Instant Karma Police

On Sanskrit Street, in addition to passages and excerpts, I will be introducing some key concepts from Sanskrit that have come into contemporary life, sometimes incorrectly, as is the case with the word, "karma." For those who know me, this is perhaps one of my biggest "language pet peeves."

The substantive noun, karma, comes from the root Kri (the ri is a retroflexive "r"), which means <<to do>> or <<to make>>. As such, karma means <<the thing done/made>>. Period.

There is no further metaphysical quality to it. When one says that a bad thing happened because "I must have bad karma," actually is a nonsensical utterance, for a few reasons. For one, karma is not immediate justice meted out on a daily basis, but it is merely daily action. Secondly, you cannot HAVE good or bad karma, but you can do something that is considered to be good or bad. Karma is not something that you have, but rather it is that thing that you do.

Within Sanskrit-based philosophy and religion then, karma is used to designate the combined actions that one has done in life, during the entirety of one's lifetime, not just as a one-off happening. In other words, if you do one thing "bad," but one hundred things "good," it is a cumulative amount. You don't get stuck in the slow line at the grocery store because you cut someone off in your car on the way to the store.

On the level of a lifetime, then, it is a balance sheet of good deeds, or lack thereof. Specifically, karma then relates to one lifetime in succession to another one, and that balance sheet is also cumulative.

In the modern world, we like instant results, instant gratification, and the concept for that, instant karma, is likewise appealing to such a society. However, it is not so easy as to help a little old lady across the street in the morning to win the lottery that same evening, for example.

Karma is active participation in your life, throughout your entire life, and similar to the Ancient Greek notion of not saying whether you are "happy" right now or not, for that is not the sum total of your life and is thus premature or ephemeral, but rather, was your life a life lived of good deeds, resulting in a balance sheet of good karma? Karma, itself, however, is neither intrinsically good or evil/bad, but merely is what is done.