Karma Operates Only Where There Is a Being to Make It

William Quan Judge · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 7 pages

Seven pages carrying *Judge's thirty-one aphorisms on Karma, first published in The Path in March 1893 and republished in Echoes of the Orient*. Its own running title inside is "The operations of Karma in 31 Aphorisms."

Judge's introductory note is unusually careful about provenance, and worth reading before the aphorisms themselves. They were given to him by his teachers, among them Blavatsky — some written, others communicated in other ways — and were declared to be from manuscripts not then accessible to the general public. He is explicit that he did not take them on authority: each was submitted to his own judgment and reason, and he publishes them because, aside from any authority, they approved themselves to him after serious consideration. The aphorisms are numbered and stand alone, which makes the file easy to consult. The first states the condition the title takes: there is no karma unless there is a being to make it or feel its effects. The second defines it as the adjustment of effects flowing from causes, during which the being through whom the adjustment is made experiences pain or pleasure. The third calls it an undeviating and unerring tendency in the universe to restore equilibrium, operating incessantly — and the fourth answers the obvious objection, that any apparent stoppage of that restoration is due to the adjustment of a disturbance at some other place visible only to the seer, so that there is no stoppage but only a hiding from view. The fifth gives its reach: from the minutest conceivable atom to Brahmā, proceeding through the three worlds of men, gods and elemental beings, with no spot in the manifested universe exempt.

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