Christian theology rests on a specific account of the human condition. Human beings are not merely imperfect. They are not merely ignorant. They are not merely weak. They are sinners — a category that carries metaphysical weight, not merely moral criticism. The doctrine of original sin declares that every human being is born already in a condition of sinfulness, already carrying a moral debt they did not personally incur, already separated from God through no act of their own choosing. This condition requires redemption — a radical intervention from outside the human situation to restore what was lost. Without redemption, the condition is permanent and its consequence is eternal.
This account of the human condition has no antecedent in mainstream Judaism. It is Paul’s theological innovation, systematized by Augustine into the doctrine of original sin as inherited guilt. The Hebrew Bible presents a picture of individual moral accountability before God: each person stands or falls on the basis of their own conduct. Genesis 3 — the story of Adam and Eve — does not, in the standard Jewish reading, describe the transmission of inheritable guilt to all subsequent humanity. The sin is Adam and Eve’s. Its consequences affect the human situation — toil, pain, mortality — but not as inheritable moral guilt.
What Christianity did find a precedent for — in Buddhist metaphysics — is the deeper structure underlying the original sin doctrine: the idea that human beings are born into a condition of accumulated moral causation that they did not personally initiate, that this condition binds them to a cycle of suffering from which they cannot escape through their own effort alone, and that liberation requires a decisive break with the accumulated force of past moral action. In Buddhism, this is karma. In Christianity, it is sin. The vocabulary is different. The metaphysical structure is the same. And the Buddhist formulation is five centuries older.
20.1 Judaism’s Account of Sin: Transgression Without Inheritance
The Hebrew Bible’s account of sin is primarily a legal-covenantal category. Sin — chet, avon, pesha — is transgression of God’s law, violation of the covenant, the act by which an individual or the people Israel breaks the bond with their God. The Torah provides detailed specification of what constitutes sin and equally detailed specification of the remedies: sacrifice, restitution, repentance, fasting. The prophet Ezekiel states the principle of individual accountability with lapidary clarity: ‘The soul that sins shall die. A son shall not suffer for the iniquity of his father, nor a father suffer for the iniquity of his son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself’ (Ezekiel 18:20).
This is not a peripheral text. It is one of the clearest statements of moral theology in the Hebrew Bible. Each person bears the consequences of their own sins, not the sins of others. The covenantal relationship between God and Israel accommodates collective consequences — the nation suffers for collective apostasy — but the individual stands before God on the basis of their own conduct, not their inherited condition. The idea that every human being is born already guilty, already morally compromised, already separated from God through the act of a distant ancestor, is simply not present in this framework.
The Wikipedia article on original sin confirms this directly: ‘The specific doctrine of original sin was developed in the 2nd century struggle against Gnosticism by Irenaeus of Lyons, and was shaped significantly by Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who was the first author to use the phrase original sin in his polemics against the Pelagians.’ The Project Augustine exegesis of Romans 5:12 is even more direct: ‘The idea of sin transmission is foreign and alien in the Old Testament as well.’ Original sin is not a Jewish doctrine developed within Judaism. It is a Pauline construction, amplified by Augustine, that has no basis in the Hebrew Bible or in standard Jewish theology before or after Paul.
Jewish theology today affirms individual accountability and recognizes the yetzer hara — the evil inclination — as a universal feature of human psychology. But the yetzer hara is a tendency, not a guilt. It is the pull toward self-centeredness and desire that every person experiences and that the practice of Torah is designed to redirect. It is not an inherited moral debt incurred before birth. The difference between the evil inclination and original sin is the difference between a difficult tendency that can be overcome through practice and a metaphysical condition of guilt that requires external redemption to address.
20.2 Original Sin: Paul’s Invention, Not Jesus’s Teaching
Jesus never taught the doctrine of original sin. The Gospels contain no statement by Jesus that all human beings are born in a condition of inherited guilt. The formulation that became orthodox Christian doctrine — that Adam’s sin resulted in the inheritance of guilt and moral corruption by all subsequent humanity — is Paul’s, elaborated in Romans 5:12-21. Even Paul’s formulation is contested by modern scholarship. The Grace Evangelical Society analysis of Romans 5:12 notes: ‘Most modern exegetes reject the Augustinian rendering of eph ho and accept that Paul’s emphasis is not so much on inherited sin but on original death — sin always results in death.’
Paul’s construction in Romans 5 is a typological argument: as Adam’s one act brought death and condemnation to all, so Christ’s one act brings life and justification to all. The argument’s force depends on the universality and involuntary character of humanity’s sinful condition. Paul needed to establish that all humans are in the same condition of needing redemption — regardless of whether they have personally committed specific offenses against the Jewish law — in order to argue that the same universal remedy (faith in Christ) applies to all. His reading of the Adam story serves this argumentative need.
But this reading of the Adam story is not what Genesis 3 says. The Genesis text describes the consequences of Adam and Eve’s transgression — expulsion from the garden, toil, pain, mortality — without stating that their moral guilt is transmitted to their descendants. The doctrine of original sin as inherited moral guilt is Augustine’s reading of Paul’s reading of Genesis — three removes from the text itself, each reading constructed to serve a specific theological agenda. It has no basis in the Hebrew Bible and no basis in Jesus’s own teaching as recorded in the Gospels.
What it does have is a structural parallel in Buddhist metaphysics that is five centuries older, systematically developed, and philosophically more sophisticated than Augustine’s formulation. That parallel is karma.
20.3 Karma: The Buddhist Moral Physics
Karma — Sanskrit for action or deed — is the foundational principle of Buddhist moral metaphysics. The Wikipedia article on karma in Buddhism states the essential definition: ‘In the Buddhist tradition, karma refers to action driven by intention (cetana) which leads to future consequences. Those intentions are considered to be the determining factor in the form of rebirth a being takes in samsara, the repeating cycle of birth and death.’
The Nibbedhika Sutta in the Anguttara Nikaya (6.63) gives the Buddha’s own definition: ‘Intention I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, and intellect.’ The moral weight of an action derives from the intention behind it — the mental state that generates the action. Actions rooted in greed, hatred, and delusion generate negative karma — patterns of moral causation that bind the actor to continued suffering in samsara. Actions rooted in generosity, compassion, and wisdom generate positive karma that moves the actor toward liberation.
The crucial feature of karma for the argument of this chapter is its cumulative and impersonal character. Karma accumulates across lifetimes. The being who enters a new life carries with it the karmic formations of previous lives — not as conscious memory, but as patterns of causal tendency that shape the conditions of the new life. This is precisely the structure of original sin: a condition of moral causation that the individual did not personally initiate in their current existence, but that shapes the conditions of their moral and spiritual life from the moment of birth. The individual is not born innocent into a neutral world. They are born into a specific configuration of causal forces accumulated through past action.
Sanchita Karma: The Accumulated Moral Debt
Indian philosophy distinguishes between different types of karma. The Philosophy Institute article on karma describes sanchita karma as ‘the total sum of all actions — good, bad, and neutral — accumulated across every past lifetime. Think of it as a vast archive or reservoir of karmic impressions that the soul carries forward.’ This accumulated karmic store is precisely the Buddhist analogue of original sin: a condition of moral debt that the individual did not choose in their current existence but that determines the conditions of their birth and the challenges they face in their current life.
The structural identity with original sin is striking. Original sin: a condition of moral debt incurred before the individual’s current existence, through the action of a distant ancestor (Adam), shaping the moral and spiritual conditions of their entire life. Sanchita karma: a condition of moral debt incurred through past existences, through the individual’s own past actions (or the actions of the karmic chain they participate in), shaping the conditions of their current life. Both posit a moral debt that the individual brings into existence — not through any act of their current life — and that requires a decisive intervention to address.
The difference is significant but structural rather than fundamental. Original sin locates the source of the debt in a single ancestral act (Adam’s) that affects all humanity uniformly. Karma locates the source of the debt in the individual’s own past actions across multiple lifetimes. Both produce the same result: the individual enters existence already carrying a moral burden that requires redemption or liberation to resolve.
20.4 The Structural Identity: Bondage Requiring Liberation
The deeper structural parallel between karma and sin — the one that matters most for the transmission thesis — is not the specific account of how the moral debt was incurred. It is the shared claim that human beings exist in a condition of bondage from which they cannot free themselves through ordinary effort. Both traditions posit a condition of moral causation that is self-perpetuating: sin generates more sin, karma generates more karma, and the being caught in either cycle cannot break it from the inside without assistance.
In Christianity, the assistance is grace — the unmerited gift of God’s action in Christ, which breaks the cycle of sin and death and restores the possibility of genuine moral freedom. In Buddhism, the assistance is the Dharma — the teaching and the community that provide the path, the understanding, and the practice necessary to break the cycle of karmic accumulation. In both cases: the individual cannot liberate themselves through moral effort alone. The condition is too deep, the cycle too self-perpetuating. Something from outside the ordinary cycle must intervene.
Paul articulates this in Romans 7:19-24 with devastating honesty: ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing… Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?’ The experience Paul describes — the will that wants to act rightly but finds itself repeatedly drawn toward what it knows to be wrong — is precisely the Buddhist account of the being caught in samsaric existence, pulled by habitual karmic patterns toward actions they know perpetuate suffering. Both accounts describe the same experiential reality: the moral agent’s inability to consistently enact their own best intentions without a transformation of the deeper structures that generate the habitual pull toward harm.
[CHRISTIAN] “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing… Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:19, 24)
[BUDDHIST] “Craving and aversion, rooted in ignorance, generate karma. Karma generates rebirth. Rebirth generates suffering. The cycle is beginningless and cannot be broken from within by ordinary effort alone.” (Anguttara Nikaya / Buddhist doctrine of karma and samsara)
20.5 Jesus on Karma: The Sowing and Reaping Formula
Jesus’s own teaching contains a statement of karmic logic so precise that it translates directly into Buddhist vocabulary. Galatians 6:7 — attributed to Paul, but expressing a principle Jesus elsewhere articulates — states: ‘Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.’ This is the law of karma stated in agricultural metaphor: action (sowing) generates consequence (reaping); the quality of the action determines the quality of the consequence; and the consequences of spiritual action accumulate differently from the consequences of merely material action.
The Majjhima Nikaya (135.9) — cited in the parallel table — expresses the identical principle: actions rooted in harming generate circumstances of harm; actions rooted in generosity and compassion generate circumstances of well-being. The karmic logic of sowing and reaping is the Buddhist law of cause and effect stated in a vocabulary comprehensible to a Galilean agricultural community. The principle is the same. The metaphor is culturally adapted. The Buddhist formulation is five centuries older.
Matthew 5:22 — ‘Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says You fool will be liable to the hell of fire’ — is similarly structured as a graduated karmic consequence: different degrees of harmful mental action generate different degrees of consequential suffering. This is not a legal framework in which an external judge assigns penalties. It is a moral physics in which the action itself generates its consequence through an inherent causal mechanism. The hell of fire is not a punishment imposed from outside. It is the natural consequence of a mind habituated to anger and contempt. This is Buddhist karma in Jewish vocabulary.
20.6 The Solution Differs: Grace Versus Practice
Having established the structural identity between original sin and karma as descriptions of the human condition, this chapter must acknowledge the most significant difference between the two traditions’ accounts of liberation from that condition. In Christianity, liberation is achieved through grace — the unmerited divine gift that forgives the accumulated debt of sin and restores the believer to right relationship with God, without any merit on the believer’s part. In Buddhism, liberation is achieved through the Eightfold Path — the sustained practice of ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom that gradually dissolves the karmic formations binding the practitioner to samsara.
This difference is real and should not be minimized. The Protestant doctrine of sola gratia — grace alone — is philosophically incompatible with the Buddhist doctrine of karma as self-generated moral causation that the practitioner must actively work to dissolve. The two solutions differ fundamentally.
But this difference in solution does not undermine the argument of this chapter. The argument is not that Christianity and Buddhism have identical soteriology. The argument is that both traditions identify the human condition as one of inherited or accumulated moral bondage from which ordinary effort cannot free the practitioner — and that both traditions posit a decisive intervention from outside the cycle as the mechanism of liberation. In Christianity, that intervention is the gracious act of God in Christ. In Mahayana Buddhism, that intervention is the compassionate presence of the Bodhisattva who transfers merit to all beings, described in Chapter 16 as the Buddhist structural antecedent of the atonement. The specific forms of the intervention differ. The structure — a condition of moral bondage requiring a decisive liberating act from outside the cycle — is the same.
Christianity inherited from Judaism the vocabulary of sin and forgiveness. It inherited from Buddhist metaphysics the deeper account of why human beings are in the condition of bondage that forgiveness must address. The doctrine of original sin is Augustine’s attempt to articulate, in the vocabulary of Pauline soteriology and Latin philosophical theology, an experiential and metaphysical reality that the Buddhist doctrine of karma had been articulating for five centuries: that human beings are not born free, that the accumulation of past moral causation shapes their present moral situation, and that liberation requires a transformation deeper than any improvement in behavior can provide. The Buddhist influence on Christian soteriology is not direct. But it is structural, and it is the most coherent explanation of why the Christian doctrine of sin looks the way it does.
— End of Chapter 20 —