Why the Ancient Indian Doctrine Is Far More Profound Than ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’
The stone wheel of the Konark Sun Temple, Odisha, India.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 12 August 2026.
Why do good people suffer while bad people prosper?
It is one of the oldest problems in philosophy and religion. Every civilisation has wrestled with it. If the universe is just, why do the virtuous endure hardship, while the vicious flourish? Why are some people born into privilege while others are burdened from the very beginning?
The Indian traditions developed one of history’s most striking answers: karma.
Today, karma is widely misunderstood, even by Indians themselves. It is often confused with fate or destiny, or reduced to the cliché that ‘what goes around comes around’. Both are misconceptions. Properly understood, karma is a law of moral causation by which our modes of engagement come to determine our station and situation.
According to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and several other Indian religions, every instance of thought, speech, and action is a cause, and every experience an effect. Reward and punishment are not arbitrary. Instead, the universe is governed by an intricate web of causes and consequences extending beyond a single lifetime.
Good karma is often referred to as punya (‘merit’), and bad karma as paap (‘demerit’). Even if punya does not immediately seem to pay off, it does in the longer term. This is why karma is closely tied to samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—with future births conditioned by the accumulated balance of punya and paap.
Although karma is fundamentally individual, it can also, in certain circumstances, be transferred. The Kaushitaki Upanishad describes a rite in which a dying father passes his karma to his son, declaring, ‘Let me place my speech in thee… Let me place my breath in thee…’, with the son replying, ‘I take thy speech in me… I take thy breath in me…’
More ordinarily, the paap of a living or deceased person may be mitigated by the prayers, rituals, or pilgrimages of others.
Justice Beyond This Life
Why should justice extend beyond a single lifetime? Because a lifetime is simply too short. Vice and virtue do not always seem to receive their due. But over many lives, the moral balance can finally be restored.
Some ancient Greeks arrived at a strikingly similar solution. At the outset of Plato’s Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus argues that it is not the just but the unjust who flourish, and that the tyrant, being the most wicked of people, is also the happiest. At the end of the Republic, in the Myth of Er, Plato turns to reincarnation to guarantee that the genuinely just always come out on top, with each soul choosing its next life according to its accumulated store of wisdom. In this, as in much else, Plato was influenced by Pythagoras (d. 495 BCE), who, like the Indians, believed in the transmigration of the soul.
In the Catholic tradition, heaven serves much the same moral purpose as karma. The soul of the newly deceased is judged and sent to heaven, hell, or purgatory. Then, there is also a Last Judgement that takes place after the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead.
In the Letter to the Galatians, St Paul warns: ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’
According to the Old Testament, punishment might even be extended to subsequent generations, that is, to future selves: ‘The Lord is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation’ (Numbers 14:18, and repeated almost verbatim in Exodus 34:7).
Whether through repeated rebirths or a final judgement, all these traditions share a common conviction: justice must ultimately prevail.
The Philosophy of Karma
Karma serves the same purpose as Eden in providing the major motivation to live a moral life. But it serves other purposes too, such as accounting for the existence of evil, rationalising rebirth (which could also operate independently of karma), and providing a soteriological goal of final liberation.
In determining our circumstances and even our temperament, karma may constrict our options, but it does not deprive us of choice and deliberation, enabling it to condone social inequities and the caste system while at the same time affirming human freedom.
The importance of karma, and the degree of freedom and determination within it, have long been debated in and between the Hindu schools.
But even if karma theory is not literally true, it is at least metaphorically true. Being good does pay off, if only in peace of mind and mental health.
In which case, is karma theory a firm basis for morality, or an appeal to naked self-interest?
One way around this problem, which has been taken, is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions, so that the system becomes impossible to game.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. More than two millennia later, Immanuel Kant would arrive at a remarkably similar conclusion with his Categorical Imperative. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome. For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.
The Buddhist Solution
The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others so that helping others is the same as helping oneself.
Aristotle makes a similar if more circumscribed move in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he says that there is no conflict between helping a friend and helping oneself insofar as a perfect friend is like another self.
When we are good to another, we are good to all, including ourself, because the distinction is an illusion, and karma travels.
If we have no self, why did the Buddhists not altogether give up on karma and samsara?
In part, because karma can still operate in the absence of a Self, or Atman, with future incarnations being conditioned by the sum of all the karmic actions that have been put into the world.
The Deeper Insight
Whether or not one believes in reincarnation, the deeper insight of karma remains compelling.
Every person—their parents, their teachers, and their parents and teachers—is the embodiment of every karmic action that has ever gone before. Our every action reverberates to the end of time.
Our every kindness changes the person who receives it, and our every cruelty does the same. Those people, in turn, shape others.
We inherit the moral world created by all those who came before us, and leave behind the moral world that our successors will inherit.
Thus, karma is not merely a mystical doctrine, but a profound truth about what it means to be human.
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