The word karma (業, karman in Sanskrit) means "action" — specifically, volitional action, action undertaken with intention. The Buddhist doctrine of karma holds that such actions leave traces, not in the external world alone but in the mind of the actor, shaping future perception, tendency, and circumstance in ways both subtle and gross. This is fundamentally different from both fatalism (everything is predetermined) and pure randomness (nothing you do matters). Karma is a middle doctrine: neither everything is fixed nor everything is arbitrary. The present moment contains the residue of past choices, and the present moment's choices are shaping future conditions — not in a simple mechanical one-to-one correspondence, but in the complex, multi-causal way that all phenomena arise interdependently. The Majjhima Nikaya is explicit that not everything that happens to you is karmic in origin; illness can come from physical causes, external forces, or sheer accident. Karma specifically describes the domain of intentional action and its consequences, particularly the mental and psychological residues that conditions the quality of future experience.

One of the most important aspects of Buddhist karma doctrine is its insistence on the primacy of intention (cetanā). The Buddha stated directly: "It is intention that I call karma." A doctor who administers a painful treatment with the genuine intention of healing generates different karmic residue than someone who inflicts the same pain with cruelty, even if the external action looks identical. This emphasis on intention has profound implications: it locates moral and psychological weight in the interior of the act rather than its surface appearance, and it means that transformation of intention — learning to act from wisdom and compassion rather than greed, hatred, and confusion — is the actual mechanism of liberation. Karma is therefore not a cosmic punishment system but a pedagogical one: the consequences of action teach, if we pay attention. The suffering that arises from unskillful action is not divine retribution but information, a signal in the system pointing toward adjustment. Understanding karma this way transforms it from a reason for shame or resentment about the past into an invitation to take radical responsibility for the present: what you do right now, with what intention, is mattering — is literally shaping the texture of what comes next.