Karma in Buddhism and Hinduism: intention, self, and dependent origination

A shared word, not a shared theory

Buddhism and Hinduism both use the word karma, both connect it to rebirth, and both treat ethical conduct as having consequences beyond a single lifetime. It is easy, from that overlap, to assume the two traditions are simply restating the same doctrine in different vocabularies. They are not. The difference is not cosmetic; it goes to one of the hardest problems either tradition has to solve, and each solves it differently: if karma is meant to connect a person's past action to their future experience, what exactly is the "person" that persists to receive that connection?

Intention at the centre: the Buddhist definition

Buddhist doctrine gives an unusually precise, almost definitional answer to what karma actually is, attributed to the Buddha in the Anguttara Nikaya: "cetanaham bhikkhave kammam vadami — intention, monks, is what I call karma; having willed (intended), one acts through body, speech and mind." This is a specific and consequential claim. It makes karma, in the first instance, a matter of mental intention rather than of outward action or outcome as such — an act performed without the relevant intention (an accident, for instance) does not generate the same karmic weight as the same outward act performed deliberately and with a particular state of mind. This intention-centred definition shapes the entire structure of Buddhist ethics: motive, not merely consequence or ritual correctness, becomes the primary object of moral evaluation, which is one reason Buddhist ethical literature spends so much attention on mental states — greed, hatred, delusion, and their opposites — as the roots from which karmically significant action grows.

The no-self problem

Hindu schools that accept karma generally also accept some version of an atman — an enduring self or soul that survives bodily death and carries karmic residue from one life into the next. This gives a relatively straightforward, if metaphysically weighty, answer to the question of continuity: it is the atman that persists, accumulates karma, and eventually, in most soteriologies, either continues transmigrating or attains liberation.

Buddhism rejects this answer at the root. The doctrine of anatta (Pali) or anatman (Sanskrit) — "non-self" — denies that there is any permanent, unchanging self or soul at all; what a person calls "self" is, in standard Buddhist analysis, a continuously changing bundle of physical and mental processes (the five aggregates, skandhas), none of which persists unchanged from moment to moment, let alone from lifetime to lifetime. This creates a genuine philosophical puzzle that Buddhist thought has had to solve carefully: if there is no fixed self, what is it that experiences the fruits of karma generated by a "previous" person who was not, strictly, identical with the "later" person receiving those fruits?

Dependent origination and the causal stream

The classical Buddhist answer is built on the doctrine of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada): rather than a fixed self moving unchanged through time, there is a causally continuous stream of momentary mental and physical events, each conditioned by what preceded it, without any of them constituting a permanent, self-identical substance. A common analogy used in later Buddhist commentarial literature compares this to a flame passed from one candle to another: the flame on the second candle is not identical with the flame on the first, but it is not entirely unconnected either — it arose directly and causally from it. Karmic continuity across what looks, conventionally, like "one person's" life, and across what looks like distinct lives, is explained on this model as this same kind of causal continuity without strict identity, rather than as one unchanging soul carrying a ledger forward. Later Abhidharma philosophy and, still later, Madhyamaka thought associated with Nagarjuna develop increasingly sophisticated versions of this account, and it remains a genuinely debated area within Buddhist philosophy itself as to how fully satisfying the no-self solution to karmic continuity actually is — this is not a settled, uncontroversial point even within Buddhist scholarship, and treating it as effortlessly solved oversimplifies real ongoing philosophical discussion, including in modern academic treatments of Buddhist philosophy of mind.

The Dhammapada's opening statement

The Dhammapada, one of the earliest and most widely read collections of the Buddha's teaching, opens with two verses that state the intention-centred, consequence-following theory in unusually direct and memorable terms. Verse 1.1: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage." Verse 1.2 restates the same structure with the opposite outcome: "If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him." These verses are doing exactly the definitional work the Anguttara Nikaya passage makes explicit elsewhere: mental state and intention, not the bare outward act, are placed at the origin of the causal chain the tradition calls karma.

Jainism: a third account, for context

It is worth briefly noting a third classical Indian account, distinct from both, so that "karma in Indian religion" is not read as a two-way Hindu/Buddhist split alone. Jain philosophy treats karma in an unusually literal, quasi-material register: karma is understood as a subtle form of matter (karmic particles) that actually adheres to the soul (jiva) as a physical-like residue caused by action, especially action driven by passion, literally weighing the soul down and obscuring its natural, luminous, all-knowing state. Liberation, on this account, involves not merely a shift in knowledge or attachment but the actual exhaustion and shedding of this accumulated karmic matter, described systematically in texts such as the Tattvartha Sutra. This is a genuinely distinct metaphysical picture from either the Hindu atman-based model or the Buddhist causal-stream model, and it is a useful reminder that "Indian karma doctrine" was never a single unified theory even among traditions in close, continuous contact and debate with each other for over two thousand years.

What the traditions share, and what they do not

All three traditions agree that action carries moral weight beyond its immediate, visible consequences, and all three connect that weight to rebirth. But they disagree substantially, and the disagreement is not trivial or merely terminological: Buddhism grounds karma in intention and explains its continuity without any permanent self; classical Hindu schools generally tie karmic residue to an enduring atman; and Jainism treats karma as a quasi-material substance literally accumulating on the soul. A reader encountering a confident claim that "karma means the same thing across Eastern religion" should treat that claim with real scepticism — the traditions themselves have argued about exactly these differences, seriously and at length, for over two millennia.

Nagarjuna's further challenge to karmic ontology

Even within Buddhist philosophy, the account of karma without a fixed self did not go unchallenged from within. Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka school, pushes the analysis further in the Mulamadhyamakakarika, arguing that karma and its agent (karta) cannot be shown to have fixed, independent existence (svabhava) on either side of the relationship without falling into contradiction — if the agent exists independently of the act, the act cannot truly belong to it, and if the act exists independently of any agent, there is nothing for it to belong to. Nagarjuna's conclusion is not that karma is therefore unreal or that moral consequence does not function conventionally; it is that karma, like everything else on his account, is empty (shunya) of independent existence and operates only at the level of conventional, dependently arisen designation, not as a self-standing metaphysical mechanism operating in the background of reality. This is a further layer of the same dependent-origination logic already discussed above, but pressed to a more radical philosophical conclusion, and it is one reason Buddhist philosophy cannot be treated as having settled the metaphysics of karma with a single agreed answer even after the dependent-origination reply to the no-self problem: Madhyamaka thinkers push the deconstruction further than earlier Abhidharma analysis had.