Preliminary Exploration of the Buddhist Doctrine of Karma

Buddhism holds that the universe and living‑beings’ world originate from the retributive power of wholesome and unwholesome karma generated by all sentient beings, and it rejects the theory of a divine Creator. The concept of karma did not originate from the Buddha exclusively; its ideological precursors can be traced back to the Vedic period of ancient India, gradually gaining philosophical systematization in the Upaniṣads. Drawing on the Karmasiddhiprakaraṇa and early‑Buddhist Āgama texts, this paper unpacks the connotation of karma defined as volition‑driven actions of body, speech and mind, including volitional karma and karma after volition. Different from non‑Buddhist standpoints such as divine determinism, fatalism and acausalism, the Buddhist doctrine of karma is established upon the thought of dependent origination. It emphasizes the decisive role of cetanā (volition), affirms the value of present‑life striving, and avoids the trap of fatalism. This paper further investigates the Sarvāstivāda interpretation of karma in Sectarian Buddhism. The Sarvāstivādins put forward the doctrine of manifest karma and unmanifest karma (avijñapti‑karman) to explain the persistence of karmic potential between karmic cause and karmic fruit. They also advanced diverse classifications of karma concerning retributive timing and transformability, such as three‑period karma, four‑kind karma, five‑kind karma and eight‑kind karma, alongside the distinction between projecting karma and completing karma. Though inheriting pre‑Buddhist karma terminology, the Buddha reconstructed karmic theory on the basis of dependent origination and anātman (non‑self), taking mental karma as the core. The sectarian debates over karmic momentum laid important theoretical groundwork for the later Sautrāntika seed‑theory and the Yogācāra Consciousness‑Only school.