Karma or action is physical movement. Like a quality it belongs only to substance, but is different from both. A substance is the support of both quality and action: a quality is a static character of things, but an action is dynamic.
While a quality is a passive property that does not take us beyond the thing it belongs to, action is a transitive process by which one thing reaches another. So it is regarded as the independent cause of the conjunction and disjunction of things.
An action has no quality, because the latter belongs only to substance. All actions or movements must subsist in limited corporeal substances (murtadravya), such as earth, water, light, air and the mind.
So there can be no action or motion in the all-pervading substances like akasa, space, time and the soul. There can be no movement of an all-pervading thing because it cannot change its position.
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There are five kinds of action or movement, namely, utksepana or throwing upward, avaksepana or throwing downward, akuncana or contraction, prasarana or expansion and gamana or locomotion.
Of these, utksepana is the cause of the contact of a body with some higher region, e.g. throwing a ball upward. Avaksepana is the cause of the contact of a body with some lower region, e.g. throwing down a ball from a house-top.
Akuncana is the cause of such closer contact of the parts of a body as did not previously exist, e.g. clenching the fingers or rolling up a cloth.
Prasarana is the cause of the destruction of previous closer contact among the parts of a body, e.g. opening one’s clenched hand. All other kinds of actions are denoted by gamana.
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Such actions as the walking of a living animal, going up of flames, etc, are not separately classed insofar as they may all be included within gamana. All kinds of actions cannot be perceived.
The action of the mind (manas) which is an imperceptible substance does not admit of ordinary perception. The actions or movements of perceptible substances like earth, water and light can be perceived by the senses of sight and touch.