Karma

Karma is one of the most recognisable and most distorted concepts in popular esotericism. In Indian traditions it is a teaching about causality — that action has consequences — not a system of rewards and punishments, and certainly not an explanation for other people's misfortune.

This section looks at what the concept means in Buddhism and Hinduism, how it travelled into Western culture and what it became along the way. Separately we cover karmic relationships: what people mean by the phrase and which very earthly psychological mechanisms lie behind the feeling of a repeating scenario. These texts are about meaning and limits, not predictions.