_Karma_ or _Kan_ (Burmese), or _Fate_, as it is sometimes rather inadequately rendered, is that self-originating, self-operating, inflexible law which necessitates and causes the working out of the cumulative influences of merit and demerit; these separately producing in succeeding births their full and appropriate effects, extending through cycles of ages, the _Kan_ being modified from time to time by the passage through these different births. Thus _Kan_ is not in any sense a Divine Providence. It is a blind impersonal force that attends our destiny through all the course of our many existences, and makes us to reap in other births what we sow in this. It may be compared to a balance. In the one side we are always putting in acts of merit, and in the other side acts of demerit, and the _Kan_ goes on determining which preponderates, and blindly producing its appropriate consequences until each has worked itself out to the pleasant or the bitter end. Undoubtedly this doctrine is a bold expedient for explaining the apparent anomalies and wrongs in the distribution of happiness and misery in this life; and although it is incapable alike of proof and of disproof, it fully satisfies those who can believe it. A child, for instance, is blind,—this is owing to his eye-vanity, lust of the eye in a former birth,—but he has also unusual powers of hearing; this is because he loved in a former birth to listen to the preaching of the law. Thus the theory can always be made to fit the facts, for it is derived from them. But it satisfies the Oriental mind none the less for that, and it is the belief of millions of Hindus and Buddhists to-day. _Nirvana_ (Burmese _Neibbân_) is the state of complete deliverance from further births and deaths. So long as existence lasts evil and suffering must continue, and there is no hope of blessedness until conscious individuality has become wholly eliminated, and the individual has arrived at that state where further births are no longer possible. This means practically annihilation; but it is so much easier to do wrong than to do right, and it takes so long for _Kan_ to work out its result, that _Neibbân_ becomes, by the ordinary way, so distant and so difficult of attainment as to be out of reach to the vast majority of the human race. If Buddhism ended there, and if nothing had been devised to relieve this strain of seeking after an all but hopeless and well-nigh impossible good, it would have been of all creeds the most pessimistic and miserable. The mind must needs have revolted from an outlook so gloomy, and we may safely affirm that it would in that case never have numbered its votaries by hundreds of millions as it does to-day. For it just amounts to this, that “Sin and its consequences follow man as the wheels of the cart follow the legs of the bullocks,” and there is no Saviour and no salvation that he can seek outside of himself.