Law of Karman

Every action has a consequence, and every consequence has a scope. The Gītā's teaching on the law of karma is not a system of reward and punishment but a description of how a universe built on cause and effect actually works — and how the individual soul moves through it across multiple lives. This section gathers the verses that trace the workings of this law in its full extent.

The thread begins in the second adhyāya with the most compressed statement of rebirth in the entire text: just as a man casts off worn-out garments and takes on new ones, even so does the embodied soul cast off worn-out bodies and take on others that are new (2.22). Death is not the end of the story; it is the page-turn. Birth is certain for the dead, death is certain for the born; therefore, for what is inevitable, thou shouldst not grieve (2.27). The grief that immobilises Arjuna at the beginning of the Gītā is, at one level, a grief about the wrong thing — the costume, not the actor.

The law carries forward not only karma but also sādhana. Sri Krishna reassures Arjuna directly: no doer of good reaches a bad end, either in this world or hereafter (6.40). The yogi who falls from the path is reborn in the house of the pure and prosperous, or among wise yogis — in both cases a better launching pad for the next attempt (6.41–42). The former practice revives of itself, even without deliberate effort; past momentum is not lost (6.44–45). This is the Gītā's great encouragement to the sincere but imperfect practitioner: the path remembers you, even when you have forgotten it.

At the cosmological scale, the law operates with mathematical precision. The cycle of day and night in Brahmā's time — each day a thousand yugas, each night a thousand yugas — governs the pulsing of all manifestation: at the day's dawn, all unmanifest beings flow into the manifest; at night's arrival, they dissolve back into the unmanifest and emerge again at the next dawn (8.17–19). No being, and no action, falls outside this rhythm. Even worlds up to the realm of Brahmā are subject to return — only he who reaches the Lord, Sri Krishna declares, knows no rebirth (8.16).

Faith and sincerity determine the trajectory within the law: those who worship the gods reach the gods; those who worship the ancestors reach the ancestors; those who worship the Lord reach the Lord (9.25). The quality of inner orientation shapes the destination, even when the outer action is the same. And dying in each of the three guṇas carries the being to the corresponding station in the next life — tamas to yet lower births, rajas to the realm of the action-bound, sattva to the pure worlds of the wise (14.14–15, 14.18). The law is not blind; it reads the heart. Every verse in this section is an invitation to ask: what am I building, in each moment, for the next moment — and for all the moments after that?