Karma, from the Sanskrit root kri, “to do,” means literally “action,” but the word has come to name something larger: the principle that every action generates a corresponding consequence, its karma-phala or “fruit,” which returns to the actor in due course. This is not fate imposed from outside; it is a law of moral cause and effect operating with the same regularity ascribed to physical laws elsewhere in the universe. Because a single lifetime is rarely long enough to exhaust the consequences of everything a person has set in motion, classical Vedic and Vedantic thought extends karma’s operation across multiple lifetimes, carried forward as latent tendencies, samskaras and vasanas, that shape the circumstances and inclinations of future births.
Tradition divides the total stock of karma into three kinds. Sanchita karma is the vast accumulated reservoir of consequences from all past actions, most of it dormant. Prarabdha karma is the portion of that reservoir already set in motion for the present life — the specific body, circumstances, and life-arc a person is currently living through, which must simply be experienced and cannot be avoided. Agami or kriyamana karma is the new karma being generated right now, through today’s choices, and added to the reservoir for the future. This three-fold division is what keeps karma from collapsing into simple fatalism: only prarabdha is fixed for this lifetime, while sanchita can still be worked through and agami remains entirely within one’s present control.
The Bhagavad Gita’s central practical teaching, nishkama karma, addresses exactly this last category. Krishna instructs Arjuna to act fully, performing his duty (dharma) without attachment to the fruits of action, offering the results to the divine rather than grasping at them for oneself. Action performed this way is said not to bind, since binding karma requires the ego’s craving for a particular outcome, and craving is precisely what nishkama karma withdraws. Even this, however, is described as a stepping stone: final freedom from karma is attributed to jnana, direct knowledge of the Self, which is said to burn away the root of karma altogether by seeing through the very sense of separate doership that generates it in the first place.