Karma and Rebirth

The Buddha's teaching on karma is shorter and stranger than the popular picture of it. "Intention, monks, is what I call karma," he says in the Nibbedhika Sutta (AN 6.63). "Having willed, one acts by body, speech, or mind." Karma in this technical Buddhist usage is not the act itself, not its visible effect, not a cosmic accounting ledger. It is the intention behind the act — cetanā — and the moral quality of that intention is what conditions the consequence (vipāka) that follows.

This is a sharp departure from the pre-Buddhist Vedic and Jain frameworks in which karma was understood more mechanically as the residue of ritual or physical action. The Buddha relocates karma to the will. A wholesome intention (kusala-cetanā), rooted in non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion, produces wholesome results; an unwholesome intention (akusala-cetanā), rooted in greed, hatred, and delusion, produces unwholesome results. The pattern is set out across the canon — the Cūḷa-kammavibhaṅga Sutta (MN 135) is the most systematic single treatment, in which the Buddha explains to the brahmin Subha why beings differ in lifespan, health, beauty, influence, wealth, family, intelligence: it is the differential ripening of past intentional acts.

What is not karma, the canon repeatedly insists, is fate. The Buddha rejects the Niganthas' (Jains') position that all present experience is the ripening of past karma — a doctrine he calls "wrong view" in the Devadaha Sutta (MN 101) because it would make the path itself impossible. Present experience arises from many factors: past karma is one, but so are climate, biology, the actions of others, and present choices. The Buddhist position is that karma operates within a wider conditioned field, and the present moment of intention is the leverage point.

“The Buddha's teaching on karma is shorter and stranger than the popular picture of it.”

Rebirth (punabbhava — literally "again-becoming") is the natural corollary. If the stream of intentional action carries momentum, and if death is the dissolution of one body but not of the conditioning that has driven the stream, then the stream continues. The Buddha taught rebirth as a matter of direct insight — on the night of his awakening, as recorded in the Mahāsaccaka Sutta (MN 36), the first of the three knowledges he is said to have attained was the recollection of his own past lives, "one birth, two, three… a hundred thousand, many aeons of contraction, many aeons of expansion." The second was the seeing of beings passing away and reappearing according to their karma.

The mechanism of rebirth in Buddhism is more subtle than transmigration as commonly imagined. No unchanging self passes from life to life — the doctrine of anatta forecloses that. What continues is the conditioning of the mental stream, the saṅkhāras, propelled by craving and clinging at the moment of death. The Milindapañha, the second-century BCE dialogue between the Greek king Menander and the monk Nāgasena, uses the metaphor of one candle flame lighting another: the second flame is neither the same as the first nor different from it. So with rebirth.

Across the six realms of the traditional cosmology — the hells, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, asuras, and devas — beings cycle according to the quality of their volitional actions. The Bhavacakra, the Wheel of Becoming painted at the entrance to Tibetan monasteries, depicts this graphically. The realms are read literally in most of the canonical and commentarial tradition; they are read psychologically by many modern teachers, including Chögyam Trungpa in his presentation of the six realms as states of mind. Both readings have textual support, and the Tibetan tradition holds that they need not contradict.

What the doctrine of karma and rebirth secures is the moral coherence of the cosmos in the absence of a creator-god. It also secures the urgency of practice. The "precious human birth" of the Tibetan teachings — the convergence of conditions that allow one to encounter the dharma — is precious precisely because it is rare and brief. The Bodhicaryāvatāra opens with this reminder. Śāntideva is unsentimental about it. The opportunity will not recur on its own; it must be used. The dharma is the instruction in how.