The term karma crops up often in casual conversation these days, and different people have different ideas of what it means. For some people, karma seems to be unpredictable — kind of like luck. For others, the term means little more than fate, and their attitude toward life, therefore, tends to be rather fatalistic: "It's my karma to be short-tempered," they may say. "That's just the way I am; what can I do?"

But Buddhists views karma (which literally means "action") as both more predictable and more dynamic than the uses of the word just described. You're continually engaging in actions now that will lead to karmic results in the future, and you're continually experiencing the karmic results now of actions you created in the past. In other words, your karma isn't a fixed, unchanging destiny that you must passively accept, as if it were a single, unchangeable poker hand dealt to you by the universe. Instead, your karmic situation constantly shifts and changes depending on how you act, speak, and think right now. By changing your behavior and transforming your mind and heart, you can definitely transform the quality of your life.