कर्म
karma
Sanskrit
“Your actions are a boomerang thrown across lifetimes.”
In the Vedic texts of ancient India, karma simply meant "action" or "deed"—from the Sanskrit root kṛ, "to do." Every action creates a ripple.
As Hindu and Buddhist philosophy developed, karma became a cosmic accounting system: every action generates a force that returns to the actor. Good begets good. Harm begets harm. Not as punishment, but as natural law.
The word entered English in the 1820s through scholarly translations of Indian texts. By the 1960s counterculture, it had become common vocabulary—stripped of its theological complexity, reduced to "what goes around comes around."
The original concept is far more nuanced: karma isn't fate or destiny, it's the opposite. It says you are not bound by circumstance, but by your own choices. Every moment is a new beginning.
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Today
In the West, karma has become a kind of cosmic scorecard—a comforting belief that bad people will get what's coming to them.
But the original meaning is both more demanding and more liberating: it says nothing happens TO you. Everything happens FROM you. You are both the thrower and the target.
The word asks not "what will happen to me?" but "what am I choosing to create?"
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