Theravāda teaching treats karma, or kamma, as intentional action in body, speech, and mind, with mental intention as the decisive factor. Actions rooted in non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion are regarded as wholesome and tend toward pleasant results, while those rooted in greed, hatred, and delusion are unwholesome and tend toward suffering. This moral causality is not understood as divine reward or punishment, but as a natural law of cause and effect shaping experience across time. The results of such actions may ripen in the present life, at the moment of death, or in future lives, and not every past deed must bear fruit if the necessary supporting conditions are absent. Within this vision, present circumstances are seen as conditioned by past karma, while present choices are actively forming future conditions.

Rebirth, in this framework, unfolds without positing an eternal soul or self that migrates from body to body. What continues is a conditioned stream of consciousness and associated mental–physical processes, driven by craving and ignorance, which takes up a new existence when the conditions for one life come to an end. This continuity is likened to one flame lighting another: there is a causal link, yet no fixed entity passes over unchanged. Depending on the dominant karmic tendencies at death, this new arising may occur in various realms, including human, animal, heavenly, ghostly, or hell states. Human birth is especially valued because it offers a balanced field of pleasure and pain in which ethical conduct, generosity, and mental cultivation can be developed.

Within this vision of karma and rebirth, individual responsibility is emphasized: each being inherits the results of its own intentional actions. At the same time, karma is only one causal strand among many, and not every event is attributed to past deeds alone. The cycle of rebirth, saṃsāra, continues as long as ignorance and craving fuel new karmic becoming. When insight into impermanence, suffering, and non-self is fully realized, and the defilements are exhausted, no further karmic fuel is generated. An arahant may still experience the residual effects of past karma in this life, but with the breakup of the body there is no further rebirth, and the round of conditioned becoming comes to an end.