future experience.
References
- Nibbedhika Sutta: Penetrative (Anguttara Nikaya 6.63), translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Read on SuttaCentral. This discourse identifies intention or volition as karma.
- Paticcasamuppada Sutta: Dependent Origination (Samyutta Nikaya 12.1), translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Read on SuttaCentral. This discourse presents the arising and cessation of the Twelve Links.
- Vibhanga Sutta: Analysis of Dependent Origination (Samyutta Nikaya 12.2), translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Read on SuttaCentral. This discourse defines the individual links of dependent arising.
- Bhikkhu Bodhi, translator. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Wisdom Publications, 2000.
- Bhikkhu Bodhi. The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering. Buddhist Publication Society.
Page Created 06/10/2026