The stored action
What is the stored action? The whole gathering of past action, lying as the seed of countless millions of births, is to be known as the stored action, sañcita.
What is sañcita (stored karma)? The vast store of past actions, lying ready as the seed of countless future births, is to be known as sañcita.
- sañcita-karma
Why does the teaching call sañcita a seed rather than simply a record of past deeds?
- Because a seed is small and the store of past action is actually slight
- Because it is power held in reserve, not yet sprouted, waiting to ripen into future births
- Because seeds are pleasant and past action is mostly merit
- Because the store grows only in this present body and nowhere else
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What separates sañcita from the begun action, prārabdha, that the next passage names?
- Sañcita belongs to others while prārabdha belongs to you
- Sañcita is the dormant store not yet sprouted; prārabdha is the portion already sprouted into this present body and its joys and pains
- Sañcita is good action and prārabdha is bad action
- There is no difference; they are two names for the same store
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The stored action
Having divided action into three kinds and named the first, the coming action that a knower's body still does, the teaching turns now to the second: the stored action, what it is. Sañcita is the whole gathering of past action, everything done across births without beginning, still lying unspent. It is not one life's ledger. It is the heaped reserve of all the doing there has ever been, carried forward and waiting.
It is named as a seed, and a seed is not the deed; it is the deed's power held back, folded small, ready to open when the soil and the season come. So this store is potential rather than event: action that has not yet sprouted into its fruit. And the fruit it sprouts is birth. The count is left uncounted, the seed of countless millions of births. As long as one takes oneself to be the doer, the store keeps yielding body after body, world after world, with no natural end in sight.
This is the size of the bondage, set down before the way out is shown. The begun action is the portion of the store already sprouted into this very body, now giving its pleasure and its pain. And the stored action, the unspent rest, is destroyed by the firm knowledge, I am Brahman alone. The seed is scorched and cannot sprout again. But that ending lands with its full weight only once you have felt how vast the store is that it cuts: first the immensity of the backlog, then the single knowledge that ends it.
So this is not asking for any belief about merit and demerit being tallied in some hidden book. It asks you to see the shape of the bondage as the teaching draws it: not a punishment from outside, but a momentum carried by the one who keeps saying I am the doer. The seed lives on the soil of that conviction. Name the store, and you have begun to ask what soil it has been growing in.
What in you keeps the seed of past action alive: the deeds themselves, or the standing conviction that you are the one who did them?
In the commentaries
Sañcita is the whole heaped store of action gathered across beginningless births and still lying unspent. The word names it as a seed, bīja, and a seed is not the deed itself but its power held in reserve, waiting for the soil and season in which it will sprout into another birth. So the count is left open, the seed of countless millions of births, because as long as one takes oneself to be the doer this store keeps yielding body after body, world after world. Tattva Bodha sets this definition down deliberately at this turn of the inquiry. It has just divided action into three and named the coming kind; here it measures the dormant backlog, so that what follows can show this very store cut at the root by the knowledge 'I am Brahman alone,' the seed scorched so it can sprout no more. The point is not the bookkeeping of merit and demerit but the sizing of bondage before the release is announced.