Karma is one of those ideas which gives people a simple tool with which to filter the world around them, so it has achieved an amazing persistence and stability. At the same time, it is simplistic and does not fit well into reality.

Definition of karma: if a person is good, then good things will happen to that person; if a person is bad, then bad things will happen to that person.

This basic definition has been expressed in many different ways over the centuries.

In his introduction to The Upanishads, Juan Mascaro defines karma in these terms: "The law of evolution called Karma explains the apparent injustice in the world with sublime simplicity. There is a law of cause and effect in the moral world. We are the builders of our own destiny, and the results are not limited to one life, since our Spirit that was never born and will never die must come again and take to itself a body, that the lower self may have the reward of its works. Good shall lead to good, and evil to evil. From good, joy shall come, and from evil shall come suffering. And thus the great evolution flows on towards perfection." (p. 13) This is a comment on the translation of the karma section of "The Supreme Teaching" (p. 140): "According as a man acts and walks in the path of life, so he becomes. He that does good becomes good; he that does evil becomes evil. By pure actions he becomes pure; by evil actions he becomes evil." (A translation obviously modeled on the Authorized Version of the Bible, cf. Prov. 23:7, which says: "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he".) The key phrase, "sublime simplicity", is important.

Juan Mascaro's translation in the first two verses of the Dhammapada well sums up karma: "What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind".

Jean Smith, in The Beginner's Guide To Walking The Buddha's Eightfold Path defines karma as: "volitional action through our body, speech, or mind" (p. 20, emphasis in original). Smith brings out that: "We thus are affected by many nonkarmic occurrences, such as weather and illness. ... The so-called law of karma states that there is always a cause-and-effect relationship between intentional actions or thoughts and their outcomes." The discussion of voluntary and involuntary actions in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics III.i (or, 1109B30) may be of interest in relationship to Smith's definition.

The most significant problem with the idea of karma is that the world does not work this way. While there is some cause and effect relationship between a person's actions and results, for the most part the world is a highly random and capricious place, and no such neat relationships can be established. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. (Not only that, bad people seem to thrive in the world and get the most out of life.) Justice is not done. People don't get what they deserve. People get what they do not deserve. Sometimes good things turn out to be bad, and bad things turn out to be good. We live in a world of complexity which is beyond the powers of karma, as a tool for understanding reality, to explain.

Eknath Easwaran, in his introduction to the Bhagavad Gita, states the law of karma as "every event is both a cause and an effect" (p. 16), and includes mental as well as physical events. In his introduction to the Dhammapada, he states "cause and effect apply universally" and "the effect is of the nature of the cause. Every event, mental or physical, has to have effects, whether in the mind, in action, or in both - and each such effect becomes a cause itself" (p. 67). In a sense, this may be true. There is a causal relationship between some actions which can be observed.

But how does this fact of causes and effects imply that personal responsibility exists, and that one's own causes produce one's own effects? I see no connection. The universe in which I live is a huge sea of complex randomness. Most of my personal causes produce no effects whatsoever. Most of what affects me is utterly beyond my control. Even if I stopped producing causes myself, nothing would change.

Easwaran states that "though we cannot see the connections, we can be sure that everything that happens to us, good and bad, originated once in something we did or thought" (Gita p. 18). The significant problem with this philosophy is that any misfortune must be blamed on the person who suffers it, which is one of the most cruel philosophies I have ever encountered. Children slaughtered by drunk drivers deserved their fate. Those born with birth defects deserved their fate. Those with chronic illnesses did something to deserve it. Every misfortune in life is the fault of those who suffer it: after the tsunami on Dec 26, 2004, many voices said that the law of karma had punished people for unknown wrongdoing. Does that make any sense? How can a child born with a horrible illness which will give lifelong suffering have done something to deserve it?

And do people truly suffer for their bad actions? How can a universal argument be made that bad people get what they deserve? I think of the financial scandals in the wake of the 2000-2001 market bubble collapsing. (There are so many of these I can't keep their details straight.) In some cases, wrongdoing was proven and punishment was meted out, but in many cases the wrongdoers were enriched so much that they are independently wealthy for life, and after a few years in prison will be better off than they would have been without the misdeeds. Are they suffering? Meanwhile, investors who trusted the integrity of the scandal-plagued companies have seen their investments evaporate. Are they suffering for trusting people who misled them? (Isn't karma supposed to apply to volitional thoughts and actions only?)

Why is tragedy tragic? The definition Aristotle gives (in Poetics, 53a) centers on the fact that the tragic character does not deserve the tragedy. Why do we find Antigone to be tragic? In the world of karma, all Antigone did was perform an action and suffer the consequences. Why do we feel any sort of reaction to her fate? And can Medea's tragedy be somehow simplified to a chain of karmic causes and effects? Isn't it more complicated, consisting of simultaneous conflicting motives? And decisions which seemed right at one time which later turned out bad. The simplistic idea of karma never seems to be an adequate explanation of the real world.

The book of Job is said to be one of the oldest in the Bible. It is (very) roughly contemporary with the Upanishads (because neither can be dated with precision). Job is a treatise about why karma does not work as a tool to explain reality. Job's (false) comforters come to him, insisting that his current misfortune comes directly from bad things he did in the past. Those who confront Job try to wear him down, and get him to cave in and accept the idea of karma as a natural law. Job knows this is not the case, that his current situation is not the result of past actions, and maintains his opposition to the law of karma, because he knows it is not true. (Wresting with the idea that karma is too simplistic to be useful preoccupied the wise: Besides the book of Job, there are other, similar contemporary treatments by other cultures.)

Because karma is easy to understand, and an easy tool to apply to the world, it persists. Because it doesn't explain reality correctly, people change the definition in a subtle way so they do not have to deal with karma's problems.

Actual working definition of karma: if good things happen to a person, then the person has been good in the past; if bad things happen to a person, then the person has been bad in the past.

This is a fallacy. Epp says: "A fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in an invalid argument." (Susanna S. Epp, Discrete Mathematics With Applications, p. 45.) This fallacy is an example of the converse error. The converse error has the form: p implies q; the condition q obtains; therefore the condition p obtains. "The fallacy underlying this invalid argument form is called the converse error because the conclusion of the argument would follow from the premises if the premise p implies q were replaced by its converse. Such a replacement is not allowed, however, because a conditional statement is not logically equivalent to its converse." (p. 46) Epp states in the definition of the converse of a statement (p. 28): "CAUTION! Many people mistakenly believe that if a conditional statement is true, then its converse ... [is] also true. This is not so." (Note that with an HTML article I am unable to draw the symbols from symbolic logic which Epp uses. A right-pointing arrow symbolizes "implies" and three dots in a triangular shape symbolizes "therefore". All emphasis in quotations is Epp's.)

If karma is a universal law, the working definition does not follow from the law itself. It is fallacious to reverse the definition of karma to assume people are enjoying or suffering today from what they did yesterday.

The fallacious definition of karma is useful for people to work with, because they can both believe karma is true and not have to deal with the practical fact that there is no definite karmic cause and relationship to be observed. The fallacious definition is neat, and irrefutable by evidence. (Much harm has come from this reversed definition of karma, such as the Indian caste system, which is based on the belief that the current life people lead is the result of previous lives. Not only can no evidence contradict this belief, there is no way to even present evidence.)

My conclusion is that the law of karma is one of those things in life which sounds good, but does not bear up under close scrutiny. People who believe in karma owe it to themselves to think through the implications this belief has on how they evaluate the world they live in. The book of Job is a good place to start.

Additional note: Many believe in karma, even if they do not use the word. There are plenty of people who call themselves Christians (I have known some) who evaluate other people's relationship with God based on their success (or lack of success) in this world. In their way of looking at the world, those with money and successful lives must be blessed by God. It is important to recognize that not all believers in the law of karma are necessarily those with Eastern religious views. The law of karma is much broader than that.