A closer look
Today, 'karma' is cheerfully tossed around by influencers to imply that if you cut someone off in traffic, the universe will magically ensure you drop your iced coffee later. But if you look at the earliest Vedic texts in ancient India, karma wasn't about cosmic moral justice at all. The word literally just translated to 'action', and it specifically referred to performing very rigid, incredibly tedious sacrificial rituals to appease the gods. If your 'karma' was bad, it didn't mean you were a bad person; it meant you mumbled the chants wrong and now the rain god was going to ruin your crops.
