Karma in Advaita is not destiny. It is the mechanism by which action, driven by identification with the ego, perpetuates the cycle of experience. Understanding karma's three forms clarifies both why practice matters and why practice alone is never enough.
Every action has consequences. This is karma — not as reward and punishment, not as cosmic justice, but as the simple mechanism of cause and effect operating in the domain of action and experience. You plant a seed; the seed grows into a tree. You act from desire; the desire is fed or frustrated; the experience conditions the next desire. The wheel turns.
Advaita distinguishes three types of karma. Sañcita karma — accumulated. Everything carried forward from this life and all previous lives: the entire store of consequences not yet experienced. Prārabdha karma — in motion. The portion of sañcita that has already become operative — what produced this particular birth, this body, this general set of life circumstances. Āgāmin karma (also called kriyamāṇa) — being made now. The new karma being generated by present actions.
What ends the cycle? Not acting well — good karma still generates further experience, pleasant rather than unpleasant, but still experience and therefore still cycle. The Advaita answer: the knowledge of Brahman-Ātman identity. That knowledge destroys the sañcita (like fire destroys seeds — they may hold their shape but cannot sprout), stops the generation of new āgāmin (no new seeds are planted because there is no longer an ego-agent planting them), and allows the prārabdha to exhaust itself naturally.
Karma matters in Advaita not as a path to liberation but as preparation for the knowledge that liberates. Careful, ethical, dharmic action purifies the mind (citta-śuddhi) — and a purified mind is capable of receiving the Mahāvākya recognition that karma itself can never produce.
The Bṛhadāraṇyaka 4.4.5 states the relationship precisely: karma cikīrṣur loko'yaṃ — this world is for those who desire to act. Action produces results within the world — better births, better circumstances, greater capacities. But it cannot produce what is not within the domain of results: the recognition of what is already the case. Brahman-Ātman identity is not a result. It is a recognition of what was never absent. And recognitions are not produced by actions — they arise from knowledge.
This is Advaita's central claim about karma: karma operates at the vyāvahārika (empirical) level, producing empirical results. Liberation is pāramārthika (ultimate-level) — it is not a result in the ordinary sense, because it does not depend on any prior condition being met. It depends on avidyā being removed. And avidyā is removed by knowledge, not by action. Karma's role is to produce the conditions in which the knowledge can arise: a human birth, a clear mind, access to a teacher, the qualities of the sādhanacatuṣṭaya. These conditions are instrumental — valuable but not the cause of liberation itself.
Śaṅkara addresses the objection from Mīmāṃsā (the ritual action school): if karma can produce good results — heaven, good births, great capacities — why cannot karma ultimately produce liberation? His answer: karma produces results that are commensurate with the action. Heaven is a result commensurate with righteous action. Liberation is not a result at all in that sense — it is the removal of the root of all results (avidyā). You cannot get there by adding more results, however great.
The destruction of sañcita karma by liberating knowledge is compared in the tradition to roasting seeds: roasted seeds look the same as unroasted seeds but have lost the capacity to germinate. The sañcita karma after liberation retains its apparent form (the past still happened, its effects on the body-mind are still in place) but has lost its capacity to generate further births — because the avidyā that would have caused the self to identify with those results and generate new desires is gone. The prārabdha karma is compared to an arrow already in flight: liberating knowledge does not change the arrow's trajectory. But the āgāmin karma (the archer's next arrow) is not shot — because the ego-archer who would have shot it is no longer the operative identity. The fire of knowledge destroys the store but cannot burn what is already burning.