Karma
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Karma
is one of those words we don't translate. Its basic meaning is simple enough-action-but
because of the weight the Buddha's teachings give to the role of action, the Sanskrit
word karma packs in so many implications that the English word action can't carry
all its luggage. This is why we've simply airlifted the original word into our
vocabulary.
But when we try unpacking the connotations the word carries now
that it has arrived in everyday usage, we find that most of the luggage has gotten
lost in transit. In the eyes of most Americans, karma functions like fate-bad
fate, at that: an inexplicable, unchangable force coming out of our past, for
which we are somehow vaguely responsible and powerless to fight. "I guess
it's just my karma," I've heard people sigh when bad fortune strikes with
such force that the only course they see open to themselves is resigned acceptance.
This has very little to do with the original Buddhist concept.
We've all been
taught that Buddhism picked up the idea of karma from its Indian milieu. Many
of us assume that the Buddhist concept of karma differs little from the pre-Buddhist
concept, that it's part of the Indian soil still clinging to the roots of the
teaching. When we look at the Pali texts, though, we discover that the early Buddhists
were very clear on the fact that their ideas about karma were integral to their
teaching and radically different from everything else in India at the time. In
fact, when they wanted to point to what made their teachings distinctive, they
pointed to their theory of karma.
Buddhist
ideas on karma were distinctive in four ways:
1) Unlike other Indian schools,
who saw karma as a physical power, early Buddhists taught that the power of karma
was determined by the mind: the views and intentions underlying a particular action.
If an action was motivated by greed, anger, or delusion, it was inherently unskillful
and would lead to suffering. If the motivation was free of greed, anger, and delusion,
the action was skillful and would lead to happiness.
2) Because karma was determined
by the mind, it was not ritualistic. There were no prescribed words or gestures
that carried any inherent karmic power. Ritual actions and mantras could not create
good karma for the future, or cancel out bad karma from the past.
3) Early
Buddhists were also unusual in seeing karma as non-linear. Other Indian schools
believed that karma operated in a straight line, with actions from the past influencing
the present, and present actions influencing the future. As a result, they saw
little room for free will. Buddhists, however, saw that karma acts in feedback
loops, with the present moment being shaped both by past and by present actions;
present actions shape not only the future but also the present. This constant
opening for present input into the causal process made free will possible. This
freedom is symbolized in the imagery the Buddhists used to explain the process:
flowing water. Sometimes the flow from the past is so strong that little can be
done except to stand fast, but there are also times when the flow is gentle enough
to be diverted in almost any direction.
4) Finally, early Buddhists saw that
if the views and intentions in the mind were skillfully trained, the process of
karma could not only lead to further happiness in the realm of cause and effect,
but also be used to dismantle that realm and lead beyond karma entirely. This
was the teaching of release.
These four points boil down to the central Buddhist
teaching: if the mind is properly trained to be clear about what it is doing in
the present moment, its karma can take it beyond all suffering and stress. Thus,
instead of promoting resigned powerlessness, the early Buddhist notion of karma
focused on the liberating potential of what the mind is doing with every moment.
Who you are-what you come from-is not anywhere near as important as the mind's
motives for what it is doing right now.
This view, of course, flew right in
the face of the Indian traditions of caste-based hierarchies, and explains why
the Buddhists had such a field day poking fun at the pretensions and mythology
of the brahmins. As the Buddha pointed out, a brahmin could be a superior person
not because he came out of a brahmin womb, but only if he acted with truly skillful
intentions.
We read the early Buddhist attacks on the caste system, and aside
from their anti-racist implications, they often strike us as quaint. What we fail
to realize is that they strike right at the heart of American culture: our obsession
with defining who we are in terms of where we come from-our race, ethnic heritage,
gender, socio-economic background, sexual preference-our modern tribes. We put
inordinate amounts of energy into creating and maintaining the mythology of our
tribe so that we can take vicarious pride in our tribal identity. Even when we
become Buddhists, the tribe comes first. We demand a Buddhism that honors our
myths.
From the standpoint of karma, though, where we come from is old karma,
over which we have no control. What we "are" is a nebulous concept at
best--and pernicious at worst, when we use it to find excuses for acting on unskillful
motives. The worth of a tribe lies only in the skillful actions of its individual
members. Even when those good people belong to our tribe, their good karma is
theirs, not ours. And, of course, every tribe has its bad members, which means
that the mythology of the tribe is a fragile thing. To hang onto anything fragile
requires a large investment of passion, aversion, and delusion, leading inevitably
to more unskillful actions on into the future.
So the Buddhist teachings on
karma, far from being a quaint relic from the past, are a direct challenge to
a basic thrust--and basic flaw--in our culture. Only when we abandon our obsession
with finding vicarious pride in our tribal past, and can take actual pride in
the motives that underlie our present actions, can we say that the word karma
has recovered its luggage. And when we open the luggage, we'll find that it's
brought us a gift: the gift we give ourselves and one another when we drop our
myths about who we are, and can instead be honest about what we're doing with
each moment--at the same time making the effort to do it right.