What Is Karma?

[camerata]

What is karma?

Sharon Stone claims the earthquake in China is the result of bad karma for its treatment of Tibetans. Is her definition - "when you are not nice, bad things happen to you" - correct?

Radiohead sings of the "karma police", called in to arrest those who upset Thom Yorke: "This is what you get when you mess with us." And Boy George warbles about a "karma chameleon", in a toxic relationship because he's not "so sweet" anymore.

Cause and effect, see. Actions have consequences.

And Sharon Stone, a convert to Buddhism, has claimed - to much criticism - that the earthquake that killed at least 68,000 people in China was bad karma for Beijing policy in Tibet. "I thought, is that karma - when you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?" she mused at the Cannes Film Festival.

Karma is an important concept for Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs. Translated from the Sanskrit, it means simply "action". Because karma is used in a number of ways and contexts - even among different branches of Buddhism - this can be confusing.

Dhammadassin, a teacher at the London Buddhist Centre, says that Stone's take on karma is common - glossed over as an outcome that is the result of something done in the past - or even a past life.

"This reduces the enormously complex matter of causes and their effects to a question of retribution meted out for unspecified previous actions," she says.

But the law of karma states that it's the motive behind one's actions that affects the outcome of that particular act.

"So an intentionally ethical action - for example to promote kindness, generosity, contentment - is more likely to have positive, beneficial consequences. An intentionally unethical one - to promote self-aggrandisement or greed - will be more likely to have unhelpful, even harmful consequences. Unhelpful, that is, for the positive well-being of either the doer or the recipient or both."

In a complex world, it's too simplistic to expect that a positive intention will always have a positive outcome as many factors are involved, she says.

Poetic justice

The idea of moral causation has long been held in India, but the doctrine of karma was formulated and explained by the Buddha, a spiritual teacher thought to have lived about 2,500 years ago. Some believe that he was a human who became enlightened; others that he was a god.

His teachings hold that whatever comes into existence does so in response to the conditions at the time, and in turn affects what comes after it.

Sangharakshita, the Briton who founded the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in 1967, explains this with the following example in his book Who Is The Buddha? "Rainfall, sunshine, and the nourishing earth are the conditions from which arises the oak tree, whose fallen leaves rot and form the rich humus from which the bluebell grows."

Dhammadassin says that despite its simplicity, this example reflects the inter-connectedness of our world, "in which our views, attitudes, opinions and intentions all have a part to play in creating our actions and their consequences". And what many call karma is actually closer to the idea of poetic justice, she says.

Nor do Buddhists believe karma is the only cause - others are:

* inorganic or environmental factors, such as the weather

* organic or biological factors, like bacteria or viruses

* psychological factors such as stress

* and transcendental or spiritual factors (such as the sometimes powerful galvanizing effect of spiritual practice)

"The earthquake in China or the cyclone in Burma have much to do with environmental factors," says Dhammadassin. "To invoke karma is more to do with our desire to nail things down and find someone to blame. But that's not ours to do."

Source: BBC.

[Pepe']

I think there is something to be said for "collective consciousness/karma."

However, Tibet is just the tip of the iceberg on China's tab...

[sbk]

Sharon Stone is Buddhist? Amazing. Well, if that is the kind of karma she believes in then she will come back in her next life as a mink.

[astromash]

Sharon Stone is Buddhist? Amazing. Well, if that is the kind of karma she believes in then she will come back in her next life as a mink.

A Buddhist mink? Very good

[Ave]

I think there is something to be said for "collective consciousness/karma."

However, Tibet is just the tip of the iceberg on China's tab...

I agree. There certainly is something to be said for collective consciousness as we have individual karma as well as the karma of an entire nation through its history, social, economical, political, religious aspects and more.

I might have posted this in another thread, however, here is what I learnt about karma so far.

As already said, "Karma derives from the Sanskrit word meaning 'action', and refers to the fact that, due to the strict law of cause and effect, every action leads to a future action, in an unbroken chain throughout eternity. We create karma through our every thought, word and deed, and our every thought, word and deed in turn expresses our karma. Everybody has karma.

Karma is not an outside force, but rather the effects of causes we ourselves have made in the past, which continue to have a profound influence on our present actions. Some of the effects of these causes are latent and have still to appear, while those which have already appeared have resulted in our present condition. If we want to understand the causes we have made in the past, we should look at the effects as they appear in the present. And if we want to know what results will appear in the future, we should look at the causes we are making now. Inhirent cause is also translated as 'mind'. It is what gives rise to latent effect. It is also called karma.

Karma can be changed once we perceive the nature of our own life. Life is subjected to what some call it the Mystic Law (mystic here is meant as 'though absolutely real, it defies narrow rationality or transmission into words and therefore is difficult to fully understand'), the Law of nature and the universe which, like in physics, indicate that for each cause there is an effect.

However, the Buddhist view of causality goes deeper than the cause and effect we observe in the external world of time and space. This concept involves penetrating the depths of our lives to the inherent cause and latent effects which we all experience subjectively and which are constantly interacting with the external world.

For example, generally speaking, people understand that, in the external world, cause comes first and the effect follows later. Sometimes, the two can be very close; we know that in flicking a light switch, say, we can produce almost instant illumination; but we also know that, even though the electric current may travel so fast that it appears to reach the light bulb instantly, its speed is actually finite. Consequently, there must a minute fraction of a second between the cause - flicking the switch - and the effect - seeing the light.

At the other end of the time-scale, cause and effect can be separated by years, even aeons. Therefore, in planting an acorn we are making the cause for an effect to occur at some time in the future; there is complete effect, a mature, fully grown oak, we cay not even live to witness. On a longer time-scale still, the appearance of human life on this planet came about as a result of causes that stretch back certainly as far as the beginning of our solar system, if not further, into the eternal past. Nevertheless, no matter how long or short the delay between a cause and its manifest effect, it is held that the latter always follows the former. In this sense, then, cause and effect is usually regarded as 'linear', in that one thing leads to another in an unbroken line of cause and effect relationships through time.

At a deeper level, cause and effect are simultaneous for, just as this present moment is the result of all the causes made since the infinite past, so it contains everything that will create the future. There can be no discontinuity between past, present and future. In other words, Buddhism distinguishes between two different but intimately related types of cause and effect: external cause and manifest effect, and inherent cause and latent effect. The first ones can be perceived in the external world, while the latter exist within our eighth consciousness as an unseen tendency. They are related in that eternal cause is whatever stimulus in our environment prompts this unseen tendency to surface in our life, while manifest effect is the effect that the appearance of this tendency then has on us and our environment.

In common with all phenomena, cause and effect is subject to the rhythm of life and death, just as life and death is subject to the law of cause and effect. This means that an external cause does not lead directly to a manifest effect; this in turn, explains why the effect of an external cause is not always immediately obvious and why the same external cause can lead to very different manifest effects.

Every activity of life occurs as the result of some external stimulus. At the same time, the true cause is the inherent cause within the human being. To give a very simple example, if someone hits you and you hit him back, first blow is the stimulus leading to the second, but is not the ultimate cause. You can maintain that you hit the person because he hit you, but in fact you hit him because you are you. The real cause was inside you, ready to be activated by the external cause. This is because in your life there is a tendency - an inherent cause - which draws such behaviour towards you like a magnet. The perpetrator is also subject to the law of cause and effect and so, at some time, must reap the inescapable consequences of his actions.

In this context, it is also important to understand that Buddhism elucidates that law of cause and effect to explain why things happen as they do, not to justify them..as our Sharon did..

[himachal]

What is karma?

And Sharon Stone, a convert to Buddhism, has claimed - to much criticism - that the earthquake that killed at least 68,000 people in China was bad karma for Beijing policy in Tibet. "I thought, is that karma - when you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?" she mused

Is 'claiming' the same as 'musing'?

[Samuian]

Sharon Stone is Buddhist? Amazing. Well, if that is the kind of karma she believes in then she will come back in her next life as a mink.

"instant karma 's gonna get you!"

Everything and anything, any kind of action, thought, deed will undoubtedly reap the fruit of kamma, wonder what kind of karma thoughts like this bring....

".....Laughin at fools like me

Who in the hel_l dyou think you are

A super star

Well, right you are

Well we all shine on

Like the moon and the stars and the sun

Well we all shine on

Evryone come on

Instant karmas gonna get you

Gonna knock you off your feet

Better recognize your brothers

Evryone you meet

Why in the world are we here

Surely not to live in pain and fear......"

-lyrics by John Lennon-

[Yamantaka]

What is karma?

Sharon Stone claims the earthquake in China is the result of bad karma for its treatment of Tibetans. Is her definition - "when you are not nice, bad things happen to you" - correct?

Source: BBC.

Karma is not like democracy - you don't suffer the effects of negative actions performed by other members of your "group". The Chinese victims cannot karmically suffer the consequences of the malfeasance of their government officials.

Karma has four causative aspects each contributing to the effect and intensity: the motivation behind the action; the type of action; the object of the action; and the result of the action. Each adds or subtracts from the effect the action has on the perpetrator.

For example, you may want to stop someone you know is going to molest a child and the only thing you can do is to kill him (motivation less negative; still lots of bad karma for killing; object is a person intending to do serious harm; split results - one dead person and one protected child). This would incur far less negative karma than beating up an old lady nun to steal her money to buy drugs. (motivation, greed; action, violence; object, helpless old & dedicating her life to the welfare of others; results, pain & suffering of another sentient being).

This is not to say that any of us has the wisdom to know that killing a child molester is a positive thing. It is our delusion and ignorance that would lead us to that conclusion. I have been taught over and over that trying to understand the minutiae of karma is beyond my capabilities at this stage of my path, even after 29 years as a Buddhist. So I haven't killed any child molesters lately.

Edited June 10, 2008 by Yamantaka

[sabaijai]

I've never seen any support for the idea of 'collective karma' in the Pali Tipitaka.

There is an earlier discussion thread on mass karma here.