Dharma and Karma are interlinked concepts. Asking what’s the different between them is like asking what’s the difference between your breath and your blood. We can talk about it, we can say well here’s what breath is composed of, here’s what blood is composed of, and yet the truth is they’re really very interconnected. They work together. They work to keep us alive. You can’t pull breath away from blood and expect blood to be able to keep you alive, or pull blood away from breath and expect breath to keep you alive. There’s an interlinking-ness. The same is true with karma and dharma.

Dharma is the “why,” and karma is the “what”—the what I’m doing. The actions I’m performing are based on my dharma. The repercussions I will get from that karma are based on my dharma. For example, taking a knife and stabbing it into someone’s chest is a bad act. It will give us bad karma. Well, that’s only true if you’re a murderer, but it’s not true if you’re a surgeon. That’s what surgeons do. They take scalpels and knives, and they stab them into people’s chests in order to save their lives. Sure, it doesn’t always work, people die on the operating table, people die post-op. So, in both cases the end result could be death, but the surgeon is fulfilling his dharma as a surgeon, and if he fulfilled it with integrity and sincerity, he’s not going to get bad karma for the fact that this person ended up dying post-op. But the murderer who stabs somebody to rob them or because they’re high on drugs or whatever the reason is absolutely going to get the karmic fruit.