Other forms: karmas
Karma is the idea that your actions shape what happens to you later. Good karma, bad karma, karma caught up with him.
In Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism it is a serious doctrine about action and consequence across lifetimes, and it is not a system of reward and punishment administered by anybody. In casual Western use it means roughly what goes around comes around, applied to parking spaces and rude drivers, which practitioners find about as accurate as most borrowings. Note karmic, and instant karma.
1nounkarmaThe idea that your actions shape what happens to you later.
“Karma in the original sense is about action rather than about revenge.”
karma is a principle of action and consequence.
Sanskrit karma means action or deed, from a root meaning to do. The word names the act rather than the consequence, which is exactly the point of the doctrine and exactly what the English borrowing lost.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷer-
Sanskrit
कर्म
English, today
karma
Built from
Borrowed from Sanskrit कर्म, nom.sg. of कर्मन् (“act, action, performance”); first attested in English in 1785 in a translation of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA