The Science of Karma

The Anatomy of an Act

Before karma can be sorted it has to be dissected, and the tradition dissected it from two directions: by what goes into an act, and by what door it comes out of.

The Gītā gives the inputs. In the eighteenth chapter Kṛṣṇa says there are five causes of every act, “declared in the Sāṅkhya where actions reach their end”: the adhiṣṭhāna, the seat, which the commentators take as the body; the kartā, the agent; the several karaṇa, the instruments — senses and organs; the various ceṣṭā, the exertions; and fifth, daiva.^[7] Text Whatever act a person undertakes with body, speech or mind, right or wrong, these five are its causes. It is a remarkable list because of the last item. Fate is not set against action here; it is counted as one of action’s components, the one the agent does not supply. We will meet the same thought in Caraka, who makes it the basis of a whole theory of medicine.

Manu gives the doors. Karma is threefold by its origin — mano-vāg-deha-sambhavam, born of mind, speech and body — and its results are the high, middling and low conditions of men. Then he counts: three kinds of mental karma (coveting what belongs to another, thinking harm, clinging to falsehood), four of speech (harshness, lying, slander, idle talk), three of body (taking what is not given, injury without sanction, another’s wife) — ten in all, and “the mind is to be known as their instigator.”^[8] Text Then the returns, and this is the part that matters for the astrology to come: a mental act is experienced in the mind, a verbal one in speech, a bodily one in the body; and by the faults of the body one becomes an unmoving thing, by those of speech a bird or a beast, by those of the mind a person of the lowest birth. The door an act leaves by is the door its result returns through. Hold onto that; B. V. Raman’s summary of the Praśna Mārga will hand it to the astrologer as a rule about the fifth, second and tenth houses.

The Buddha, some centuries before the Gītā took its present form, cut the knot differently. Cetanāhaṃ bhikkhave kammaṃ vadāmi — “it is intention, monks, that I call karma; having intended, one acts by body, speech and mind.”^[34] Text Manu’s three doors are there, but the act has moved inside. The Jains went the other way and made it more physical than anyone: karma is a species of subtle matter, pudgala, drawn to the soul by its passions and sticking there.^[39] We will give both their own panel at the end. For now notice that the Hindu texts keep a middle course — the act is really done, really leaves a residue, and the residue is neither only a thought nor a particle.

Two more distinctions round out the anatomy. The Gītā warns that one must understand karma, vikarma and akarma — action, wrong action and non-action — because “the way of karma is deep,” gahanā karmaṇo gatiḥ; and it denies that non-action is even available: no one can remain for a moment without acting, since the qualities of nature compel everyone.^[7] Text Patañjali colours the residue: the karma of a yogī is “neither white nor black,” while for everyone else it is of three kinds — white, black, and mixed.^[11] Text The point of both is the same. There is no exit from doing; there is only the question of what kind of residue a doing leaves, and whether it clings.

How Fixed Is Fixed?

Every practitioner is eventually asked the only question a client really has: can it be changed? The traditions answer with a second sorting, not by time but by fixity, and here the vocabulary is more tangled than the textbooks let on. Five vocabularies grade karma along something like a scale from alterable to fixed, and only two of them — one Brahmanical, one Jain — are grading fixity itself.

The oldest careful Brahmanical treatment is Vyāsa’s commentary on the Yoga Sūtra. Patañjali says that the deposit of karma, the karmāśaya, is rooted in the afflictions and is “to be experienced in seen or unseen births”; that so long as the root exists, its ripening is jāti, āyus, bhoga — birth, span and experience; and that these bear the fruit of joy or pain according as their cause was merit or demerit.^[11] Text Vyāsa then draws the tree. The deposit may be dṛṣṭa-janma-vedanīya, felt in this seen birth, or adṛṣṭa-janma-vedanīya, felt in an unseen one; and in either case its ripening may be niyata, appointed, or aniyata, unappointed. The one-birth deposit — the ekabhavika store that makes a single life — is the appointed part. The unappointed part has three possible fates: “it may be destroyed without fruition; it may become merged in the ruling action; or it may live on for a long time, overpowered by the ruling action whose fruition has been appointed.”^[11] Text That is as precise as anyone in the Brahmanical tradition ever got about alterability, and it is where the astrologers’ later confidence in remedies has to find its warrant.

The Jains were, if anything, more precise, because for them karma was a substance and substances have properties. The Tattvārthasūtra says bondage has four aspects — the kind of karma, its duration, its intensity and its quantity — and the karma-treatises then describe processes that act on the duration and intensity of karma already bound: udvartanā increases them, apavartanā decreases them, saṃkramaṇa converts one sub-type into another. Karma in the state called nidhatti is closed to some of these processes; karma that is nikācita is closed to all of them and must be experienced exactly as it was bound.^[40] Text That is a true gradient from alterable to fixed, and it maps well onto Vyāsa’s unappointed and appointed — different metaphysics, same shape.

The Buddhist scale is not really about fixity at all, and I include it because it is the most humane answer any of the traditions gives. In the Loṇakapalla Sutta the Buddha says that if it were true that “a person experiences karma exactly as he has done it,” there would be no holy life and no way to end suffering; rather, a trifling misdeed may take one person to hell and be barely felt by another. A crystal of salt in a cup of water makes it undrinkable; the same crystal in the Ganges does not.^[36] Text The crystal is the deed; the vessel is the doer’s development in body, virtue, mind and wisdom. Fixity here is a property not of the karma but of the person it lands in. The commentarial tradition does have a fourfold division by the time of ripening — in this life, in the next, in some later life, and karma that has lapsed altogether — and it maps neatly onto Vyāsa’s seen and unseen births; but that is a sorting by when, not by whether.^[37]

And then there is the scheme most Jyotiṣa students learn, which grades karma as dṛḍha, fixed; adṛḍha, not fixed; and dṛḍhādṛḍha, mixed — with the rule that remedies act on the second, partly on the third, and not at all on the first. I have taught it myself. It is a good scheme. It is not a classical one. The triad and its rule reach English, so far as I can find, through Hart de Fouw and Robert Svoboda’s Light on Life in 1996, and spread from there through nearly every modern manual.^[33] The only classical astrological text I know to be cited for dṛḍha and adṛḍha karma is the seventeenth-century Kerala Praśna Mārga, and there only through B. V. Raman’s summary of its fourteenth chapter, which I have not been able to check against the stanzas. In that summary the words mean something else: dṛḍha karma is that made by conscious activity of mind, speech or body, and adṛḍha that made unintentionally; and a malefic in the fifth, second or tenth shows karma of thought, word or deed respectively.^[29] Mine That is Manu’s three doors and the Buddha’s intention, not a fixity scale. The modern triad has borrowed the Sanskrit of the Praśna Mārga for the sense of Vyāsa. Mine I do not say this to discredit the scheme — Vyāsa’s appointed and unappointed karma give it all the warrant it needs — but a science should know which of its words are old and which are new, and this pair is new.

Karma in the Body

Āyurveda is the Vedic science that had to make karma operational at the bedside — to decide, patient by patient, whether a given suffering was karma at all and what that implied for treatment. Its answers are more careful than the popular idea that “all disease is karmic,” and they are worth having exactly.

Caraka’s definition of the person already has karma in it. The empirical person, “called the aggregate,” is mohecchādveṣakarmajaḥ — born of delusion, desire, aversion and karma.^[17] Text Karma is a cause of the body, not merely something the body does. When the Śārīrasthāna comes to classify the causes of disease it names the natural ones — time, age, death — and then adds: nirdiṣṭaṃ daivaśabdena karma yat paurvadehikam / hetus tad api kālena rogāṇām upalabhyate, “what is called by the word daiva is the karma of a former body; in time it too is found to be a cause of diseases.” And the next verse gives the clinical rule: “there is no great karma whose fruit is not experienced; karma-born diseases defeat treatment and subside on the exhaustion of that karma.”^[17] Text That is the physician’s prārabdha — the disease that will not answer to medicine because it is not, at bottom, a medical event.

But Caraka does not let the category swallow the clinic. The Sūtrasthāna gives the three causes of all disorder — wrong contact of the senses with their objects, prajñāparādha or the offence against wisdom, and pariṇāma, the transformation of time — and these are the causes the physician can see and act on.^[18] Text Daiva is what is left when the visible causes have been accounted for and the disease still does not behave. In the embryology, likewise, karma is one item in a list: the variety and deformity of embryos come from faults of the seed, of the self’s karma, of the womb, of the season, of the doṣas, and of the mother’s diet and conduct.^[17] And the same chapter of the Sūtrasthāna that argues rebirth from all four means of knowledge — the word of the reliable, perception, inference and reasoning — concludes not with fatalism but with an exhortation to dharma.^[18] Text The medical tradition treats karma as a real cause that must be kept in its place among the others.

Suśruta is more schematic. He classifies disease by its origin into seven: from the seed, from the womb, from the doṣas, from injury, from season, from daiva, and from nature. The fate-born class, daivabala-pravṛtta, is then itself divided — diseases from curses incurred by offending the gods, diseases made by Atharvan rites, and diseases of “visitation,” upasarga, which include lightning and thunderbolt, spirits, contagion and accident.^[19] Text Two things are striking in that list. First, that the classical physician put the curse and the epidemic in the same drawer: both are events that arrive from outside the patient’s own physiology and history, and “fate” is the name of that drawer. Second, that the curse is there at all — because when we open Parāśara in two chapters’ time, curses from a former life are precisely what he will teach the astrologer to read.

Vāgbhaṭa, characteristically, compresses. His embryology opens with the soul arriving: śuddhe śukrārtave satvaḥ svakarmakleśacoditaḥ / garbhaḥ sampadyate yuktivaśād agnir ivāraṇau — in my translation, “when the śukra and ārtava are pure, the satva, impelled by its own karma — actions from past lives — and kleśas, becomes an embryo, by the power of yukti, just as fire arises from fire-sticks.”^[20] Text I want to underline the word kleśa. It is Patañjali’s word — the deposit of karma is kleśa-mūla, rooted in the afflictions — and Vāgbhaṭa has put the yogic account of why a soul takes a body into the first verse of his Śārīrasthāna.^[11] The physician and the yogī are describing the same event from two sides: what drives the soul to a womb, and what the womb then has to work with.

Where the Ledger Shows

Parāśara devotes a chapter to what each house shows, one verse per house, and it is the natural place to begin because it is the oldest list most of us actually use. The instrument below carries all twelve verses, with Santhanam’s English, beside the reading I give each house in the vocabulary of the ledger; the tints mark which of the three stores a house speaks to most directly — a different sorting from the three fruits of Fig. 9, which say what a house reads, where the tint says which account it draws on. The classical lists are Text; the karmic readings, and the tints, are Mine. A few of the houses deserve comment here because the modern glosses on them are so widespread that it is worth knowing where they come from.

The fifth. Nearly every modern text calls it the house of pūrva-puṇya, the merit of former lives. Parāśara’s verse does not: his fifth is amulets and mantras, learning, the workings of intelligence, children, authority and its loss.^[24] Text The phrase seems to rest on the Uttarakālāmṛta, whose long list for the fifth includes an item its translator renders as “virtuous act done by the father” — the Sanskrit of which I have not been able to check, and which could as easily be the merit of forebears as of former births.^[30] What is classical is that the fifth is where the granary shows through the measure: every one of Parāśara’s eight past-life curses is read from it, and the rule in Raman’s summary of the Praśna Mārga puts the karma of thought there.^[28][29] The gloss is sound even if its Sanskrit pedigree is thin.

The eighth. Parāśara’s list is longevity, battle, enemies, forts, the wealth of the dead — and then a phrase the e-text gives as gatyanukādikam, which Santhanam, apparently reading gatānāgata-, renders as things gone and to come, “in the past and future births.”^[24] Text That makes the eighth the one house whose classical significations already look across the boundary of a life; with the third, which is eighth from it, it carries Patañjali’s āyus.

The tenth is named karma by the tradition, though in this verse Parāśara calls it vyoma, the sky, and lists authority, livelihood, honour, the father, foreign residence and debts.^[24] Text In the ledger it is the field: what the hands are doing now. Mine And the rule Raman draws from the Praśna Mārga — thought in the fifth, word in the second, deed in the tenth — turns out to be Manu’s three doors laid onto the chart, which is a correspondence I have not seen remarked on and find lovely: the mind’s karma read from the house of intelligence, speech’s from the house of the mouth, the body’s from the house of the deed.^{[29] [8]}

Then the grahas. The chart’s second view gives each its classical role from Parāśara and Varāhamihira — the Sun the self, the Moon the mind, Mars strength, Mercury speech, Jupiter knowledge and happiness, Venus potency, and Saturn duḥkha, sorrow.^[23] Text I want to be exact about Saturn, because “Śani is the karma-kāraka” is said in every classroom including mine. The texts do not say it. Varāhamihira’s Kālapuruṣa verse ends duḥkhaṃ dineśātmajaḥ, and Parāśara’s parallel ends chāyāsūnuś ca duḥkhadaḥ: the Sun’s son gives grief.^[23] Text The step from grief to karma is ours, and it is a reasonable step — Patañjali says the fruit of the deposit is joy or pain, and the graha of pain is therefore the graha of the deposit’s bitter half — but it should be labelled as a step. Mine The nodes, likewise, have no classical verse tying them to past lives as such; what the texts do is put Rāhu in the fifth and call it the serpent’s curse, and put Ketu in the twelfth from the kārakāṃśa, with benefics, and call it liberation.^[28][25] Text That last is the one place the classical literature ties a graha to the end of the ledger, and it belongs to Jaimini’s system, in which the graha of highest degree, the Ātmakāraka, stands for the self that carries the account.^[31]

And the curses. The eighty-third chapter of Parāśara opens with Maitreya asking why a man is childless — “there is no way forward for the sonless, the scriptures say; by what sin does one become sonless, and how may an astrologer know it from the birth chart?” — and Parāśara answers by relating a conversation between Śiva and Pārvatī in which eight curses from a former life are listed, each showing in the fifth house: the serpent’s, the father’s, the mother’s, the brother’s, the maternal uncle’s, the brāhmaṇa’s, the wife’s, and the curse of the dead who were not given their rites.^[28] Text Each has its yogas; each has its remedy. The chart’s third view draws one verse of each, and I have taken care that the placements can actually occur — a debilitated Sun in the fifth, for instance, needs a Gemini lagna, and the chart says so. This chapter is the most concrete karma-doctrine in the whole of Jyotiṣa: a named deed in a former life, a named signature in this chart, a named rite to discharge it. Suśruta’s drawer labelled daiva, with curses in it, turns out to have an index.

Changing the Account

The last question is the one the client actually came with. If the measure is drawn and the wheel is turning, what is the point of a remedy? The tradition’s answer has four parts, and they correspond to the four rows of the figure below: living it out, non-attachment, effort and remedy, and knowledge. Each reaches a different store, and the texts are more precise about which than practice usually is.

Living it out is the only thing that reaches the fixed part of the measure. Prārabdhaṃ bhogena naṣṭaṃ bhavati: the karma that has begun is destroyed by being experienced, and by nothing else.^[13] Text That is a hard sentence, and it is the reason the classical physicians say that karma-born disease “defeats treatment.” But the Yoga Sūtra states the whole rationale of remedy in three words, two sūtras after describing the deposit: heyaṃ duḥkham anāgatam, “the pain not yet come is what is to be avoided.”^[11] Text Past pain is spent; present pain is being spent; the field of action is future pain, and the unappointed part of the deposit is where future pain is still negotiable.

Effort and remedy act on that part. We have Caraka’s matrix for effort. For remedy, the oldest legal text on planetary rites says why one performs them at all: “one who desires prosperity, or peace, or rain, long life and nourishment, or who would work against another, should perform the sacrifice to the grahas”; and near its end the chapter gives the rule every astrologer knows in some form — yaś ca yasya yadā duḥsthaḥ sa taṃ yatnena pūjayet, “whichever graha is ill-placed for whomever, at whatever time, that one he should worship with effort.”^[32] Text Parāśara’s curse-chapter ends the same way, sorting the remedies by the graha at fault: Śiva-worship for Mercury or Venus, mantra and yantra and medicine for Jupiter or the Moon, the gift of a maiden’s marriage for Rāhu, Hari-kīrtana for the Sun, a cow for Ketu, Rudra-japa for Mars and Saturn, and for every fault the hearing of the Harivaṃśa with devotion.^[28] Text Vyāsa supplies the mechanism these rites are relying on, though none of them cites him: unappointed karma may be destroyed without fruit, merged into a stronger karma, or overpowered and deferred.^[11] Mine A remedy, on this account, is an attempt to make one of those three things happen to a particular unappointed account — and it is itself a deed, which means it also goes into the field. The ledger shows both: effort deflects the alterable share, and the deflected share returns to the granary, because I have chosen Vyāsa’s most conservative fate. A practitioner who believes remedies destroy rather than defer is entitled to; the texts allow either.

Non-attachment reaches the field. Karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana: your right is to the act alone, never to its fruits; do not be one whose motive is the fruit.^[7] Text The Gītā is not saying that detached action leaves no residue — nothing leaves no residue — but that the residue of unattached action does not bind, which is why the ledger’s slider is labelled binding and not quantity. Mine Patañjali says the same in his own colours: the yogī’s karma is neither white nor black.^[11]

And knowledge reaches the granary. Jñānāgniḥ sarvakarmāṇi bhasmasāt kurute: as a kindled fire reduces fuel to ash, the fire of knowledge reduces all karma to ash.^[7] Text All karma — but the Brahma Sūtra immediately qualifies “all”: only that whose effect has not begun.^[12] The Tattvabodha’s three sentences say exactly which store knowledge touches and how, and they are the three cells of the last row in the figure: sañcita destroyed by the knowledge “I am Brahman,” āgāmi clinging to the knower no more than water to a lotus leaf, prārabdha spent only by living.^[13] Text

I find the matrix consoling and I think it is meant to be. It says that nothing in a life is entirely fixed — even the fixed part of the measure is being spent every day, and spending is a kind of change — and that nothing is entirely free. It puts the astrologer’s remedy in its proper and modest place: one instrument among four, aimed at one part of one store. And it explains why the same tradition can hold, in one hand, a chapter of curses with their rites, and in the other the potter’s wheel. The two are about different rows of the same column.

The Lamp, Not the Sentence

I called this essay a science of karma, and I should say in what sense the word is earned. Not in the sense that any of it is measured — a “measure” in the ledger is a unit of nothing, and the model’s numbers are choices, labelled as such. It is a science in the older sense the tradition itself intended by śāstra: a body of doctrine with defined terms, stated rules, and consequences that can be drawn out and checked against one another. What I have tried to show is that the doctrine, taken at its word, is a system — stores, flows, gates, a clock — and that when it is drawn as one, its parts fit. The three stores of the Vedāntins, the appointed and unappointed karma of Vyāsa, Caraka’s contest of fate and effort, the physician’s disease that defeats treatment, the three fruits of the deposit and the three things a chart claims to read, the curses of the fifth house and their rites, the potter’s wheel and the fire of knowledge — none of these contradicts another, and most of them turn out to be the same claim made in a different vocabulary.

What the system does not do is predict. The lamp shows the furniture; it does not say where you will stub your toe. Varāhamihira chose his verb with care, and so did Parāśara when he made the grahas the form of the giver and not the giver. The horoscope, on the texts’ own account, is a reading of one measure drawn from a very old store, at the moment of the draw, before any of it has been lived, with the order of its payment sketched by the daśās and its alterable share still open to effort, remedy, detachment and knowledge. That is a great deal to be able to read. It is not a sentence, and any astrologer who delivers it as one has confused the measure with the granary and the lamp with the room.

Whatever was gathered in another birth —
this science makes visible, as a lamp the things in darkness.

The principal readings in this essay that are mine — three of them — should be weighed as such: the three fruits laid over the houses, the intersection of ledger and daśā as the form of a reading, and the observation that the thought–word–deed houses of Raman’s Praśna Mārga are Manu’s three doors. Smaller steps of mine — the fixed-to-alterable ratio, the step from Saturn’s sorrow to Saturn’s karma, the tints on the chart — are flagged where they occur. The rest is the texts, cited so that they can be checked, with the places where I could not verify a reading marked in the notes. If a reader finds the Sanskrit behind the fifth house’s “former merit,” or a classical verse that calls Śani the significator of karma, I would be glad to know it and gladder still to correct the page.