Samsara, karma and liberation

Overview

Recall questions on karma and its three aspects, sakam and nikam karma, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads on action, desire and rebirth, anugraha and prapatti, the monkey and cat analogies, bhakti, and whether karma is just or leaves room for free will.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is karma, and what is it not?

   Model answer

   Karma means action, and by extension the moral consequence that action carries. Hindus generally hold that every intentional act leaves a residue which must eventually work itself out, so that the moral order is self-executing rather than requiring a judge to impose sentences. It is not fate, since it is the accumulated result of what has been freely done, and it is not punishment inflicted by a deity, since it operates as a law. Nor does it apply to everything a body does: mechanical or unintended action carries no weight, because it is intention that generates karma.

2. 2

   Why does karma keep samsara turning?

   Model answer

   On the Hindu account, actions performed out of desire produce results which must be experienced. If they cannot all be worked out within one lifetime, a further birth is held to be required in circumstances suited to them; and in that life the being acts again out of desire, generating fresh karma, which calls for a further birth in turn. Hindu traditions therefore describe the cycle as self-renewing and without a natural end, which is why they treat samsara as beginningless. Breaking it, on this account, means dealing with karma itself rather than merely improving one's next birth.

3. 3

   Name and explain the three aspects of karma.

   Model answer

   Accumulated karma is the entire store built up over all previous lives and not yet worked out. Fruit-bearing karma is the portion of that store which has already begun to ripen and which determines the present life: the body, family, circumstances and length of life a person has been given. Karma in the making is what is being generated now by present action, and it is added to the store for the future. The division matters because liberation requires all three to be dealt with, and they are dealt with in different ways.

4. 4

   How does a person get free of karma?

   Model answer

   The classical account works through the three kinds. The accumulated store is destroyed by liberating knowledge, which is said to burn it up. Fresh karma stops being generated once action is performed without craving for its results, since it is the desire and the sense of being the owner of the deed that make an act binding. Fruit-bearing karma cannot be cancelled, because it has already begun to operate, so it must be lived out until the body it produced falls away. That is why a liberated person can continue to live and act in the world without being bound by what they do.

5. 5

   Distinguish sakam karma from nikam karma.

   Model answer

   Sakam karma is action done with desire, undertaken because of what the doer hopes to get out of it, and it binds, because the doer has attached himself to a result which must then be delivered to him. Nikam karma, also called nishkama karma, is action done because it ought to be done, with the doer relinquishing any claim on the outcome; it produces no binding residue. The distinction is important because it means that renunciation of action is not required, only renunciation of the fruits. A Hindu can therefore act fully in the world and still make progress towards liberation.

6. 6

   What does the Bhagavad Gita establish about action and its fruits?

   Model answer

   Krishna's instruction to Arjuna is that a person's claim is on what they do and never on how it turns out, that the outcome must not become the reason for acting, and that none of this licenses withdrawing from action altogether. Action is to be performed while established in discipline, with attachment abandoned and with the same steadiness in success and failure, and this evenness is what the text identifies with yoga. Those who act for the sake of results are described as in a worse condition than those who act from settled understanding, and it is those who let the fruit go who are freed from the bondage of rebirth. The passage is the classic basis for the whole doctrine of desireless action.

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