The word's field
Karman is a verbal noun built on the root kṛ, "to do, to make," and its plainest meaning is the thing done — an act, a deed, a piece of work. From that ordinary center the word gathers the freight that made it one of the load-bearing terms of Indian thought. In the older ritual literature karman is above all the rite: the sacrificial act correctly performed, whose efficacy lies in exact execution rather than in the disposition of the performer. The Brahmanas are largely manuals of karman in this sense, confident that a right action rightly done produces its result as surely as a cause produces an effect.
The Upanishadic tradition inherits that ritual sense and turns it inward. The innovation the commentarial tradition locates in the early Upanishads is the extension of karman from the sacrificial act to action as such, so that every deed leaves a trace and yields a fruit, and the sum of a person's deeds becomes the engine of rebirth. A being becomes what its action makes it; good action makes one good, and the doer is carried by past deeds into a further existence shaped to their result. Karman thus names at once the act and the law of the act — the deed and the debt it incurs.
The Bhagavad Gita takes up the word at its point of greatest tension. If every action binds, the seeker appears trapped: to act is to accumulate fruit, and to accumulate fruit is to remain bound to the wheel of birth. The Gita's answer is not the cessation of action but its transformation: action performed without attachment to its fruit, offered rather than grasped, ceases to bind. The name for this discipline is karma-yoga, discipline through works — one need not stop acting to be free, but must change one's relation to the act.
In the corpus
Our corpus records 280 occurrences of the lemma across 8 works, and the distribution is decisively Upanishadic. The Brhadaranyaka Upanisad alone carries 166 occurrences, well over half the total, and the Chandogya adds 49, so that the two oldest and longest of the principal Upanishads together account for most of the word's presence in the corpus. The Bhagavad Gita follows with 42. The remaining five works are thin by comparison: Taittiriya (9), Aitareya (7), Isa (3), and Prasna and Svetasvatara (2 each).
That shape tells a real story about where the word does its work. The heaviest concentration sits in the Brhadaranyaka, the text the tradition credits with the first explicit statement that a person is made by deeds — the word's native ground. The Gita's 42 occurrences are fewer but disproportionate in weight, gathered where karman becomes the object of a teaching rather than a description. The corpus thus holds both faces of the word: the Upanishadic diagnosis of bondage by action, and the Gita's prescription for acting without being bound.
Canonical moments
The record's citations open onto the Gita's argument for action, clustering in its third chapter, the chapter of karma-yoga. At the close of the second chapter, Bhagavad Gita 2.49 sets the terms: work done for the sake of reward is held far inferior to work done in the discipline of even-mindedness, and those who crave the fruit are called wretched. The verse names the problem the rest of the teaching addresses — that it is not action but the craving attached to action that binds.
The third chapter presses the point that action cannot simply be abandoned. At Bhagavad Gita 3.5 the pointer locates the claim that no one can remain even for a moment without acting, since the constituents of nature compel everyone whether they will or not. Withdrawal is therefore no escape; the choice is never between acting and not acting, but between binding and unbinding action. A few verses on, Bhagavad Gita 3.8 directs the seeker to do the work that falls to him, since action is better than inaction and even the body's maintenance cannot proceed without it — the locus the record surfaces twice, marking its weight in the argument.
The chapter then supplies the release. At Bhagavad Gita 3.9 the pointer locates the pivotal distinction: action undertaken as offering does not bind, while action performed otherwise holds the doer fast to the world. Here karman splits along the line the whole teaching turns on — the deed that fastens and the deed, identical in outward form, that frees.
These citation-pointers locate the passages without reproducing them: the source licenses for this wing do not permit the running text to be displayed, so each link fixes the reference alone.
The word's world
Karman stands within its own wing beside the terms for what is bound and what is free. Its counterweight is dharma, the order that action either upholds or violates — the Gita teaches that one's own dharma, done without craving, is the path through. Where karman is the deed and its debt, atman is the self the tradition holds untouched by the deed, the witness whose realization is release from the whole economy of action. The disciplines that work upon action are yoga, the karma-yoga the Gita expounds, and jnana, the knowledge that cuts the root of binding action at a stroke.
Across the wings the nearest sibling is the Pali kamma, the same word in the Buddhist analysis, where the emphasis shifts to intention — the deed's moral quality lies in the volition behind it rather than in ritual correctness. That tradition carries the round of action-and-result toward nibbana, the extinction in which it finally stops. What sets karman apart is the reach of its ambition: it is at once the smallest thing, a single act, and the largest, the law by which every act composes a life and carries it onward.
Grounding: corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record (receipt soul-word-journey-v0). Cross-references: dharma, atman, yoga, jnana, kamma, nibbana.