You experience the consequences of your own karma primarily, but others' karma affects you indirectly through shared circumstances and relationships.
Buddhism teaches that each person experiences the direct results of their own intentional actions. The Buddha stated in the Anguttara Nikaya that beings are "owners of their actions, heirs to their actions; actions are the womb from which they spring." This means you cannot experience someone else's karma directly—you cannot feel their guilt, receive their merit, or suffer their punishment. Each person's volitional actions (karma in the strict sense) create their own causal stream.
However, this does not mean others' actions have no effect on you. The distinction is crucial: you cannot inherit someone else's karma account, but you do experience the natural consequences of living among people who act skillfully or unskillfully.
While you cannot directly experience another's karma, you share environments and relationships created by collective actions. If someone acts harmfully toward you, you experience pain—but that pain is the natural consequence of their action meeting your presence, not the transmission of their karma to you. Your experience stems from your own karma of being in that place, at that time, encountering that person.
The Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Buddhist teachers explain this through the concept of collective karma: groups of beings with similar karmic tendencies are drawn together. A society born into poverty may reflect accumulated unskillful actions by its members, but each individual within it experiences poverty through their own karmic connection to those circumstances, not by inheriting others' specific karma.
A common question asks whether children suffer from parents' karma. The orthodox answer is no—a child's circumstances (including having particular parents) reflect the child's own karma from past lives. However, a child also experiences the real, natural consequences of parental behavior. Abuse harms a child directly, not karmically transferred from the abuser. The child's karma explains why they were born into that situation; the parent's unskillful actions create natural suffering for themselves and their child separately.
Some Mahayana schools, particularly in East Asia, have developed more complex views allowing for some karmic transference through ritual and merit-dedication, but this represents expansion beyond early Buddhist doctrine rather than contradiction of the core principle.
Theravada Buddhism maintains the strictest interpretation: you experience only your own karma's results. Mahayana traditions, particularly in Tibet and East Asia, developed concepts of merit-sharing and transference. In these schools, one person can dedicate their merit toward another's benefit, and rituals can transfer positive karma to deceased relatives or others. These developments reflect different philosophical frameworks about the nature of karma and interdependence, but even Mahayana sources agree that fundamental karmic responsibility remains individual—you cannot transfer your negative karma to escape its consequences.
All schools agree on this: you are responsible for your own actions and their consequences. You cannot blame someone else's karma for your suffering, nor can they escape karma through your forgiveness, though forgiveness affects your own mental state and future karma.
This teaching protects against two errors: first, victimhood narratives that deny your agency (you are not merely a passive recipient of others' actions), and second, blame that denies others' personhood (you cannot judge someone's entire karmic account from one harmful action).
For practice, this means taking full responsibility for your choices while understanding that harm from others, though painful, is not your karmic debt. It means cultivating compassion for those whose own karma creates suffering for them, without absorbing their karma into your own account.