Across the Buddhist world, we find not only that our relationships are constituted by karmic affinities, but also that in many contexts those relationships are seen as the media through which karma unfolds.

These understandings not only provide frameworks for interpreting relationships but underwrite ritual technologies through which people can form, maintain, or disperse these affinities.

Justin Ritzinger shares what he learned about the nature of karma after attending the “Lived Karma” conference at Dartmouth in 2022. To read more papers from the conference, see the Journal of Global Buddhism Vol. 24 No. 2.