The coming action
The action, in the form of merit and demerit, done by the knower's body after knowledge has arisen, is called the coming action, āgāmi.
The karma, both good and bad, performed through the body of the knower after knowledge has dawned, is called āgāmi (the coming karma).
- āgāmi-karma
What marks an action as agami rather than sancita or prarabdha?
- It is the largest of the three stores of karma
- It is action done by the knower's body after knowledge has arisen
- It is the karma that has already begun to give this life its pleasure and pain
- It is karma that can never be exhausted by anyone
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The coming action
Three kinds of action were just named: the stored, the begun, and the coming. The coming action, agami, is the one that lies ahead. It is the merit and the demerit that would gather from what the knower does once knowledge has dawned, the fresh karma of deeds not yet performed.
What sets it apart is simply when it happens. Sancita is the vast seed of past lives, lying in wait. Prarabdha is the portion already ripening, the very karma that brought this body forth and now gives it pleasure and pain. Agami is neither of those. It is what the body earns from here onward, after the Self is known.
It is named here, at the threshold of how bondage comes undone, because for the knower this coming action no longer binds. The body still acts; it is praised, it is blamed, it helps and it harms. But the one who took himself to be the doer has been seen through, and so the new merit and demerit find no doer in him to settle on. They form, and they do not adhere.
So the question agami raises is not whether the knower keeps acting, for he plainly does, but whose the action finally is. Giving the coming action its name is only the opening of that question. What becomes of it, and to whom it goes, the teaching takes up next.
When the knower's body still acts and earns, what is it in you that the new merit and harm could fasten to?
In the commentaries
Agami is the fresh merit and demerit that would form from what the knower's body does once knowledge has arisen. The word names a class by its timing: not the deeds of past lives, but action begun after the dawning, here and onward. What sets it apart is that for the one who knows the Self, such action no longer fastens itself to him. The body still acts, praised or blamed, helping or harming; but the doer it once seemed to bind has been seen through, and so the new merit and demerit find nothing in him to cling to. Naming agami is the first step in showing how the whole bondage of action comes undone for the knower, deed by deed, while he yet lives.