A Law That Needs No Judge

The distinctive claim of karma as causal law is that moral consequence follows from action with the same reliability physical effects follow physical causes, requiring no external enforcer, no divine bookkeeper tallying merits and demerits, because the connection between act and consequence is built into the structure of action itself rather than imposed on it from outside.

The Bhagavad Gita develops this into an entire ethic of action: since acting at all generates karma, and since even the wish to escape action is itself a kind of action, Krishna teaches Arjuna that the way out is not withdrawal from duty but performing one's duty without attachment to its results, nishkama karma, action that generates no binding karmic residue precisely because it is not grasped after or performed for personal reward. Buddhist sources sharpen the mechanism further by locating karma's real weight in intention rather than outward act: two physically identical actions, one performed with harmful intent and one performed accidentally or with good intent, are held to generate entirely different karmic consequences, which is why Buddhist ethics places such heavy emphasis on cultivating wholesome states of mind rather than merely regulating behavior. Both traditions insist the law operates across lifetimes, not only within one, which is what gives karma its distinctive explanatory role in accounting for apparently undeserved suffering or unearned fortune within a single life.