Within the Sanlun, or Chinese Madhyamaka, tradition, karma is understood entirely through the lens of emptiness and the doctrine of the two truths. On the conventional level, karmic cause and effect fully operate: intentional actions of body, speech, and mind give rise to corresponding results, and beings experience pleasure and pain in accordance with these accumulated causes. Ethical conduct, avoidance of unwholesome deeds, and attention to the moral texture of one’s life remain indispensable within this sphere. Karma thus functions as a practical truth for unenlightened beings, structuring their experience of samsara and guiding them toward more wholesome patterns of behavior.

On the ultimate level, however, karma is seen as empty of inherent existence. Neither the agent, nor the act, nor the result possesses any independent, permanent essence; all are dependently arisen, like illusions or dreams. From this perspective, there is no substantial self that performs actions or bears their fruits, and karmic processes have no fixed ontological core. They are designated within a web of conditions and cease to bind once their empty nature is realized. This insight does not negate their conventional efficacy, but reveals that what appears as solid bondage is, at root, a conceptual construction.

Sanlun thought thus walks a careful middle path between eternalism and nihilism. It rejects the view that karma is some enduring metaphysical substance owned by a permanent self, while equally rejecting the idea that emptiness renders karmic cause and effect unreal or irrelevant. Karma is “real” only in the sense that it functions dependently within conventional reality, and “unreal” in the sense that it lacks intrinsic being. To cling to either extreme—treating karma as absolutely existent or as utterly nonexistent—is regarded as a philosophical error that perpetuates confusion and suffering.

From a soteriological standpoint, the realization of emptiness transforms one’s relationship to karma. As long as ignorance persists, karmic results continue to unfold, but insight into their empty, conditioned nature undermines the grasping that generates new bondage. Fearful fixation on consequences and attachment to merit-making gradually loosen, and the duality of actor and act, bondage and liberation, begins to dissolve. In advanced understanding, even the contrast between samsara and nirvana is seen as a conceptual distinction applied to what is, in truth, empty of any fixed nature.