Kamma means action, and in the Buddha's teaching its moral center is intention. In AN 6.63, the Buddha says, "Intention, I tell you, is kamma." Intending, one acts through body, speech, and mind. An accidental harm and a planned harm may look similar externally, but they do not carry the same moral quality because the volition differs.
Kamma is not fate. Past action conditions the present, but it does not dictate every event or remove present choice. The Buddha rejected the claim that everything felt now is caused only by past kamma. Bodies, climate, other beings, social conditions, and many causal processes operate together. Kamma explains the ethical continuity of intentional action: repeated greed, hatred, and delusion shape character and painful results; generosity, goodwill, and wisdom shape beneficial results.
Kamma is also not cosmic punishment administered by a judge. Results arise dependently from actions and conditions. Some are visible now: truthful speech builds trust; cruelty agitates the mind. Other results mature later, and traditional Buddhism teaches that kamma contributes to rebirth among different realms of existence. Rebirth is not a detachable cultural decoration in the early discourses; it is part of the horizon within which the Buddha describes saṃsāra and final liberation.
The complexity of results makes simplistic claims dangerous. We cannot look at someone's illness, poverty, disability, or misfortune and declare that we know the deed that caused it. The Cūḷakammavibhaṅga Sutta (MN 135) gives broad patterns, not permission for blame. Compassion toward present suffering remains a wholesome action regardless of unseen past causes.
Kamma makes practice urgent and hopeful. A person inherits the results of deeds, but new intentions can be cultivated now. Confession, restraint, making amends, generosity, meditation, and wisdom do not erase every old result; they stop adding the same causes and create a different direction.
Aṅgulimāla has committed grave violence. After meeting the Buddha, he renounces killing, ordains, and later attains arahantship. Yet people who know his past attack him, and he returns wounded. The Buddha tells him to endure a result that otherwise would have been far more terrible.
The Buddha asks Rāhula to examine an intended deed before doing it, while doing it, and after doing it. If it tends toward harm, it should be abandoned; if a harmful deed was completed, it should be disclosed and restrained in the future.