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Karma, Dharma and the Doctrinal Divergences between Buddhism and Hinduism

Buddhism and Hinduism share the same geographical cradle — the Indian subcontinent — and draw on a common philosophical vocabulary. Terms such as karma, dharma, samsara, moksha and nirvana circulate in both traditions. Yet the doctrinal differences between them are profound, at times irreconcilable, and concern precisely the way these concepts are understood at their root.

Tibetan thangka depicting Yama holding the Bhavachakra, the wheel of existence
Yama holding the Bhavachakra, the wheel of existence. Tibetan thangka, an iconographic source shared by Buddhism and Hinduism. Public domain.

Karma: Far More Than «What You Do Comes Back to You»

In Western popular culture karma has become almost a saying: «karma is real», people say when something bad happens to someone after they have done wrong. But this is a simplification that reduces a philosophical concept of extraordinary depth to moralistic superstition.

The Sanskrit term karma (कर्म) derives from the verbal root kṛ, which simply means «to do, to act». Karma is therefore, first of all, action. But not just any action: it is action that leaves a trace, that produces effects — not only in the outer world, but in the very being of the one who acts.

To truly grasp it, we must start with an image: imagine throwing a stone into a still body of water. The ripples spread in ever-wider circles, invisible after a while, but real. Every intentional action we perform is that stone: it produces circles that keep expanding even when we no longer see them, even beyond this life.

Karma in Hinduism: Cosmic Order, Duty and Liberation

In Hinduism karma is not merely an ethical matter — it is a cosmic law, interwoven with the very structure of reality. It works with the precision of a physical law: it is not a judge who rewards or punishes, nor the will of a vengeful god. It is simply the nature of things: every cause produces an effect, every action is inscribed in an invisible register that determines the conditions of the future life.

Hindu karma operates on three coexisting levels.

Ritual karma. In the most ancient sources — the Vedas and the later interpretive schools of the Mīmāṃsakas — karma is above all sacrificial and ritual action. Performing the prescribed rites correctly, offering the right sacrifice at the right moment, reciting the mantras with exact pronunciation: all this accumulates positive karma and favours good rebirths or the fulfilment of desires in this life. In this archaic vision, the rite is not symbolic — it is technically effective, like pressing the right key on a cosmic machine.

Ethical karma. With the Upaniṣads and then with the Bhagavad Gītā, the focus shifts towards intention and moral conduct. Lying, doing harm, acting with greed or hatred produces negative karma. Being generous, honest, compassionate produces positive karma. These «deposits» accumulate in the individual soul — the ātman — and determine its circumstances in the next incarnation: the type of body, the family one is born into, the caste, wealth or poverty, health or illness.

Krishna and Arjuna on the chariot at Kurukshetra, a scene from the Bhagavad Gita
Krishna and Arjuna on the chariot at Kurukshetra: the scene in which the teaching of nishkāma karma — action without attachment to its fruits — takes shape. Traditional Bhagavad Gītā iconography.

Karma as a bond to be dissolved. And here is the most sophisticated point: even «good» karma is still karma. Even good actions, if performed with desire for the result, bind us to the wheel of rebirths (samsara). The paradox of classical Hinduism, magnificently expressed in the Bhagavad Gītā, is that to be liberated one must act — one cannot withdraw from action — but one must act without attachment to the fruits.

“You have a right to action, never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.”

Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gītā

This is nishkāma karma — action without desire — and it represents the royal road to exhausting karma rather than accumulating more.

Another useful image: karma is like debt. One can accumulate bad debt (negative actions) or good debt (positive actions, which in a sense «owe» us good future conditions). But as long as one is in debt — in any direction — one is bound. True freedom (moksha) is when the account is zeroed: no debt, no credit, no bond.

Karma in Buddhism: Intention Is Everything

Bhavachakra, the Buddhist Wheel of Life
The Bhavachakra, the Wheel of Life: the Buddhist representation of samsara, karma and dependent origination.

The Buddha knows the concept of karma well. But when he begins to teach, he performs a subtle and revolutionary transformation that changes everything.

“Mind is the forerunner of all actions. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”

Dhammapada

For the Buddha, karma is intention — in Pāli, cetanā. It is not the external action in itself that produces karmic consequences, but the conscious volition that originates and moves it. This shifts the focus from outside to inside, from the gesture to the heart of the gesture.

A clarifying example: a surgeon uses a scalpel and cuts a person’s flesh. A murderer uses a knife and cuts a person’s flesh. The physical actions are structurally analogous. But the intention is at opposite poles: one wants to heal, the other wants to kill. For Buddhism, the karma produced is radically different — not because the external result differs, but because the intention differs. It is the quality of mind at the moment of action that counts.

This has enormous consequences. It means that karma is not fatalism: we are not mechanically enslaved to past actions. It means transformation is possible, and it happens in the mind. It means that even a person who has done great harm can change their karmic trajectory, here and now, by transforming the intentions that move their actions.

But there is an even deeper difference with Hinduism, concerning who carries karma from one life to another. In Hinduism, it is the ātman — the permanent individual soul — that gathers karma like a suitcase and carries it into the next incarnation. But Buddhism denies the existence of a permanent ātman. So how does karma work between lives, if there is no soul to transport it?

Buddhism answers with the image of the flame: when you light a candle from the flame of another, you have not transferred the same flame — it is a new flame, born of the previous one. It is not identity, but neither is it total otherness: it is causal continuity. Karma is like that flame: a stream of mental states and conditionings that perpetuates and transmits itself causally, without any need for a fixed subject to carry it.

Dharma: The Most Translated and Most Betrayed Word

If karma is often reduced to «you reap what you sow», dharma suffers an even more tragicomic fate in popular culture: it ends up on T-shirts, in the names of vegan cafes, in Instagram captions, emptied of any precise meaning.

The Sanskrit term dharma (धर्म) — dhamma in the Pāli form used by Buddhism — derives from the root dhṛ, which means «to support, to hold, to keep together». Dharma is therefore, at its root, that which sustains order, that which holds the structure of reality together. But from this common starting point, the two traditions branch in very different directions.

Dharma in Hinduism: The Order of the World and Your Place in It

Classic Sri Yantra, a sacred geometric diagram of Hinduism
The Sri Yantra: a sacred geometric diagram representing cosmic order and the interweaving of the planes of reality in the Hindu tradition. Nineteenth-century engraving with explanatory labels.

In Hinduism dharma is a layered concept operating on several levels simultaneously — and the difficulty in grasping it for a Westerner lies precisely in the fact that all these levels coexist and influence one another.

Dharma as universal cosmic order. At the highest and most abstract level, dharma is the law that governs the entire universe: the cycle of the seasons, the movement of the stars, the alternation of day and night, the growth of plants, the behaviour of animals. Everything in the universe has its nature and its role: fire burns, water flows downward, the sun rises in the east. To respect dharma means to align with this natural and cosmic order, not to contradict it. To violate it — not only ethically, but also ritually or «naturally» — is adharma, disorder, chaos.

It is a fascinating idea, in some ways analogous to the Greek concept of logos or cosmos: the universe is not random chaos but an intelligible order, and to live well means to live according to that order, not in spite of it.

Dharma as differentiated personal duty. Here Hinduism becomes truly peculiar — and controversial. Varṇāśrama-dharma is the specific duty of each person according to two coordinates: one’s varṇa (caste: brahmin, warrior, merchant, servant) and one’s āśrama (life stage: student, householder, forest-dweller, total renunciant).

In this system, dharma is not the same for everyone. The brahmin has obligations completely different from the śūdra. The householder has duties opposite to the renunciant. The woman has responsibilities different from the man. This is not — at least in the classical view — injustice: it is the idea that the universe is hierarchically organised, and that perfectly fulfilling one’s specific role, however humble, is spiritually equivalent to performing great deeds. A cook who cooks with total dedication fulfils his dharma just as much as a warrior who fights with courage on the battlefield.

“Better one’s own dharma, though imperfect, than the dharma of another well performed.”

Bhagavad Gītā

Of course, this system has also historically served to justify caste rigidity and its injustices — a criticism Buddhism would raise from the very start.

Dharma as universal virtue. Yet there is also a level of dharma that transcends castes and life stages: sādhāraṇa-dharma, the virtues belonging to every human being as such. Non-violence (ahiṃsā), truth (satya), not stealing, purity, self-control, compassion, generosity. These qualities do not depend on who you are in the social hierarchy: they belong to the human being as such. This level of Hindu dharma is the closest to a universal morality in the Western sense.

Dharma in Buddhism: The Path, the Truth, Reality

Dharmachakra, the wheel of the Buddhist Dharma
The Dharmachakra, the «wheel of the Dharma»: symbol of the setting-in-motion of the Buddha’s teaching and of the Eightfold Path.

The Buddha takes this word and fills it with a radically new meaning — so new as to make it almost unrecognisable compared to Hindu usage.

Dhamma as the teaching of the Buddha. First of all, the Dhamma is the very doctrine the Buddha discovered and transmitted: the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the law of dependent origination. It is the second of the Three Jewels (triratna) in which the Buddhist practitioner takes refuge: «I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dhamma, I take refuge in the Saṅgha» (the community of practitioners). Here the Dhamma is not an abstract cosmic order: it is a concrete map towards liberation, the cartography of suffering and its overcoming.

Dhamma as the nature of reality — and the dhammā in the plural. At a deeper philosophical level, in the Buddhist psychology elaborated above all in the Abhidhamma tradition, the dhammā (in the plural) are the «fundamental building blocks» of experience: the elementary phenomena, the moments of consciousness, the physical and mental qualities that compose all that exists. Everything we perceive as solid and permanent — people, objects, the self — is in reality an extremely rapid flow of these impermanent, interdependent dhammā, devoid of their own substance. To understand the dhammā is to understand the nature of reality without illusions.

Dhamma as an egalitarian and universal path. Here lies the sharpest break with Hinduism: the Buddha does not accept that dharma differs for different castes. When he states that «one is not a brahmin by birth, but by conduct», he is subverting one of the pillars of the Hindu social order. The Buddhist Dhamma is the same for all sentient beings capable of understanding. There are no spiritual obligations differentiated by caste, gender or social origin. Suffering does not discriminate; nor does the path out of it.

Nor is the Dhamma an eternal revelation to be accepted on faith. In the famous Kālāma Sutta, the Buddha tells the young Kālāmas something extraordinarily modern: do not accept anything merely because it is tradition, authority, sacred text, abstract logic or the opinion of a teacher. Accept what «you know for yourselves to be good, virtuous and beneficial», what brings a decrease of suffering for oneself and others. The Dhamma is verified in direct experience, not imposed from outside.

The Fundamental Doctrinal Divergences

Vishnu reclining on the cosmic ocean, Anantashayana
Viṣṇu reclining on the cosmic ocean (Anantashayana): an image of the eternal foundation and the Absolute that Hinduism places at the basis of manifestation — precisely what Buddhism, by contrast, does not posit.

1. Ātman vs Anātman — the question of the self. This is the deepest philosophical fracture between the two traditions. Hinduism affirms the existence of a permanent, conscious ātman, ultimately identical to the universal Brahman. Buddhism denies it: the doctrine of anātman is one of the three fundamental marks of existence, together with impermanence and suffering. What we call «I» is a changing aggregate of five components (khandha), without fixed substance.

2. Moksha vs Nirvāṇa. In Hinduism liberation is union or fusion with Brahman. In Buddhism nirvāṇa is the extinction of conditioning — not fusion with an Absolute (which is not posited), but the extinguishing of the fire of desire, hatred and illusion.

3. The Vedas and authority. Hinduism recognises the Vedas as eternal revelation. Buddhism recognises no infallible external authority: truth is verified in experience.

4. God and the divine. Hinduism is plural but essentially theistic in its major currents. Buddhism is non-theistic: the devas exist as conditioned and impermanent beings, but none can guarantee the liberation of another.

Conclusion: Same Word, Different Worlds

Thangka of Padmasambhava at the Paro monastery, Bhutan
Padmasambhava, the «lotus-born» master, a central figure of Tibetan Buddhism. Thangka from the Paro Taktsang monastery, Bhutan.

Karma and dharma are not concepts the two traditions share: they are shared words that guard divergent philosophical worlds. Like two rivers born from the same source flowing towards different seas.

In Hinduism, karma and dharma build a cosmic edifice in which every being has its place, its role, its soul travelling through lives towards final realisation. In Buddhism, they become tools for dismantling every illusion of permanence — including that of the self who performs karma and follows dharma.

In one sentence
The difference is not one of degree but of horizon: where Hinduism finds the eternal foundation, Buddhism points to yet another veil to be lifted.
The content of this article is for informational and cultural purposes and does not replace the direct study of the sources or guidance from qualified teachers of the respective traditions.

Annotated Bibliography by Language

A commented selection for those who wish to go deeper — from accessible introductions to academic texts.

🇬🇧 In English

  • Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Grove Press, 1959, rev. 1974). The single best short introduction to Buddhism in any language, based on the Pāli Canon.
  • Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (HarperOne). A comprehensive overview with rich insights into karma and dharma.
  • Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge University Press, 1996). The academic standard for English-language scholarship on Hinduism.
  • Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Karma: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Why It Matters (Shambhala). An exceptional treatment of the Buddhist understanding of karma.
  • Swami Vivekananda, Karma Yoga (1896). The foundational text on karma as spiritual discipline.
  • Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker (Basic Books). A remarkable bridge between modern psychology and the Buddhist doctrine of anātman.

📚 Recommended Primary Texts in Any Language

The Bhagavad Gītā remains the most accessible text of classical Hinduism for a Westerner; the Dhammapada is its Buddhist counterpart — short, luminous, dense with practical wisdom. For those who wish to enter Buddhist philosophy, the Majjhima Nikāya offers the doctrine in the very voice of the tradition. For Vedantic Hinduism, the principal Upaniṣads — Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya, Kaṭha — are the source of everything.