The classical Hindu doctrine of *karma* is more nuanced than the popular phrase "what goes around comes around" suggests. The Yoga Sutras and the Vedanta commentaries categorise karma into three principal types — *Sanchita*, *Prarabdha* and *Kriyamana* — and the distinction matters for how one approaches one's own life.
✦ Sanchita — Accumulated Karma
*Sanchita* literally means "heaped up". This is the total store of karma accumulated across all lifetimes — every action ever performed by the individual soul, with all its consequences still pending fruition. It is the unmanifest backlog. Most of an individual's sanchita karma never manifests in the current life; it remains stored, waiting.
✦ Prarabdha — Karma That Has Begun to Bear Fruit
*Prarabdha* literally means "begun" or "set in motion". This is the portion of sanchita that has been "released" for the current life — the karma that gives this birth its particular family, body, time, place, opportunities and constraints. Prarabdha is what is fixed in this life: one cannot change one's parents, one's birth-circumstances, one's body's basic constitution. Classical commentary calls prarabdha "the arrow already shot" — once released, its trajectory must complete.
✦ Kriyamana — Karma Being Created Now
*Kriyamana* (also called *Agami* — "future") is the karma being created right now, by current actions. Every choice, every action, every thought adds to one's kriyamana. Most kriyamana karma will not bear fruit in this life; it will join the sanchita storehouse and emerge in some future birth.
✦ The Practical Significance
The three-fold division resolves a tension in the karma doctrine. If everything is determined by past karma, what is the use of present effort? The classical answer is precise:
- ✦*Prarabdha* is fixed — no effort changes the basic conditions of this life.
- ✦*Kriyamana* is entirely free — the choices one makes now are genuinely one's own.
- ✦*Sanchita* can be exhausted by self-knowledge — the great spiritual schools (Vedanta especially) hold that direct knowledge of the self burns up the entire sanchita store.
So one's freedom operates inside the constraints of prarabdha, building either a better future or a worse one through kriyamana, while spiritual practice can — over many lifetimes or in this one — burn through the larger sanchita stockpile.
✦ A Common Misunderstanding
Karma is not punishment dispatched by a divine bookkeeper. The classical understanding is that karma is the natural law of cause and effect operating on subtle as well as gross levels. A wrong act produces consequences not because someone is keeping score but because the act itself, by its nature, sets in motion certain effects in the agent's mind, body, relationships and circumstances. The doctrine is closer to physics than to courtroom justice.