Karma: what the word means and what a horoscope shows of it

“That is karma” is easily said, and what is meant by it is almost always the same: what goes around comes around. Astrology has a whole line of interpretation built on this word. The strange part is that on its way to Europe the term lost almost everything it once meant — and picked up something that does not belong to it at all.

A deed, not a verdict

Karma is Sanskrit and means simply this: deed, action, work. In the traditions it comes from — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism — it names a teaching about action and its consequences, not a penalty. Nobody imposes anything; what is described is a process that runs by itself.

How that process works is something the schools do not agree on. Jainism understands karma as a subtle matter that clings to the soul and has to be worked off; Buddhist schools place the emphasis on the intention behind the deed. There is no single doctrine of karma, but a family of doctrines that have been arguing with one another for two and a half thousand years.

Why “fate” is the wrong translation

The European notion of fate has a picture of its own: among the Greeks, three women spin a thread, measure it off and cut it. What is spun is settled. Anyone who translates karma that way turns the teaching into its opposite.

For if everything hangs on the deed, a new deed changes what follows. The thought is not built on unalterability but on its opposite: what matters is what you do now, or the teaching would be pointless. In Western usage, a call to act has become an explanation for accepting what comes.

What everyday English has made of it

Two things happened when the word was taken over, and they pulled in opposite directions. The difficult part — rebirth, which is what holds the whole idea together — is usually left out; hardly anyone who says “karma” is thinking of earlier lives. What was kept, of all things, was the book-keeping: the idea of an account being kept somewhere.

The second shift matters more. In the traditions the teaching is addressed to the person acting, as an instruction for the conduct of one’s own life. Today the word is used almost only about other people, and most readily when something has caught up with someone who was not much liked anyway. A demand made on oneself has become a comfortable remark about somebody else’s misfortune — and with that the term has stopped explaining anything.

Why a birth chart says nothing about the time before

Now for the sober side of it. A horoscope is a calculation, and every calculation has inputs. Here there are three: the day, the time and the place of a birth. Out of them come the positions of the celestial bodies for that moment at that place on the earth, and the houses with them. Nothing more goes in, and so nothing more can come out.

None of the three details brings anything with it that is older than that moment. So what a text under a karmic heading says about an earlier time does not come from the calculation but from the person who interprets it. As long as that is stated, nothing is lost; if it is passed off as a result, the attribution is wrong.

Three words that belong together

In its languages of origin karma never stands alone. Two further terms belong with it, and without them the first makes little sense.

• Samsara, literally the wandering about: the cycle of birth, death and birth again, in which the consequences of a deed reach beyond a single life.
• Dharma: depending on the tradition, the order, the duty or the teaching — the thing action takes its bearings from.
• Moksha, in Buddhism nirvana: the stepping out of this cycle.

This is where the largest shift shows. In the traditions the aim is not to accumulate good karma but to get out of the cycle — good karma holds one in it just as firmly as bad, only more pleasantly. Anyone collecting “karma points” is therefore pursuing the opposite of what these teachings are about.

For reading, that means: when the word karma turns up, check what the text is talking about — what you do, or a reckoning that somebody else has drawn up. What a birth chart actually yields is set out under Astrology and under Horoscopes.