Black Karma, White Karma, and the Karma That Exhausts All Karma

T1606 gives concrete illustrations of the genuinely mixed case: black in underlying intention but white in method describes someone who, wishing to deceive another, first deliberately displays an outward appearance of trustworthiness — even performing genuine acts of generosity or renunciation — purely as a manipulative setup for the deception to come. Black in method but white in underlying intention describes the reverse: a parent, moved by genuine compassion, harshly and coarsely scolds a child or student in order to steer them away from danger — the visible method looks harsh and unkind, yet the underlying motive is entirely benevolent. Neither of these two components is judged in isolation; the treatise's own point in naming this fourth mixed category explicitly is that a single act's moral coloring is not always uniform all the way through, and intention and method can genuinely diverge.

The fourth category — uncontaminated karma capable of exhausting all the rest — deserves its own emphasis: this is specifically the karma present at the very culmination of the path, in the preparatory and immediately-liberating stages where afflictions are actually, finally severed. T1606 explains its three defining qualities directly: it is called "neither black" because it is entirely free of affliction's own stain; "white" in the sense of being purely, thoroughly pure, though ultimately beyond even this ordinary white/black contrast; and "without ripened result" because it runs contrary to the very mechanism of continued birth and death that ordinary ripening depends on. It is called capable of "exhausting all karma" because the power of uncontaminated karma alone is what finally uproots even the deepest habitual traces left by the other three, black, white, and mixed kinds of karma together.

T1606 defines each of the three tainted categories against what specifically obstructs the noble eightfold path: crooked karma is bodily, verbal, or mental action that directly prevents the path's own upright factors from developing at all — falling into either eternalism or annihilationism, and thereby departing from the genuine middle way, is the paradigm case. Tainted karma is action that actively defiles one's own mental continuum, laying the ground for further obstructive karma to arise from it. And murky karma is action grounded in the distorted views of rival, non-Buddhist schools — precisely the kind of confused unbelief that every buddha's own pure teaching is specifically designed to counteract. T1606 further maps these three onto specific philosophical errors: falling into the extremes of permanence or annihilation is what "crooked" names; holding a view that denies genuine value and instead intensifies impurity is what "tainted" names; and clinging to the view of a substantial body, which specifically obstructs the true seeing of selflessness, is what "murky" names.

Pure karma, by contrast, is defined as simply the reverse of these three at once — moral discipline held together with correct view, such that bodily, verbal, and mental action all remain free of the very faults of view that give rise to precept-violation in the first place. And "sagely" karma names specifically the uncontaminated bodily, verbal, and mental action of both a trainee and one beyond further training, since — T1606 notes pointedly — only genuine sages possess this particular kind of karma at all; it is not available to an ordinary, unenlightened being regardless of how carefully that being observes the outward forms of precept-keeping.