The Owner of Your Deeds
"Sentient beings are the owners of their deeds and heir to their deeds." This course reads four suttas that unpack that single sentence — first defining exactly what a "deed" technically is, then showing the pattern it produces, then showing the pattern's own honest limits, and finally showing the one deed that ends the mechanism entirely.
Kamma is one of the most casually used and least carefully understood words to cross over from Buddhism into everyday English. This course reads it the way the earliest texts actually present it: not fate, not a system of external reward and punishment, but a mechanism of causal fit — and one with real, stated limits on how confidently anyone, however psychically gifted, is entitled to reason from a single observed case.
Not a cosmic ledger kept by someone else. A mechanism of your own intentions, working exactly the way a shape produces a matching shadow.
All four suttas are read in full on this site, in Bhikkhu Sujato's complete CC0 translation of the Pali Canon, each with its own structured reading guide, full text, and ten-question self-check quiz. Readers who have completed the Abhidhamma's chapter on process-freed consciousness will recognize the same subject — kamma's role in death and rebirth-linking — treated there with full technical precision; this course reads the same mechanism from the sutta side, in the Buddha's own working examples.
- State the technical definition of kamma as intention — not the bare physical or verbal act — and explain why the channel (body, speech, or mind) doesn't change what makes a choice count as kamma.
- Explain the seven paired tendencies linking conduct to visible traits, and — just as importantly — state the sutta's own explicit limit on how far that pattern extends.
- Distinguish granting a particular observed case from granting a universal law built on it — the single most important epistemic skill in this entire course, and one that reaches well beyond the topic of kamma.
- Explain why the fourth kind of deed is still, unmistakably, a kind of deed — and why that distinction is what separates renunciation from mere inaction.
- Respond responsibly to the casual, harmful use of "it's their karma" to dismiss someone's suffering as deserved.
Five steps, every session — read the sutta itself in full partway through, not as an afterthought.
All four sessions are live. The order builds from definition, to pattern, to the pattern's own limit, to the mechanism's exit.
- Nothing to buy. Every sutta is on this site in full, in Bhikkhu Sujato's CC0 translation, with its own reading guide and quiz.
- No prior course required, though the Abhidhamma's chapter on process-freed consciousness is a natural companion for the full technical account of death and rebirth-linking.
- Willingness to sit with genuine complexity. Session 3 deliberately unsettles Session 2's tidy pattern before resolving it — the discomfort in between is part of the teaching.
- Care with how this gets applied to real people. Every session in this course returns to the same caution: a general tendency is not a verdict on any individual's specific suffering.