The four kinds of karma: sanchita, prarabdha, kriyamana and agami

A teaching scheme, not a single verse

The fourfold division of karma into sanchita, prarabdha, kriyamana (or vartamana) and agami is one of the most frequently repeated pieces of karma doctrine in modern yoga and Vedanta teaching, and it is genuinely useful — but it is worth being honest about its status. It does not appear, worded exactly this way, as a single passage in the Upanishads or in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. It is a systematisation that developed within later Vedanta pedagogical literature, drawing together and organising ideas about action and its residue that are scattered more loosely across earlier texts. This does not make it illegitimate — teaching traditions regularly organise older material into clearer schemes, and this one has been used by generations of Vedanta teachers because it is genuinely clarifying — but readers should not assume it is quoted verbatim from a single ancient source, or that every teacher defines all four terms identically.

Sanchita: the accumulated store

Sanchita (from sanchi, "to heap up" or "accumulate") names the entire, vast residue of action performed across a being's past — in most tellings, across countless past lives, not only the present one. It is described as a kind of storehouse, far too large and complex to be inventoried or consciously accessed by an ordinary person, containing the seeds (bija) of every kind of experience the person might, in principle, undergo. Sanchita is not itself currently being experienced; it is the reservoir from which the "in play" portion (prarabdha) is said to be drawn. Teachers commonly stress that sanchita cannot be counted, listed or diagnosed — it is a theoretical totality, not a legible record anyone can read. This page's companion, sanchita-karma, goes into this in more depth, including what the texts do and do not claim about it.

Prarabdha: what is already in motion

Prarabdha (from pra-arabh, "to begin, to set in motion") is the portion of the accumulated store said to have already begun ripening into the present life's actual circumstances — body, temperament, major life events. It is prarabdha that produces the classical analogies discussed at prarabdha-karma: an arrow already loosed from the bow cannot be recalled, a potter's wheel continues spinning for a time even after the potter's hand is lifted. The teaching significance of singling out prarabdha is that it is treated, in most Vedanta accounts, as fixed for this life — not subject to being altered by present effort, in contrast with the two remaining categories, which are.

Kriyamana (vartamana): action being made now

Kriyamana — sometimes called vartamana, "present" or "current" — refers to karma actively being generated through action performed in the present. This is the category over which a person is usually said to have the most direct influence: how one acts now generates new residue, which will, in turn, join the accumulated store and eventually condition future experience. Some teaching lineages use "kriyamana" and "agami" almost interchangeably; others draw a firmer line between the two, as below.

Agami: karma yet to come

Agami (literally "that which is coming") is generally used for karma that has been generated by present action but has not yet begun to ripen — the future fruit of what is being done now, as distinct from prarabdha, which is already ripening from past action. Some authors use agami as a near-synonym for kriyamana, treating "action currently generating future results" and "results yet to come" as two descriptions of the same process; others distinguish them more sharply, with kriyamana denoting the act and agami denoting its as-yet-unripened fruit. Given this real variation, a reader encountering slightly different definitions across two teachers or books is not necessarily encountering an error — the terminology genuinely is not perfectly standardised across the tradition.

Why the scheme is used, and its limits

The practical use of this fourfold scheme, in Vedanta teaching, is mainly to make a specific argument: that while sanchita is unimaginably vast and prarabdha is already fixed for this life, kriyamana and agami remain, in principle, open to present effort and right conduct — which is where the doctrine connects to ethical and spiritual practice rather than functioning as pure fatalism. This is a genuinely important nuance, and it is why the scheme has proven durable as a teaching tool over centuries: it lets a teacher say, in effect, "you cannot undo the arrow already in flight, but you are shaping every arrow you have not yet loosed."

At the same time, this page should be honest about the scheme's limits as evidence. It is a systematising framework, not a verifiable inventory, and none of its four categories can be measured, counted or independently confirmed by anyone, including the person whose karma is being discussed. It is presented here, as throughout this Kriya Yogi karma cluster, as doctrine reported accurately — what Vedanta teaching holds — not as an established fact about how the reader's own life is currently organised.

A note on related, non-classical ideas

It is worth flagging, because the confusion is common online, that this fourfold Vedanta scheme is entirely distinct from modern "karmic debt" numerology, karmic contract theories, or claims about specific numbers of past lives — none of which appear in the classical literature this page describes, and all of which belong to twentieth-century Theosophical and New Age reinterpretation rather than to sanchita/prarabdha/kriyamana/agami as taught within Vedanta.

Vyasa's older twofold classification

Before the fourfold sanchita/prarabdha/kriyamana/agami scheme became standard in later Vedanta teaching, Vyasa's Yoga Bhashya — the earliest surviving commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras — offers a different, older classification worth setting alongside it. Commenting on Yoga Sutra 2.13, Vyasa distinguishes karma that ripens as a single birth (ekabhavika) from karma so weighty or so numerous that it must ripen across several births (aneka-bhavika), and he discusses at length how multiple karmic causes, generated at different times, can combine to produce a single birth's circumstances, or conversely how one especially forceful action can shape more than one lifetime. This is a genuinely different organising question from the one the fourfold scheme answers: Vyasa is asking how many births a given stock of karma takes to exhaust, where the sanchita/prarabdha/kriyamana/agami scheme asks instead what stage of activation a given portion of karma has reached. The two classifications are not contradictory, but they come from different commentarial projects centuries apart, and treating Vyasa's ekabhavika/aneka-bhavika distinction as simply another name for the fourfold scheme would be a mistake.

A worked example across one lifetime

It helps to see all four terms applied to a single hypothetical case rather than defined in isolation. Imagine a person born with a particular temperament and into a particular family — on the fourfold scheme, this is prarabdha, already ripening, not chosen or alterable by that person's present will. Over the following decades, that person accumulates a vast, largely unremembered history of past action from earlier in this life and, in most tellings, from lives before it — this whole residue, active and not-yet-active together, is sanchita. Each choice the person actually makes today — a promise kept, a word spoken in anger — is kriyamana, action being generated in the present moment. And the consequence of today's anger, not yet felt, waiting to ripen at some future point either later in this life or beyond it, is agami. The scheme's teaching value lies precisely in holding these four together: a life is never only its already-fixed starting conditions, nor only its vast invisible past, but also, continuously, whatever is being generated right now.