Karma
karma (karman)
The act, and by extension the consequence of the act. In the *Bhagavad-Gītā*, karma is not primarily the moral law of retribution that the West has made of it, but the very principle of activity: everything in the cosmos is held together by *Act*. No one can abstain from it; the question is therefore not whether to act or not, but *how* to act.
En effet, les animaux vivent des fruits de la terre ; les fruits de la terre sont engendrés par la pluie ; la pluie, par le Sacrifice ; le Sacrifice s’accomplit par l’Acte.
Burnouf translates karman as “the Act,” with a capital letter that marks its cosmic rank. The verse unfolds a chain: living beings feed on the earth’s fruits, the earth on the rains, the rains on the Sacrifice, the Sacrifice on the Act—and the Act “proceeds from Brahma.” Karma, then, is not merely what an individual does; it is the motion by which the world sustains and renews itself.
From this stems the Gītā’s central argument against the temptation of withdrawal. “It is impossible for a man, endowed with a body, to abstain entirely from all action.” To live is to act; not to act is still a way of acting, and the most barren one. The problem posed to Arjuna was never to cease acting, but to cease being bound by what he does.
To be distinguished from kāma, desire, which corrupts the act by grafting onto it the expectation of its fruit: the act is neutral, desire makes it binding. This is why karma-yoga does not abolish karma but purifies it, and why niṣkāma-karma consists in preserving the Act while excising desire alone. The moral retribution commonly associated with the word comes afterward: it is merely the fruit from which the Gītā teaches us to detach.