Karma

At the Zen Center tonight, we talked about karma. Actually, we talked about many things, but the conversation eventually came around to karma.

In my opinion (yours may differ), many people in the West misunderstand karma. The sort of dumbed-down, westernized version of karma goes something like this: If you do good things, good things will happen to you. If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you. You reap what you sew. So behave yourself. The trouble with that interpretation is that it ignores the fact that we all know of perfectly dreadful people who seem to always have all the luck, and of dreadful misfortunes that have happened to some of the nicest people.

Some Buddhists try to reconcile this dissonance by maintaining that our bad deeds plant seeds for future misfortune, and our good deeds plant seeds for future happiness. Although the fruit of these seeds may not immediately manifest themselves, in time all karmic debts are re-payed. This, of course, brings up metaphysical questions of where the seeds are stored, how they travel with a person through life (or future lives), and what conditions must occur for them to finally come to fruition. There are whole schools of teaching about "seed consciousness" (alaya), and the proper cultivation and manifestation of the "good" seeds, along with suppression of the "bad" seeds. The teachings go on that we carry these seeds from one life to the next, and that is why good things may happen to a bad person (happy seeds had been planted in a former life), or bad things happen to a good person (unfortunate seeds were planted).

I've even heard this explanation of karma used as "proof" of reincarnation - how else can unredeemed karma be reconciled if not in a future life? This is a fantasy based on a delusion, a sand castle standing on a soap bubble, ignorance begetting ignorance.

I will tell you what karma is: it is the effect of a cause - the fall from a push, the clap from two hands, the warmth from a sunrise. It is neither bad nor good; both "bad" and "good" are distinctions of our discriminating minds, and the true nature of the universe transcends these dualistic categories.

Besides, who's to say what's good and what's bad? When we look at things, what we often thought was bad at first sometimes turns out to be good or to have some good in it. And what's good for one might at the same time be bad for another - your good fortune at, say, winning the lottery is based on my misfortune of not winning it. And your good fortune of sudden wealth may turn against you in time (the suicide rate among lottery winners is well known to be alarmingly elevated).

There's an ancient Chinese story that goes like this: A wise farmer once saw that his horse, a stallion, had escaped from its pen. His neighbor came over to console him on his loss, but the wise farmer said, "Who's to say what's good and what's bad?"

The next week, the stallion returned and four breeding mares followed him into the pen. The neighbor came back to congratulate the wise farmer on his good fortune, but he said, "Who's to say what's good and what's bad?"

However, the wise farmer's son tried to break in one of the mares and got thrown, breaking his back. He was paralyzed in bed, his prognosis uncertain, when the neighbor came back to grieve.
But the wise farmer told him not to be sad, for after all, "Who's to say what's good and what's bad?"

As it turns out, the Army came through the next month, and conscripted all the young men of the village into service, except, of course, for the wise farmer's paralyzed son. As the boys were being marched off to fight and likely die on a distant battlefield, the wise farmer asked his son, "Who's to say what's good and what's bad?"

And so on. Good and bad are not two different things - they're the two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. There is no "good karma" and "bad karma," there's just karma.

Imagine you're sitting in a small round swimming pool on a still summer evening. There's absolutely no breeze and as long as you're perfectly still, the surface of the water can become as smooth as plane of glass. But as soon as you start moving, there are waves, and then the waves bounce off the sides of the pool and refract into more waves (or more complex waves). And if you try to move around to get out of the waves' way, it only creates more waves. Similarly, if you try to only let the waves that you like for some reason to roll against you, but dip beneath the surface when a wave you don't like comes along, you're still just making more waves. But if you start sitting very still again for a while, the waves will start to calm down and after time, the water's surface will once again be like glass.

Now imagine there's eight of you in the pool. How many more waves there are now, and how much harder it is to calm them! Now imagine the whole world is the pool, and everyone in the world is in there with you . . .

The waves, obviously, are karma. The waves are not good or bad (that's silly) - they just are. We might find one side of the wave preferable to the other, but one side can't exist without the other. Karma is just the waves formed by our actions, neither good nor bad, just waves on the ocean of existence, and since the First Noble Truth points to the existence of suffering, we typically perceive the waves as suffering, as "bad," as "bad karma."

And such is my opinion. Yours may differ. Who's to say what's "right" and what's "wrong?"