From Buddhism: Action

For action can be considered in respect of its moral implications: good and evil actions, which is really not a view of action, but of the consequences of action, the result.

Apart from good action there is right action which refers to bodily actions only, right action being the abolishment from killing, stealing and wrong indulgence in the sense.

In the wider sense of action as karma, it is also right thought and right speech which have to be classified under kusala kamma; for action in its comprehensive meaning is volitional activity which may lead to mental, verbal or physical activity. This volitional aspect is the most essential characteristic of karmic action, and without such intention there would be no karmic responsibility, even if there were physical activity. Action then can be viewed as the cause of the effect and will be accordingly classified; for it cannot be a good cause which produced an evil effect.

From the point of view, action and its result can be considered from the time-aspect, i.e., the duration required for action to ripen in this life itself, or in an immediately following after birth, or in some further distance, future existence. Again, without taking into consideration the effect itself, one can discuss the intrinsic efficacy of action, its reproductive force, its supportive activity, counteractive or even destructive force, or in other words the function or power of action to generate, to maintain, to suppress and to destroy.

From the seriousness of the result, action can be classified as weighty and unavoidable, as habitual or accumulative, which will bide its own time to produce its fruit, if conditions permit. And if all that fails, it remains mere action spent, action that was and that will never bear fruit.

Karmic action being always intentional, there is a purely psychological conclusion to be drawn, viz., that only full-grown thoughts with volitional discrimination entail karmic responsibility; while mental processes which have not grown beyond the stage of sensory reactivity or perceptivity and which do not posses the active power of discrimination which moulds a thought with likes and dislikes – such process are not action, but reaction.

Finally, there is known that action which is born from the understanding of a need, and not from the hunger of greed. Action grown from greed and misunderstanding is karma which will result in rebirth. But action, which springs from the necessity of understanding, has no further motive and does not project itself into a future existence. It is action, pure and simple.