The law of karma is the counter-part in the moral world of the physical law of uniformity. It is the law of the conservation of moral energy.

The vision of law and order is revealed in the Rta of Rig-Veda.

According to the principle of karma there is nothing uncertain or capricious in the moral world. We reap what we sow.

Since the sense of individual responsibility is emphasised, there are critics who think that the karma doctrine is inconsistent with social service. It is said that there is no emphasis on the bearing of one another’s burdens.

As a matter of fact, the Upanishads hold that we can be free from karma only by social service. So long as we perform selfish work we are subject to the law of bondage.

When we perform disinterested work we reach freedom. “While thus you live there is no way by which karma clings to you”. What binds us to the chain of birth and death is not action as such but selfish action.

In an age when the individual was ever ready to shirk responsibility for what he did by throwing the burden on providence or stars or some other being than his own self, the doctrine of karma urged that a man “fetters himself by himself, like a bird by its nest”.

What looms over us is no dark fate but our own past. We are