Do You Believe in Karma, or Just Wish It on Others?

Do you believe in karma?

We have all said it, usually through gritted teeth: karma will get them. I have said it too. But while writing today’s post, I noticed how rarely we say it about ourselves.

So I went back to what karma meant in the traditions that gave us the word. I looked at a Tamil epic about a king who condemned an innocent man without hearing him, and at the Bible’s surprising refusal to read suffering as punishment. Where I landed may not be where you expect.

I would love to hear how you see it. Is karma about justice for others, or responsibility for ourselves?

Do I Believe in Karma? Yes — Which Is Why I’ve Stopped Wishing It on Others

“Karma will get them.”

I have heard that sentence in offices, at bus stops and in family quarrels. I have said it myself. It is almost never said about the speaker. So before I answer today’s question, I want to look at how the question is usually asked.

1. The Phrase We Reserve for Others

Karma may be the only law most of us believe in on someone else’s behalf. We invoke it when a rude colleague is promoted or a dishonest neighbour prospers. In that mood, karma is less a moral principle than a postponed revenge, a debt collector we hope will one day knock on another person’s door. If that is what belief in karma means, then I do not believe in it.

2. What the Word Actually Means

The Sanskrit word karma simply means “action” or “deed.” In the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions that shaped it, karma describes how what we do leaves its mark on us and on the world. The Bhagavad Gita asks us to act rightly while giving up any claim on the results. The Buddha placed the weight on intention: “Intention, I tell you, is kamma.” Neither text gives us a scoreboard for tracking our neighbours.

3. The Epic That Made Karma Its Thesis

The Tamil epic Silappatikaram [1] opens by announcing three truths it will show. One of them is that past deeds return in full force and make us taste their fruit. The story that follows is, at its heart, a courtroom tragedy. A king condemns an innocent man, Kovalan, on the word of a thieving goldsmith, without hearing him. Kovalan’s widow, Kannagi, breaks her anklet before the throne and proves his innocence. The king cries out, “Am I a king? I am the thief,” and dies where he sits.

4. Why We Built Courts Anyway

I spent most of my working life drafting and reforming laws. I have come to see every penal code as a quiet confession that we do not trust karma to deliver justice on time. Law is organised consequence. It insists on evidence, a hearing, and a verdict within a lifetime. The king’s failure in the epic was a failure of natural justice: he never heard the other side. Yet law has limits the old traditions noticed long ago. A statute can reach only what we do. It cannot reach what we intend, and it has no power over who we become.

5. The Hardest Objection: Innocent Suffering

Any honest essay on karma must face the child born into misery and the cruel man who dies in comfort. Here the Bible offers a rebuke rather than a parallel. When the disciples asked whose sin had caused a man’s blindness, Jesus answered that it was neither his nor his parents’. When a tower fell at Siloam, he denied that its eighteen victims were worse than anyone else. Job’s friends lose their argument precisely because they read his suffering as payment. Even the Buddha counted the exact working-out of karma’s results among four things no one should try to calculate. These traditions disagree about whether karma exists, but they agree that I have no licence to read another person’s pain as a verdict.

6. Where Consequences Land First

If karma is not a cosmic ledger, what remains? Something closer to home. Aristotle observed that we become just by doing just acts. Paul warned that whatever a person sows, that they will also reap. The Qur’an says that anyone who does an atom’s weight of good will see it. Read together, these point to the same place: the first person my actions reach is me. A lie repeated becomes a habit, a habit becomes a character, and character, far more than fortune, is the harvest I can be certain of gathering.

7. So, Do I Believe in Karma?

Yes, but only in the version I am permitted to apply to myself. I cannot audit the universe’s books, and I should stop trying to audit my neighbour’s. What I can do is look at the seeds in my own hand.

The next time you are tempted to say that karma will catch up with someone, ask yourself this: if it caught up with you first, what would it find?

Note for readers

[1] The Silappatikaram (“The Tale of the Anklet”) is one of the Five Great Epics of Tamil literature. It is attributed to Ilango Adigal, traditionally described as a Chera prince who renounced the throne, and is dated variously between the second and sixth centuries CE. Its prologue names three truths the story will show. First, dharma turns into death for a ruler who errs in governance. Second, the great will honour a woman of true virtue. Third, past deeds return in full force to be lived through; in Tamil, ūḻvinai uruttu vantu ūṭṭum.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

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In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 25 September 2026

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