Dharma, karma, saṃsāra, mokṣa: the key words of Hinduism

This article is part of an introductory series on Hinduism: 1. What it is · 2. The texts · 3. Key words · 4. The paths to liberation · 5. The deities.

Many Hindu words have entered everyday language, often changing their meaning along the way: “karma” has become a kind of fate, “nirvana” a state of bliss. It is worth going back to the beginning and taking them in the sense they have in the texts.

Dharma: order and duty

Dharma comes from a root meaning “to uphold”: it is what holds the world together. It refers to the order of the cosmos, but also to each person's duty according to their station, their age and their role in the family and in society. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa says that it is better to carry out one's own dharma, even imperfectly, than to carry out another's perfectly (3:35). The tradition lists four legitimate aims of life (puruṣārtha): dharma, prosperity (artha), pleasure (kāma) and, above all the others, liberation (mokṣa).

Karma: action and its fruits

Karma simply means “action”. The idea is that every action, including thoughts and intentions, leaves a trace and sooner or later bears its fruit, in this life or in a later one. It is neither blind fate nor a punishment imposed by someone: it is closer to a moral law of cause and effect. Past karma shapes the present, but today's choices prepare the future.

The Gītā adds a famous teaching: “You have a right to the action, never to its fruits” (2:47). Acting well without clinging to the result is the way to avoid accumulating new karma.

Saṃsāra: the cycle of births

Saṃsāra is the “flowing together”, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth in which beings are caught for as long as their karma drives them on. For the Indian tradition this is not good news: even happy lives come to an end, and the cycle repeats itself. The hope is not to be reborn into something better, but to get out. We have written a separate article on this, and on the difference between reincarnation and rebirth.

Mokṣa: liberation

Mokṣa is liberation from saṃsāra. The schools describe it in different ways: as the discovery that one's own self has always been one with ultimate reality, or as an eternal communion of love with God. Either way, it is the end of suffering and of ignorance. The paths that lead there are the subject of the next article.

Brahman and ātman: ultimate reality and the self

The Upanishads call ultimate reality, the ground of everything that exists, brahman, and the deepest self of every being, beyond the body and the thoughts, ātman. Their most celebrated insight is that the two are one and the same. In the Chāndogya Upaniṣad a father, Uddālaka, teaches his son through simple examples (salt dissolved in water, the seed of the fig tree) and repeats: tat tvam asi, “you are that” (6:8:7). The Bṛhadāraṇyaka has the sage say: ahaṃ brahmāsmi, “I am brahman” (1:4:10).

Not every school reads these sentences in the same way. For Śaṅkara's Advaita Vedānta the identity is complete and the multiplicity of the world is illusory; for the devotional schools, such as that of Rāmānuja, the soul shares in God but remains distinct from him, like a spark from the fire.

Compared with other traditions

Buddhism uses almost the same words, karma, saṃsāra, dharma, but overturns one of them: it denies the ātman. For the Buddha there is no permanent self (anattā), and liberation, nirvāṇa, is reached precisely by ceasing to cling to an “I”. The Chinese Tao resembles brahman as the ground of all things, but it is described more as a course, a way in which nature flows, than as a being: “the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao”, says the first chapter of the Daodejing.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam think of time as a line running from a creation to a fulfilment, not as a cycle. Human beings live only one life, and salvation is a gift from God, grace, rather than the outcome of an impersonal law such as karma. And yet there too the principle that actions bear fruit is strong: “each will reap what they have sown”, Paul writes to the Galatians (6:7). Yoruba religion has a concept close to personal dharma: orí, the “inner head”, the destiny that each person is said to have chosen before birth and must fulfil through good character.

What can we take from all this? The idea of karma, stripped of its popular imagery, is an invitation to responsibility: no action is without consequences, not even a thought. The idea of dharma reminds us that each of us has a place and a task, and that there is no point in envying someone else's. And the insight “you are that” invites us to see something sacred in every being.

In the next article: the paths of liberation, knowledge, devotion, action and meditation.