Everyone has heard the word karma. Few have stopped to ask what it means.
In common talk it means a kind of payback. A man cheats his friend, and a year later he loses his job, and someone says that was karma. The idea is that the world keeps score and sooner or later settles the account. There is some truth in this. But it misses the heart of the thing, and it turns our eyes the wrong way. It sets us watching other people.
The word comes from Sanskrit, from a root that means to do. Karma is doing. In its first sense it is nothing more than action. The hand that lifts is karma. The word that is spoken is karma. The thought turned over and over in the mind at night is karma too.
From that first sense grow two more. It is worth keeping all three apart, because most confusion about karma comes from mixing them.
The first is the act itself: the deed, while it is being done.
The second is the mark the act leaves in the doer. What we do does not vanish when it is done. It leaves an impression, the way a foot leaves a print in wet ground. The impression is stored, and it inclines us to do the same thing again.
The third is the fruit. In time a stored mark ripens and comes back to us as something we meet: a situation, a tendency, a joy or a sorrow. A seed goes into the ground, and months later there is a harvest. The seed does not come up to reward the farmer or to punish him. It comes up because it is a seed.
The act, the mark, and the fruit. Karma is all three, in that order. It is less a judge than a harvest.
This changes the question we ask. The useful question is not what someone else deserves. It is what I am planting now.
Guru Nanak put it in three short lines in Japji Sahib.
ਪੁੰਨੀ ਪਾਪੀ ਆਖਣੁ ਨਾਹਿ ॥
punnī pāpī ākhaṇ nāh |
Goodness and wrongdoing are not a matter of talk;
ਕਰਿ ਕਰਿ ਕਰਣਾ ਲਿਖਿ ਲੈ ਜਾਹੁ ॥
kar kar karaṇā likh lai jāhu |
what you do, and do again, is written down and goes with you.
ਆਪੇ ਬੀਜਿ ਆਪੇ ਹੀ ਖਾਹੁ ॥
āpe bīj āpe hī khāhu |
You sow it yourself, and you yourself eat what grows.
Japji Sahib, pauri 20
Two things stand out. The first is the phrase what you do, and do again. The Guru does not speak of a single act. One act is a footprint in sand, and the tide takes it. What we do over and over is a road, and roads last. The second is the last line. You sow it yourself. No one plants in your field but you, and no one eats from it but you.
There is another word hidden inside this one. In Arabic and in Persian there is a word karam. It means kindness, generosity, a gift freely given. It means grace. In Punjabi the two words are written with the same letters, ਕਰਮ. The Gurus knew both and used both. In one line the word means by our deeds. In another the same word means by His grace.
Karma and karam. What we do, and what is given. A person may live a whole life inside the first word and never hear the second. The Gurus spent their lives teaching both.