Tendai presents karma as a finely woven network of cause and effect that encompasses body, speech, and mind, yet it refuses to treat this network as a rigid fate. Every thought, word, and deed is seen as leaving an imprint that shapes present and future experience, but these imprints arise only through dependent origination and are always open to transformation. Karma functions as a morally binding law of cause and effect, yet it is not an inescapable destiny; new wholesome causes and conditions can mitigate or redirect even deeply rooted tendencies. This view encourages responsibility without fatalism, inviting practitioners to understand their circumstances as the fruit of past actions while recognizing the possibility of change in every moment.

Within the Tendai reading of Mahāyāna doctrine, karma is interpreted through the framework of the threefold truth: emptiness, provisional existence, and the middle. From the standpoint of emptiness, karmic actions and their results lack any fixed, independent essence; they are empty of self-nature. From the standpoint of provisional truth, however, karmic causality is entirely real in its moral and experiential consequences. The middle truth holds these together, affirming the full seriousness of karmic cause and effect while simultaneously seeing its empty, contingent character, thus avoiding both nihilism and rigid reification.

Tendai further understands karma through the doctrines of universal Buddha-nature and the mutual inclusion of realms. All beings are regarded as possessing inherent Buddha-nature, so no karmic burden can ultimately obstruct the possibility of awakening. Every moment of mind contains the potential for both wholesome and unwholesome karma, and even deluded or harmful patterns can become the very material of awakening when illuminated by insight. This is expressed in the idea that negative karma can be transformed rather than merely exhausted, turning defilements into conditions for realization rather than treating them as permanent stains.

Because of this, Tendai practice emphasizes the rapid transformation of karma through the path revealed in the Lotus Sūtra, sometimes described as the One Vehicle. Faith, ethical conduct, recitation and contemplation of the Lotus Sūtra, and the cultivation of the perfections are upheld as powerful karmic causes that benefit both oneself and all beings. Karma thus functions not only as an explanation for suffering but as a call to compassionate action and diligent practice. In this way, Tendai maintains a strict sense of moral causality while situating it within an interdependent, ultimately empty reality in which enlightenment remains accessible regardless of one’s karmic past.