Appearance
8.2 — The Four Karmas, With Modern Examples
The tradition divides accumulated action into four categories. The names sound technical and the distinction turns out to be one of the most useful things in this Part, because it separates what you can act on from what you cannot.
The four
Sanchita — the whole store
Everything ever accumulated. The total of all past action, whether or not it has begun to produce results.
In the rebirth framework this covers all lives. Without it, it covers everything you have ever done.
And the tradition's position on it is: it is not fully knowable and it is not directly workable. You cannot go through it.
Prarabdha — what has already started
The portion that has begun to produce results, and that is currently running.
The standard image is an archer. Sanchita is the whole quiver. Prarabdha is the arrow already in flight.
And the tradition's position is unambiguous: the arrow in flight cannot be recalled. Even a person who has completed the entire path continues to experience the working out of what was already in motion — which is why the Buddha still got old and ill and died of a bad meal (6.13), and why Krishna's clan destroyed itself in front of him (3.19).
This is the category that covers: the body you have, the family you were born into, the country, the century, the consequences of decisions you made ten years ago that are still arriving.
Kriyamana — what you are doing right now
Action being performed in the present.
And this is the only one you actually control. It is the entire working surface.
Agami — what is coming
The consequences that current action is generating, which have not yet arrived.
Kriyamana becomes agami becomes prarabdha becomes, once complete, part of sanchita. It is one process viewed at four stages.
Why this is useful
Because it produces a triage, and the triage is the point.
Two of the four cannot be worked on. One is arriving whether or not you do anything. One is the lever.
And people spend enormous amounts of attention on the wrong ones.
Time spent on sanchita is regret. Going back over what you did, cataloguing it, explaining it, defending it. It is not workable and the doctrine says so. The only useful operation on the past is extracting a rule for the present, and that takes an hour, not a decade.
Time spent resisting prarabdha is the largest single waste there is. The arrow is in flight. The diagnosis is real, the parent is who they are, the industry has changed, the decision was made. Arguing with what has already arrived is the most reliable way to spend a life without altering anything.
And agami is not workable directly either. You cannot act on a consequence that has not arrived. You can only act on the thing producing it, which is the third category.
Everything reduces to kriyamana. That is the entire framework's conclusion and it is not trivial, because most people's attention is distributed almost exactly the wrong way round.
Modern examples of each
Sanchita. Everything in your history: how you were raised, every job, every relationship, every habit you built, every promise kept or not. The accumulated whole. You cannot audit it and there is no point trying.
Prarabdha. The results already in motion. A qualification you did or did not get twenty years ago and the career shape that followed. The health consequences of a decade of a particular diet. The relationship with a sibling that has been what it is since you were fifteen. A reputation that precedes you into rooms.
And a hard one, because the doctrine's honesty depends on it: the things that were not your doing at all. Where you were born. What your parents were like. What happened to you as a child. The tradition puts these in prarabdha, which means it does not ask you to have caused them — it asks you to work from where they put you.
Kriyamana. This week. The conversation you have or do not have. What you eat. Whether you do the work today. How you speak to the person who annoyed you this morning.
Agami. What this week is building. The relationship in five years that depends on whether you call. The body in twenty years. The reputation that is being assembled now, one instance at a time.
The uncomfortable part
And it has to be said, because the framework is otherwise too comfortable.
Prarabdha is not fair.
Two people do the same work. One has a body that cooperates and one does not. One was born where the opportunity was and one was not. The arrow in flight was not aimed by everybody equally.
The rebirth framework explains this by saying the arrow was aimed in a previous life. This book has said that is not established (8.1). Without it, there is no explanation, and the honest position is: prarabdha is partly your own past action and partly circumstance, and there is no reliable way to tell which is which.
What the framework offers instead of an explanation is an instruction, and the instruction is the same either way. The arrow is in flight. The lever is the present. You can spend the remaining time establishing whether it was fair, or you can use the lever.
That is not a satisfying answer and it is the true one.
What can be done about the past
One genuine qualification, because the framework can sound harsher than the tradition actually is.
The traditions all hold that accumulated karma can be affected, and each has a mechanism. Knowledge burns it (5.4). Devotion transfers it (5.7). Practice exhausts it. And in the Buddhist framing, Angulimala's stones were the consequences arriving in a compressed and survivable form because of what he had become (6.11).
Stripped of the metaphysics, the defensible version is this: you cannot undo what you did, and you can change what it means going forward.
A person who behaved badly for ten years and then genuinely changed does not get those years cancelled. What changes is that the pattern stops feeding, the consequences stop compounding, and the accumulated result begins to be diluted by a different accumulation.
Which is slow, and it is real, and it is the only version of redemption that does not require anybody to pretend.
What to carry from this page
Two of the four cannot be worked on, one is arriving anyway, and one is the lever. Check where your attention actually goes.
Regret is work on a category the doctrine says is not workable. Extract the rule and stop.
Arguing with what has already arrived is the most reliable way to spend a life without changing anything.
And you cannot undo what you did — you can stop feeding it, and start a different accumulation, and wait. That is what change actually is and it takes years.
Next: 8.3 — the other great word, in its four senses, and how to find yours in a world where you choose your own work.