Kamma, Dukkha, and Rebirth: Three Pali Words Your English Dictionary Can't Hold.

 

Karma (Kamma in Pali, the language in Buddha's time)

A note before we begin: every English word in this post is a finger pointing at the moon. Please don't mistake my finger for the moon.

Language (the English words) is a necessary descriptive tool. But it is not the actual object.

               (D. T. Suzuki - A Zen Master)

The Misconception I Started With.

When I first began reading about the Buddha's teachings, I brought my Western baggage with me. In our casual usage, "kamma" means something like: "bad guys will eventually get what's coming to them". It is a cosmic scoreboard, a divine ledger, a delayed punishment for misdeeds.

Looking back, I can see where that came from. It is a distinctly Abrahamic reading - a judgment framework with a judge - grafted onto an Indian term that never carried that meaning. The Buddha himself explicitly rejected the fatalistic view that everything we experience is predetermined by past action. So the pop-culture karma I grew up with was, at best, a distant cousin of the Pali kamma, and at worst, a mistranslation wearing a costume.

Kamma: The Weight of Your Intentional Choices

Here is the passage that changed my reading:

"It is intention (cetanā), monks, that I call kamma."

— The Buddha, AN 6.63

That single sentence is the heart of it. The Buddha locates the moral core of an act not in its outward performance, but in the intention behind it. A deed done carelessly and a deed done with full awareness are not the same kamma, even if they look identical from the outside. An example in real life could be someone causing a fatal accident versus someone committing murder. Someone died in both cases, but the consequences are different.

But notice what that sentence does not say. It does not say kamma is intention, full stop. Kamma encompasses the intentional act, the deed performed through body, speech, or mind, and the latent causal trajectory that deed sets in motion. Translating kamma simply as "intention" would be like translating "medicine" as "chemistry" - technically related, but it misses the lived reality.

So here is the frame I have landed on: Kamma is not a ledger kept by someone. It is the weight of your intentional choices. The Buddha's point is that the moral quality of an act is rooted in the cetanā behind it - not in the outward show, and certainly not in a divine bookkeeping system.

Dukkha: "Suffering" Is the Doorway, Not the Room

If kamma is the term I thought I understood, dukkha is the one I thought was simple. "Life is suffering," the saying goes. But that translation is a doorway, not the room.

The Pali word dukkha covers a spectrum: ordinary physical pain, the distress of not getting what you want, the subtle unease woven into impermanent experience, and the fundamental unsatisfactoriness of clinging to anything conditioned. In the Samyutta Nikaya, the Buddha lists birth, aging, illness, death, union with the disliked, separation from the liked (losing the things you enjoy), and not getting what one wants - then caps it with a line that is easy to skim past:

"In brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are dukkha."

That last line is the key. Even pleasant experiences are dukkha in this technical sense, because they are impermanent and cannot provide lasting satisfaction. The house looks comfortable, but it is built on sand.

Some translators prefer "unsatisfactoriness," others "stress," others "anguish." None is perfect. "Suffering" gets you in the door, but dukkha is the whole house—including the rooms that look comfortable but are built on sand.

Rebirth: The Word That Carries the Most Baggage

If kamma and dukkha are mistranslated, rebirth may be the most misleading of the three - because it arrives in English already wearing a costume from a different religion.

When a Western reader sees "rebirth," the automatic association is the transmigration of a soul: I die, and I am born again somewhere else. A continuous person, a ticket punched, a journey resumed. That is the model of reincarnation found in some Indian traditions and in popular Western spirituality. It is also precisely the view the Buddha rejected.

The Pali term is punabbhava - literally "again-becoming" or "renewed existence." Notice what it does not contain: no jīva, no soul, no self that travels. The Buddha's teaching of anattā (not-self) cuts against the idea of a continuous entity that moves from life to life. What continues is not a person but a causal process -a stream of conditioned becoming, driven by kamma and sustained by craving. The flame passes to the next candle, but it is not the same flame.

This is why some scholars prefer "rebirth" to "reincarnation," but even "rebirth" imports the rebirth-of-a-soul assumption. Others have proposed "re-becoming," "again-becoming," or simply leaving punabbhava untranslated. None is perfect, because English has no word that naturally carries the idea of causal continuity without a continuous entity.

So here is the frame: Rebirth is not a soul taking a new body. It is the continuation of a causal process - the same current, not the same water. And this is not a minor technicality. If you read kamma through the lens of a traveling soul, you get a system of rewards and punishments for a person. If you read it through the lens of anattā and causal continuity, you get something closer to the Buddha's teaching: the weight of intentional choices shaping the ongoing stream of becoming, with no one at the wheel.

Why the Words Matter (and Why They Don't)

Here is the honest confession every translator and every careful reader eventually makes: the word is not the thing.

The Daodejing opens with exactly this warning: "The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao." And a well-known Buddhist proverb—often traced to the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra and later Zen texts—tells us that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Grasp the finger, and you lose the moon.

These two sayings come from different traditions, but they make the same point. When I translate kamma as "intention," dukkha as "suffering," or punabbhava as "rebirth," I am pointing a finger. The Pali word is the moon. My English translation is just a finger—and a clumsy one at that.

So here is what I want to say to you, reader:

Use these translations as tools for looking, not as the final truth itself. Compare multiple translations. Read the footnotes. Notice when a translator chooses one English word and wonder what they left behind. The Pali term carries more than any single English word can hold. That is not a weakness of the teaching—it is a sign of how much there is to see.

Three Words, One Project

Kamma, dukkha, and punabbhava are not separate topics. They are three angles on the same project: understanding how intention-driven action perpetuates unsatisfactoriness, and how the cessation of that pattern is possible. The Buddha's teaching is not a cosmic punishment system, and it is not a soul's journey through lifetimes. It is a diagnosis and a prescription - about a process in your life, not a person.

And like any diagnosis, it loses something in translation. The finger is not the moon. But if you follow the finger, you may find yourself looking at the moon.

A note on sources: The cetanā definition of kamma appears in Aṅguttara Nikāya 6.63. The dukkha formula appears in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) and elsewhere. The term punabbhava appears throughout the early texts, including in the Buddha's account of dependent origination (paṭiccasamuppāda). The Daodejing passage is Chapter 1. The finger-and-moon simile is found in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra and throughout Zen literature. 

(Translations are my own working renderings, offered as fingers, not moons)

(With assistance from DeepSeek based on my prompts)

(A lot of the illustrations come from a Facebook channel called Non-duality. The artist is Emily Snow. Do pay a visit to the channel, but note that it's an open group with varying opinions)