Not Everything Is Your Karma. The Buddha Said So.
It was a quiet Tuesday morning in Kyoto when Pam said something that stopped me mid-thought.
We had spent the earlier part of the morning walking through Nishi Hongwanji, and by the time we settled into a café nearby, our conversation had wandered — as good conversations do — from AI ethics to the nature of suffering to the strange word everyone seems to use now: trauma.
“You know,” Pam said, “what you’re describing with karma sounds a lot like how Martine talks about it in a manuscript I’ve been editing. She quotes a sutta where the Buddha actually enumerates the causes of suffering — and most of them aren’t karma at all.”
Martine and her husband Stephen Batchelor are friends I first grew close to at a conference — the kind you later stay with in France, eat and argue and laugh with late into the night. Pam is bound to them more closely still: a kindred spirit of Martine’s who has carried her French-formed writing into English through the intimate work of translation. So when Pam spoke of Martine’s manuscript, she was not citing a book, but passing along something from within a shared circle of friendship and practice. I knew Martine’s work well. But I had not known this particular teaching. When Pam later sent me the passage — from the Sīvaka Sutta — I sat with it for a long time.
The Buddha had already said what I was trying to say — more clearly than I had managed, and 2,500 years ago.
The Problem with “It’s Your Karma”
In casual speech, karma has become a synonym for cosmic payback. Someone cuts you off in traffic and gets a flat tire: karma. A corrupt politician falls from grace: karma. You are struggling with illness, grief, financial ruin, and somewhere, somehow, someone says: it must be your karma.
This usage is so widespread that it has crossed language barriers and cultural contexts. In Japan, where Buddhism is part of the cultural fabric, the misuse runs even deeper — the word carries the weight of tradition while losing its meaning.
The common understanding is something like: karma means you reap what you sow, and whatever is happening to you now, you caused it.
This is not what the Buddha taught.
To tell someone — or yourself — that suffering is the fruit of past karma is not offering wisdom. It is closing a door. It may be closer to a kind of violence dressed in ancient language than to dharma.
What the Buddha Actually Said
In the Sīvaka Sutta, a wanderer named Moliya Sīvaka — himself a physician, trained in the classical Indian medicine of his day — comes to the Buddha with a question that has been asked in every age: Are all our feelings — pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral — caused by past actions?
It is the question behind the popular use of karma. And the Buddha’s answer is a quiet refusal of that premise.
That is too broad, he says. That is an overgeneralization.
He then lists eight causes of unpleasant experience:
Disorders of bile
Disorders of phlegm
Disorders of wind
Disorders of all three together
Changes of seasons
Poor care and heedlessness
Sudden assault from outside
The fruit of one’s own actions
The first four are physical illness — the body breaking down through causes that need not be traced back to intention or past action. The fifth is weather and climate, the world changing without consulting us. The sixth acknowledges carelessness, but the Buddha specifies that we are not heedless on purpose. The seventh is violence or accident that simply befalls us from outside.
Only the eighth — the fruit of one’s own intentional actions — is what technically deserves the name karma.
It is worth pausing on what karma actually means in the Buddha’s usage, because even this eighth cause is often misread. Karma (kamma in Pali) refers to the intentional act itself — what he calls cetanā, or will. The fruit that follows is technically a separate thing: vipāka, the ripening. Karma is not the suffering you experience; it is the intentional action that set something in motion. Popular usage collapses this distinction entirely, treating karma as both the act and its consequence — which is part of how it becomes so easily used as a verdict on people’s lives.
Eight causes. Karma is one.
The Buddha was not dismissing karma. He was protecting it from being stretched beyond recognition. Karma is real and consequential. It is simply not the explanation for everything that happens to you.
The Word We Reach For Now
I have been thinking about why the misuse of karma persists. Part of the answer, I think, is that it fills a need. Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. When something goes wrong, we want a reason, a way to make cause and effect feel clean.
The popular version of karma provides that. It offers a story in which everything means something and nothing is random.
What strikes me, though, is that the word we now reach for most often to describe unresolved suffering is not karma but trauma. In many ways, trauma has become the secular karma of our time — a way of explaining why we are the way we are, why certain patterns repeat, why the past will not stay in the past.
There is something genuinely valuable in this. The recognition that early experiences shape the nervous system, that violence and loss leave real traces in the body and mind — these are important insights that have helped many people take their pain seriously.
And yet, sitting with Pam over coffee that morning, I noticed something I have been noticing for a while. When any single word becomes the dominant story we tell about why we are the way we are, something subtle happens: the story, however true it is, can begin to feel more solid than the person telling it. The explanation starts to precede the experience. We may find ourselves living inside the account rather than moving through it.
Karma, as the Buddha described it, offers a different kind of story.
Karma as Accumulated Habit
For the past several years, when I speak about karma — including with business leaders and practitioners who have no Buddhist background — I have been using a different definition. Not fate, not cosmic debt, not punishment — karma, as I understand it, is the accumulation of our habits.
Everything we have thought, said, and done over time compounds into our patterns of reaction, our ways of seeing, our default responses to the world. It is not destiny, but it has weight. It has momentum. It is something like the operating system written and rewritten by every action we have taken.
This understanding shares something with the trauma framework — both acknowledge that the past is present in the body and mind, that we do not simply choose our patterns from scratch each morning. But it differs in a few important ways.
First, it does not assign blame. Accumulated habit is neither sin nor wound — simply what has gathered.
Second, it is not fixed. What has accumulated can, with attention and effort, be worked with and changed. This is the whole premise of practice.
Third — and this is what the Sīvaka Sutta illuminated for me — karma is only one of the reasons we suffer. Physical illness, seasonal change, external violence: not everything that happens to us is the fruit of what we have sown. Much of it is simply the condition of being alive in a world larger than our intentions.
I want to add a caution here, directed at myself as much as anyone. This framing of karma — as accumulated habit, as a pattern we can work with — can itself become another tool in the pursuit of self-improvement. If it gets consumed as a better framework for optimizing ourselves, that misses the point entirely. The intention is not to hand you a better instrument. It is simply to see more clearly what is actually happening, and what is not.
And when we do see clearly — when we stop spending ourselves on what was never ours to cause — something small but real is freed up. There is a sliver of each day that actually belongs to us.
The 1% That Is Ours
I often say that 99% of any given day, we are swept along by the river of our accumulated karma — reacting the way we reacted yesterday, seeing what we have trained ourselves to see, running on pattern.
But there is 1% — perhaps even less — where something different is possible. The space between stimulus and response. A moment where we can choose not to follow the groove.
This 1% matters. Not because it is large, but because it is genuinely ours in a way the other 99% is not. Practice might be understood as the work of widening that space.
The Sīvaka Sutta, I think, is pointing to something similar. By saying that most of our suffering does not come from karma, the Buddha is not diminishing our responsibility — he is locating it more precisely. Do not spend your energy on what the body does on its own, on what the weather brings, on what came from outside without your choosing. That is not your karma. That energy can go toward the 1% that actually is.
In a single life, or in a life shared with others, small intentional acts accumulate and slowly change direction. That, at least, is what actually happens.
Karma, the Buddha said, is real. And it is one cause among eight.
That is not a diminishment. It is a liberation.