What holds the charge

An act ends in an instant. The rite is performed, the vow is broken, the kindness is done, and the moment closes. Yet the fruit may not arrive for years, or for lifetimes. Between the deed that is over and the result that has not come, something must persist, holding the charge, or the whole doctrine of karma is a story with a gap at its centre.

The Indian schools saw the gap clearly. They agreed it had to be filled. And then, with the ferocity that Indian philosophy reserved for its deepest questions, they disagreed about what filled it. To watch them argue is to see the doctrine of karma at its most rigorous, stripped of consolation and worked as a problem in metaphysics. The site’s article on the six darshanas introduces the schools; this chapter sets four of them against a single question.

Mimamsa: the potency that runs itself

Start with the oldest and most surprising answer, because it needs no God at all.

Mimamsa, the school of ritual interpretation, was the first to analyze karma as a technical problem, and it was born from the world of the Vedic sacrifice, where a rite performed today secures a result, heaven perhaps, that does not arrive until after death. How does a completed sacrifice reach across that span to deliver a reward long afterward? The Mimamsa answer was a single coined concept: apurva. The word means, literally, the not-before, the new thing. It is an unseen potency generated by the correctly performed act, which persists after the act is over and ripens, in its own time, into the result.

The audacity of the position is what it leaves out. It leaves out God. The Mimamsakas, the great analysts Kumarila and Prabhakara among them, held that no divine bookkeeper is required to connect the deed to its fruit. The connection is built into the structure of reality. Apurva runs itself, the way a law of nature runs itself. The journal piece what ‘karma’ doesn’t mean notes this in passing, that the oldest detailed system of karma has no god in it, and the point is worth dwelling on, because it shows how deep the intuition of an impersonal moral order runs in the tradition. For Mimamsa, the universe keeps its own books, and no one has to read them.

Nyaya: the force that needs a hand

The logicians of the Nyaya school found this unsatisfying, and their objection is the one a modern reader is likely to feel too.

Nyaya also posited an unseen moral force, which they called adrishta, the unseen, the residue of merit and demerit attaching to a soul. But they argued that such a force, being unconscious and inert, cannot arrange its own results. An unintelligent potency does not know how to reward the good deed and punish the bad, cannot time its ripening, cannot fit the fruit to the fault. Something intelligent must superintend it. And so Nyaya reached for Ishvara, the Lord, as the conscious agent who directs adrishta to its proper ends. God does not invent the moral law arbitrarily; the deeds are the beings’ own. But God is the intelligence that administers the unseen force according to those deeds. Here the ledger has a keeper.

Two schools, then, and a clean fault line. For Mimamsa the moral order is self-running and godless. For Nyaya it is administered, because an inert force cannot administer itself. That fault line will widen into the whole subject of the next chapter.

Yoga: the deposit in the mind

The Yoga school, whose analysis of the inner mechanism this treatise has already leaned on, located the persisting charge not in the cosmos but in the person.

For Patanjali, what carries karma forward is the karmashaya, the deposit of action lodged in the deep mind, ripening through the samskaras and vasanas the sixth chapter described. This is a more psychological account than either Mimamsa’s cosmic potency or Nyaya’s administered force. The charge is stored where the deed was registered, in the chitta, the mind-stuff, and it ripens from there into birth, lifespan, and experience. Yoga does admit an Ishvara, but as a special object of devotion and a help to practice rather than, primarily, as the enforcer of results. The weight of its account falls inward. The account you carry is written in you.

Vedanta: real, and dispensed

The Vedanta schools, which the tradition treats as the crown of the six, accepted the reality of karma at the level of ordinary experience and folded its administration into their theology.

Karma is real, the Vedantins hold, as long as the world of separate selves and things is taken as real, which is to say at the vyavaharika level, the everyday standpoint the treatise’s final chapter will define against its opposite. At that level the fruits of action are dispensed by Ishvara, the Lord, acting as phaladata, the giver of fruit, in strict accordance with each soul’s own beginningless deeds. The Bhagavad Gita states the presiding role at 9.10, where Krishna says that under his oversight nature brings forth all that moves and does not move. The commentators Ramanuja and Madhva, the great theistic readers of Vedanta whom the site profiles in its articles on Ramanuja and Madhva, make this dispensing God central: the Lord is the just administrator of a law the souls themselves generate. Shankara’s non-dualism accepts the same at the everyday level while holding that the whole transaction is finally transcended, a thread this treatise picks up at its close.

What the argument reveals

Step back from the four positions and something important comes into view.

The schools are not really disagreeing about whether action bears fruit. On that they are one. They are disagreeing about the deepest architecture of the universe: whether it is a self-running mechanism or a governed order, whether the moral law is a fact of nature or an act of divine administration, whether the decisive residue sits in the cosmos or in the mind. The doctrine of karma turns out to be a place where the whole of Indian metaphysics is at stake. How you fill the gap between the deed and its fruit reveals what you think reality is made of.

Where the schools converge, the treatise has said, it speaks plainly. Here they diverge, and the divergence is the substance. This chapter does not rule between them. It names the positions and their holders and leaves the argument open, because the argument was never closed.

One question inside it, though, presses harder than the rest, and it cannot be deferred. Mimamsa says no God is needed. Nyaya and theistic Vedanta say a God dispenses the fruit. If a God does keep these books, then the oldest and most painful objection returns with full force. Why do the innocent suffer? What kind of just administrator presides over a world like this one?

The next chapter puts that question to the tradition and refuses to let it off lightly.