The Buddhist conception of karma briefly stated is this: Any act, good or evil, once committed and conceived, never vanishes like a bubble in water, but lives, potentially or actively as the case may be, in the world of minds and deeds. This mysterious moral energy, so to speak, is embodied in and emanates from every act and thought, for it does not matter whether it is actually performed, or merely conceived in the mind. When the time comes, it is sure to germinate and grow with all its vitality. Says Buddha: “Karma even after the lapse of a hundred kalpas, Will not be lost nor destroyed; As soon as all the necessary conditions are ready, Its fruit is sure to ripe.”[85] {184} Again, “Whatever a man does, the same he in himself will find, The good man, good: and evil he that evil has designed; And so our deeds are all like seeds, and bring forth fruit in kind.”[86] A grain of wheat, it is said, which was accidentally preserved in good condition in a tomb more than a thousand years old, did not lose its germinating energy, and, when planted with proper care, it actually started to sprout. So with karma, it is endowed with an enormous vitality, nay, it is even immortal. However remote the time of their commission might have been, the karma of our deeds never dies; it must work out its own destiny at whatever cost, if not overcome by some counteracting force. The law of karma is irrefragable. The irrefragability of karma means that the law of causation is supreme in our moral sphere just as much as in the physical, that life consists in a concatenation of causes and effects regulated by the principle of karma, that nothing in the life of an individual or a nation or a race happens without due cause and sufficient reason, that is, without previous karma. The Buddhists, therefore, do not believe in any special act of grace or revelation in our religious realm and moral life. The idea of deus ex machina is banned in Buddhism. Whatever is suffered or enjoyed morally in our present life is due to the karma, accumulated {185} since the beginning of life on earth. Nothing sown, nothing reaped. Whatever has been done leaves an ineffable mark in the individual’s life and even in that of the universe; and this mark will never be erased save by sheer exhaustion of the karma or by the interruption of an overwhelming counter-karma. In case the karma of an act is not actualised during one’s own life-time, it will in that of one’s successors, who may be physical or spiritual. Not only “the evil that men do lives after them,” but also the good, for it will not be “interred with their bones,” as vulgar minds imagine. We read in the _Samyukta Nikâya_, III, 1-4: “Assailed by death, in life’s last throes, At quitting of this human state, What is it one can call his own? What with him take as he goes hence? What is it follows after him, And like a shadow ne’er departs?