Stand inside a Jain temple in Gujarat during the festival of Samvatsari. Devotees whisper Michhami Dukkadam — a request for forgiveness for every harm done in the past year, intentional or not. The air carries the scent of sandalwood and saffron. Hands fold. Voices drop. No one is asking for pardon from a god. They are asking the souls they have harmed — insects, neighbors, strangers — to release the karmic debt that would otherwise cling to their own soul across lifetimes.
That ritual, performed by millions every August, rests on a system of cause and effect older than writing itself. We at Le Grand Grimoire keep a reference library of these traditions, and we practice what we document. Here we define karma and reincarnation as the belief that every intentional action generates a consequence that follows the soul from one life to the next, creating a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that can only be ended through spiritual liberation. This is not a single doctrine. It is a family of teachings that evolved across Asia and later transformed Western esotericism.
What This Vertical Includes and Where It Stops
The concept of karma and reincarnation has borders. Inside this vertical we place the doctrines of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and the derivative systems found in Theosophy and contemporary New Age spirituality. These share a core: the soul (or mind-stream) continues after death, its future circumstances determined by past actions.
Outside these borders lie ideas that look similar but operate on different principles. The Christian resurrection of the body is a one-time event, not a repeating cycle. The ancient Egyptian Ba and Ka travel through the Duat and may be reborn in the afterlife, but there is no law of moral causation linking deeds to the form of that rebirth. Shamanic soul retrieval restores fragmented pieces of a living person’s soul but does not posit a chain of lifetimes. We exclude these from the vertical not because they are invalid, but because they answer different questions. The vertical of karma and reincarnation asks: What makes my next life? The answer is always, in some form, what you did in this one.
How the Tradition Formed and Changed
The earliest written evidence of reincarnation in India appears in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, composed around 800–600 BCE. A sage named Yajnavalkya teaches King Janaka that after death the soul (atman) returns to the world according to its knowledge and conduct: “As a caterpillar, having reached the tip of a blade of grass, draws itself together and takes hold of another, so the atman, having cast off this body, takes hold of another.” The word karma itself originally meant “action” or “ritual act” in the Vedas. The Upanishads gave it a moral dimension: good action leads to good rebirth, bad action to bad rebirth.
By the 6th century BCE, two new movements formed their own versions. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, rejected the idea of an eternal soul (anatta) but retained karma and rebirth. Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, developed a rigorous materialist theory of karma: tiny particles of karmic matter (karmana sharira) literally stick to the soul like dust. The Upanishadic tradition evolved into classical Hindu schools like Vedanta and Samkhya, each with its own map of the cycle.
These traditions crossed into the West in the 19th century through the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott. Theosophy blended Indian karma with Platonic and Gnostic ideas, popularizing terms like “karmic law” and “reincarnation” in English. By the 1960s, the concepts had been absorbed into Western New Age thought, often stripped of their monastic disciplines and reinterpreted as self-help.
The Inner Structure of the Field
Karma and reincarnation is not a monolith. Its branches diverge on fundamental questions: Does the soul exist? Is karma a law or a substance? Can you get out of the cycle, and if so, how?
Hindu Karma and Rebirth
Classical Hinduism divides karma into four types. Sanchita karma is the stockpile of all past actions from previous lives. Prarabdha karma is the portion of sanchita that has begun to fruit in the current life, your family, your body, the circumstances you were born into. Kriyamana karma (also called agami) is the karma you are creating right now, which will join the stockpile. Agama karma refers to future actions you intend to perform.
The goal is moksha, liberation from the cycle (samsara). The paths to moksha vary by school. The Bhagavad Gita (composed 200 BCE–200 CE) offers three: the path of action (karma yoga), perform your duty without attachment to results; the path of devotion (bhakti yoga), surrender to a personal god; and the path of knowledge (jnana yoga), realize that the atman is identical with Brahman, the ultimate reality.
In practice, a Hindu might recite the Gayatri mantra at dawn to burn karma, or make offerings to ancestors (shraddha) to assist their rebirth. A common saying: “As you think, so you become.” That is drawn from the Upanishads and governs ethical choices, diet, marriage, occupation, as karmic determinants.
Buddhist Karma and Rebirth: No Self, No Pause
Buddhism starts with a radical break. There is no atman, no permanent soul that moves from life to life. What continues is a stream of consciousness (vijnana-santana) conditioned by karma. The Buddha compared it to a flame passing from one lamp to another, not the same flame, but causally connected.
Karma in Buddhism is defined as cetanā: intention. “It is intention, monks, that I call karma. Having intended, one acts through body, speech, or mind.” (Anguttara Nikaya 6.63). The result (vipāka) may ripen immediately, later in this life, or in a future life. The Buddha taught four types of karma: heavy (determined by gravity of the act), proximate (acted out at the moment of death), habitual (patterns of behavior), and residual (everything else).
Reincarnation becomes rebirth, no soul, but a continuity. The Tibetan Buddhist Bardo Thodol (the Tibetan Book of the Dead) describes the 49-day intermediate state between death and rebirth, where visions of peaceful and wrathful deities arise from the mind’s own karmic traces. A practitioner who recognizes these as empty can achieve liberation; if not, they are drawn toward conception.
In Theravada Buddhism, the focus is on breaking the chain of dependent origination (paticca-samuppada). The path is the Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. Nirvana is the extinguishing of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion, and therefore of karma itself.
Jain Karma: Matter as Bondage
Jainism takes the most literal view. Karma is not a law but a substance. When you act with passion (kashaya), particles of karmic matter enter the soul, weighing it down and coloring it. These particles are divided into eight types: knowledge-obscuring, perception-obscuring, feeling-producing, deluding, lifespan-determining, personality-determining, status-determining, and obstructive.
The soul is potentially omniscient and blissful, but karmic particles cover that nature. Liberation (moksha) requires stopping the inflow of new karma (samvara) and shedding existing karma (nirjara). How? Through twelve vows, ahimsa (non-violence) above all. A Jain monk sweeps the ground before sitting to avoid crushing insects. A lay Jain may not eat after sunset (no root vegetables, no honey) to minimize harm. Even your thoughts produce karma: anger, pride, deceit, greed are the four passions that attract the heaviest particles.
Once all karmic particles are shed, the soul rises to the top of the universe (Siddhashila) and dwells forever in perfect consciousness.
Theosophical Reincarnation: The Sevenfold Soul
When Theosophy imported these ideas to the West, it systematized them into a scheme more Platonic than Indian. The soul has seven principles: body, astral, prana, kama (desire), manas (mind), buddhi (intuition), and atman (spirit). Reincarnation happens at intervals of centuries, with a long rest in a “devachan” (heaven-world) between lives where the soul digests its karmic experiences.
Theosophy’s karma is less personal and more collective: groups of souls reincarnate together, nations share karmic debts, and the whole evolution of humanity is driven by karmic law toward ultimate perfection. Annie Besant, the second president of the Theosophical Society, wrote that karma and reincarnation were “the two fundamental laws of the universe.”
Key Texts, Figures, and Traditions
No single scripture governs karma and reincarnation. These are the essential sources.
Upanishads (800–200 BCE). The Chandogya and Brihadaranyaka Upanishads establish karma and rebirth as the framework for liberation. The Katha Upanishad tells of Nachiketa, a boy who learns from Yama (death) that the soul is immortal and reaps the fruits of its own deeds.
Bhagavad Gita (200 BCE–200 CE). A dialogue between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Krishna explains that the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead, because the soul is never born and never dies. He teaches karma yoga: act, but abandon attachment to the results.
Dhammapada (5th century BCE, Pali canon). A collection of the Buddha’s sayings. Its opening lines: “Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.”
Tattvartha Sutra (2nd–5th century CE, Jain). The definitive Jain text on karma. It lists the eight types of karmic matter, explains how they bind to the soul, and prescribes the vows that stop the inflow. Umasvati, its author, called it “the path to liberation.”
Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol, 8th century CE, attributed to Padmasambhava). A guide for the dying and the dead. It describes the bardos (intermediate states) and how karmic visions appear. The text warns: “Do not be afraid of the peaceful and wrathful deities. They are the reflections of your own mind.”
The Key to Theosophy (1889) by Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky presented karma and reincarnation as natural laws, not beliefs. She argued that the West had lost this knowledge and that the Theosophical Society existed to restore it.
Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) by Paramahansa Yogananda. This book introduced millions of Westerners to the Hindu view of reincarnation through the lens of a modern saint. Yogananda described past-life memories and the karmic reasons for illness and poverty.
Glossary of Essential Terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Karma | (Sanskrit: “action”) Intentional deeds that produce consequences, influencing future circumstances in this or a future life. |
| Reincarnation | The rebirth of a soul or consciousness stream into a new body after death. |
| Samsara | The endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth driven by karma. |
| Moksha | Liberation from samsara; the soul’s return to its true nature, often union with Brahman (Hindu) or Siddhashila (Jain). |
| Nirvana | (Pali: nibbana) The extinction of craving and karma, ending rebirth (Buddhist). |
| Atman | The eternal self or soul in Hindu thought; identical with Brahman. |
| Anatta | (Pali: “non-self”) The Buddhist doctrine that no permanent, unchanging self exists. |
| Vipāka | (Pali: “result”) The fruit of karma; the consequence that ripens in the present or future. |
| Samvara | (Jain) The stopping of new karmic inflow through ethical discipline. |
| Nirjara | (Jain) The shedding of existing karmic matter through ascetic practices. |
| Bardo | (Tibetan) The intermediate state between death and rebirth, described in the Bardo Thodol. |
| Dharmamegha | (Sanskrit: “cloud of virtue”) In Yoga, the final state of wisdom that destroys the seeds of karma. |
| Shraddha | Hindu funerary rites performed to assist the deceased’s soul in its journey to a favorable rebirth. |
| Karmana Sharira | (Jain) The subtle body composed of karmic matter that accompanies the soul after death. |
How Karma and Reincarnation Is Practiced Today
The living traditions of karma and reincarnation are not confined to ancient texts or monks’ cells. They shape daily rhythm.
In a Hindu home in rural Tamil Nadu, a woman wakes before dawn and draws a kolam, rice flour patterns on the threshold. Each day the pattern is swept away by feet; each day she draws it again, an offering to Lakshmi, a small act of merit. At family gatherings, the eldest performs shraddha: a ball of rice (pinda) is offered to the ancestors, the names of three generations recited. The belief is that these offerings nourish the dead in their intermediate state and reduce their karmic burden.
In a Thai Buddhist monastery, a farmer offers alms to monks at dawn. The monks walk barefoot with bowls, not speaking. The farmer places a scoop of sticky rice in each bowl. He receives a blessing in return, a transfer of merit (punya) that improves his rebirth. The practice is called thamboon, making merit. It is the most common religious act in Theravada Buddhist countries.
A Jain layperson in Mumbai avoids eating root vegetables like onions and potatoes because uprooting the plant kills the microorganisms in the soil. During Paryushana, the annual eight-day festival, they fast and recite the Pratikramana, a confession of all violations of ahimsa committed in the past year. The confession is not to a priest but to oneself and to the community. It is a literal attempt to shed karmic particles.
In the West, the New Age interpretation of karma has become a practice of emotional auditing. A practitioner might sit in a guided past-life regression and “see” a childhood in ancient Egypt. The therapist asks: “What did you do? Who did you harm?” The insight becomes material for forgiveness. Books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (who claims to have awakened after a lifetime of depression) tell readers that karma is the accumulation of unconscious patterns and that presence dissolves them. This is a stripped-down version of Buddhist mindfulness, offered without a sangha or a vow.
Common Misconceptions
The most persistent error is that karma is a cosmic reward-and-punishment system operated by a deity. It is not. In all three major traditions, karma is impersonal, a natural law like gravity. No god judges. The results flow from the nature of the action itself.
A second misconception: reincarnation always means returning as a human. In Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, one can be reborn as an animal, a ghost, a god, or a hell-being depending on karma. Human rebirth is considered rare and precious because only humans have the combination of pleasure and suffering needed to pursue liberation.
Third: karma is immediate. Popular culture treats karma as a quick retribution: “He lied and then his car broke down, instant karma.” The texts teach that karma can ripen instantly, later in life, or in a future lifetime. You cannot trace the cause of a car accident back to a specific lie.
Fourth: you can “burn off” bad karma by suffering. Suffering is indeed the fruit of past karma, but the wise person does not seek suffering to accelerate the process, they practice equanimity and ethical action, which purifies the mind without creating new karma.
Fifth (common in New Age circles): karma is something you “work out” between a few past lives. The classical traditions teach that samsara is beginningless. You have been reborn countless times. Liberation is not the resolution of a few traumas; it is the complete uprooting of the very mechanism that produces rebirth.
FAQ
Can karma be changed? Yes, but only through present action. Past karma (prarabdha) is already fruiting and cannot be undone, but you can stop adding new karma (samvara) and weaken the seeds of past karma through meditation, ethical conduct, and confession.
Do animals have karma? In Hinduism and Buddhism, animals are reborn beings with their own karmic inheritance. In Jainism, all souls are equal, a lion and a bee both have karma. An animal can be reborn as a human if its karma ripens favorably.
Is reincarnation the same as the soul? Only in dualistic traditions. Buddhism denies a permanent soul yet affirms rebirth. The person who dies is not the same as the person reborn, but not entirely different either, like a flame to flame.
What happens if you do not believe in karma? The traditions hold that karma operates whether you believe in it or not. Ignorance of the law does not prevent its effects. But conscious belief and ethical practice give you the tools to direct your future.
Toward the Detailed Guides
This hub has given you the architecture of karma and reincarnation across the traditions. The lived details are deeper than any overview can reach. For a focused study, begin with the Buddhist perspective: what karma means when there is no self, how it compares to Hindu theories, and the symbols that encode these teachings. We have written full guides on these questions. Read them next.
The guide on what karma means in Buddhism
The comparison of karma in Buddhism versus Hinduism
The symbols of karma in Buddhist iconography
Each article stays inside the tradition it documents, with the same precision and sensory grounding. From the Buddhist monastery to the Jain confession hall, the pattern holds: every act matters, every life is connected, and liberation is possible, if you know where to look.