The word's field
Kamma is a plain word for doing before it is a doctrine. Formed from the root of karoti, to do or to make, it names deed, work, action, and in the everyday register the PTS dictionary records first, occupation or trade. Its oldest etymological neighbors point toward making of the most concrete kind, building and weaving, the plaiting of garland and creeper; the dictionary sets it beside the Latin verb for weaving. Before it carries any weight of destiny, kamma is what a person does with the day.
What the Buddha's teaching adds is not a new word but a narrowing of an old one. In the Nikāyas the term is decisively moralized: kamma is intentional action, owned by the intention behind it, and bound to consequence. The commentarial tradition fixes the definition the whole system turns on, that kamma is at root volition, cetanā, so that the morally decisive act is the willing itself and not merely its outward performance. From this follows the law of ripening, vipāka: deeds bear fruit, wholesome or unwholesome, in this life or a later one, and a being inherits the harvest of its own doing, born and reborn along the grain of what it has willed.
The word therefore sits at a hinge. On one side it keeps its ordinary sense of work and action. On the other it becomes the name of the ethical order itself, binding intention to outcome across the span of a being's existence. The distinctive move of the early teaching is to relocate the decisive point of kamma inward, from the visible act to the volition that drives it, so that the ethics of doing become an ethics of intending.
In the corpus
Within the Logoi Pāli corpus kamma occurs 76 times across 5 works. The distribution is markedly uneven, and its shape is itself the finding: the Digha Nikaya alone carries 48 of the 76 occurrences, close to two-thirds of the total. The remainder falls to four collections, the Udana (10), the Dhammapada (8), the Sutta Nipata (6), and the Itivuttaka (4).
That concentration answers to the two registers named above. The long discourses of the Digha are where the teaching argues and disputes at length, and where a doctrinal term of art such as kamma is set out and defended; the occurrences there reflect the word functioning as a technical anchor of exposition. The verse collections carry fewer instances but a different charge. In the Dhammapada, the Udāna, the Sutta Nipāta, and the Itivuttaka the word appears in the compressed maxims through which the doctrine of deed-and-fruit was carried in the mouth. The corpus thus preserves kamma in both of its transmitting forms: extended in the prose that reasons about it, distilled in the verse that made it portable.
Canonical moments
At Dhammapada 66 the word stands in the register of consequence, where the deed done in unknowing turns against the doer and ripens into bitterness. The locus states the whole law of ripening at once: what is done returns as what is suffered, and the doer is the heir. This is kamma as inheritance, the harvest a being reaps from the field of its own doing.
At Dhammapada 173 the same law is shown from its brighter side, the earlier deed overlaid and covered by the good that follows, so that a life is not the sum of its worst acts but a course that later doing can redirect. The passage holds kamma open rather than sealed: the fruit of action is real, yet the field can be re-sown. Read against Dhammapada 66, the two verses frame the doctrine's double face, the binding weight of what is done and the room the teaching leaves for change.
At Dhammapada 217 the term recovers something of its plainer sense while keeping its moral color, attaching to the settled discharge of one's own proper action. The PTS entry itself glosses this line under the everyday meaning, treating the phrase for doing one's own work as a bridge between occupation and moral conduct. The locus shows the two registers of the word touching in a single phrase.
At Digha Nikaya 13:77, with its continuation at Digha Nikaya 13:79, the word appears in the extended prose where the long discourses set out their argument. This pair falls in the collection that carries the majority of the corpus's occurrences, and it exemplifies the discursive register in which kamma is laid out at length rather than compressed into a maxim, marking the seam between the word's poetic and its expository lives.
The word's world
Kamma belongs to a family of Pāli terms for the inner springs of action, and its center of gravity is volition. Its nearest kin in the corpus is sankhara, the formations through which a being fabricates its future; where saṅkhāra names the shaping activity, kamma names the deed as owned and morally charged. Behind both stands citta, the heart-mind from which intention issues, and mano, the mental faculty that the moralizing of kamma into intentional action directly implicates. Its fruit is felt as vedana, the pleasant and painful feeling in which ripening is registered, and the whole apparatus of deed-and-consequence is bound to dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness that unskillful action perpetuates and that the release of nibbana undoes.
Across traditions the resonance is exact with Sanskrit karman, the cognate from which the Pāli form descends and with which it shares both the ordinary sense of act and rite and the developed doctrine of act-and-recompense; the two are one word in two dialects of the same religious world, and their divergence lies chiefly in the Buddhist relocation of the decisive point to intention. The Sanskrit dharma stands near as the order within which deeds acquire their weight. What sets kamma apart within this field is its insistence that the moral force of a deed lives in the willing behind it, that a being is, in the end, the heir not of its acts alone but of the intentions that authored them.
Grounding: corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record (receipt soul-word-journey-v0). PTS Pali–English Dictionary senses from the wing's lexicon shelf. Cross-references: sankhara, citta, mano, vedana, dukkha, nibbana, karman, dharma.