The four movements

Here is a problem the doctrine of karma has to solve, and it is not obvious until you sit with it.

If every deed of countless lives has left a residue, and none of it is ever lost, then each of us carries a store of consequence too vast to imagine. Why does it not fall on us all at once? Why is a life liveable at all, rather than an avalanche of everything we have ever earned arriving in a single instant?

The tradition’s answer is that the store is metered. It ripens in portions, and only one portion is being paid out at any time. To explain how, a later teaching tradition built a model, and the model has become the standard grammar of karma across modern Hindu thought. It is worth stating exactly what it is and what it is not before leaning on it.

A model, honestly labelled

The fourfold scheme is a systematization. It is not stated as such, in these terms, in the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita. The site’s own myth-busting piece, what ‘karma’ doesn’t mean, makes this point, and this treatise holds to it: the neat division is a post-classical teaching tool, refined in the Vedanta manuals and the oral tradition, though the underlying intuition, that the present life ripens out of past action, is very old. Named honestly as a model, it is one of the most useful maps the tradition ever drew. Mistaken for a scriptural quotation, it becomes one more piece of false precision. This treatise uses it as a map.

The store has four movements.

Sanchita karma is the accumulated whole. Every deed not yet ripened, from every life, gathered. The granary. It is too large to be discharged in one lifetime, which is exactly why it must be metered.

Prarabdha karma is the portion drawn from the granary and set ripening in this present life. Patanjali gives this movement its most precise scriptural anchor. At Yoga Sutra 2.13, he says that as long as the root of affliction remains, the deposit ripens into three things: jati, the birth or species one takes; ayus, the length of the life; and bhoga, the experiences of pleasure and pain that fill it. That is prarabdha exactly, though Patanjali does not use the later word: the fixed frame of a given life, its where, its how long, its weather.

Agami karma, also called kriyamana, is the karma being generated now, by present action, to ripen in some life to come. It is the one movement still open, still being written.

Four movements, and everything hangs on the difference between two of them.

The arrow already in flight

The teaching tradition carries this in an image so apt it has outlived every manual that used it. Picture an archer.

The quiver on his back is full of arrows. That is sanchita, the whole store, held in reserve. One arrow he has already loosed; it is in flight, and nothing he does now can call it back. That is prarabdha, the portion in motion, the life already underway. A third arrow is fitted to the string, drawn, not yet released; he can still lower the bow, change his aim, choose not to shoot. That is agami, the karma of the future, still in his hands. And the very act of drawing and loosing is kriyamana, the doing itself, happening now.

Sit with the image and the whole moral weight of the doctrine emerges from it. The arrow in flight cannot be recalled. Whatever is prarabdha in your life, the body you wear, the family you woke into, the broad shape of your fortune, is the arrow already loosed, and the tradition is unsentimental about it: it must be lived out. But the quiver and the drawn bow are another matter. What you do now is not fixed. The pen, to change the image back, is still in your hand.

This is the answer to the charge that karma is fatalism, and it is worth stating as bluntly as the tradition does. Only the arrow in flight is beyond change. The archer is still standing there, still choosing, still able to lower the bow. A doctrine that fixed everything would have no use for the fourfold scheme at all. The scheme exists precisely to mark off the small fixed portion from the large open one.

The colour of a deed

There is a further refinement, and it belongs to Patanjali again, because it will matter when the treatise reaches the question of how anyone gets free.

At Yoga Sutra 4.7, Patanjali sorts karma by its moral colour. Ordinary action, he says, is of three kinds: shukla, white, the wholesome deed that brings pleasant fruit; krishna, black, the harmful deed that brings painful fruit; and the mixed, shukla-krishna, which most human action is, part bright and part dark. Then he adds a fourth category that belongs to no one but the accomplished yogin. The yogin’s karma, he says, is ashukla-akrishna, neither white nor black. It deposits nothing at all.

Hold that fourth colour. It is the same finding as the last chapter, arriving from a different direction. The one who acts without the craving that signs the deed produces action with no colour, which is to say action that leaves no residue in the granary. White karma still binds, if pleasantly; the round of pleasant rebirths is still the round. The colourless deed is the only one that does not add an arrow to the quiver.

The overview article names the three movements, sanchita, prarabdha, agami, and leaves them there, which is right for a newcomer’s map. This treatise has added the fourth movement of doing, the archer that holds them together, and the colour that decides whether a deed feeds the store or falls through it clean. What it has not yet explained is the mechanism underneath the metaphor. An arrow is a thing you can see. The residue of a deed is not. How does a fleeting action actually become a stored disposition, waiting in the dark of the granary for its hour?

That is a question about the engine, and the next chapter opens it.