Karma - Sowing and Reaping

Karma: Sowing and Reaping

If someone were to throw a fire bomb into your house and burn it down would you say it was the bomb that was responsible for burning your house down, or the person who threw the bomb? Or would you blame the house for burning or possibly even yourself for not make your house of fire-proof material? Or anyone of a million other factors going towards the resulting inferno. I'd guess that most people would place the blame at the feet of the person who threw the bomb - possibly reserving some responsibility for any others who conspired with the perpetrator of the act, or those who helped in its execution. That is just common sense - but it is interesting to see why is that 'common sense'. We know in our gut who should be held responsible. We don't need any clever argument to be convinced of the identity of the guilty party. After all, if you found the person about the throw the bomb would you start to tell the bomb not to explode or to burn, or would you try to prevent the person using the bomb? The bomb is simply doing what it is its chemical nature to do - given the right conditions it explodes and sets a fire. So we place responsibility at the feet of the bomber, their conspirators and accomplices because they had a choice and they choose. The guilt and the responsibility lies in the choosing (and the following through). The bomb, the house, the inflamable curtains and all the other conditions have no room for choice to change the outcome, but the people do. The people have minds; the inanimate objects do not have minds. This, it may surprise you to discover, is what karma is about.

'Karma' has come to mean something almost like 'fate' or 'destiny' and used in this sense as an excuse (at least as presented in drama) for lack of responsibility for the outcome. Karma, in its original philosophical and religious meaning is 'willed, deliberate action' - and this is the sense in which it is used by millions across the world. In a sense it is the actions (in word, thought and deed) that you perform which create the future, and the world. I use the word 'create' here deliberately. In the case of actions without willed choice the outcome is virtually part of the pre-conditions: a bullet racing towards your unprotected head will continue along its path and cause injury and damage in relation to the laws of physics. However when you 'choose', you create - you weave another strand into the pattern of the future, rather than simply following the path of a pre-existing strand. However, Karma is not like a sportsmans score card, to be assessed at the end of the season and a decision made about how well he did during the season. Karma is more like the training, exercise, games and good nutrition of the sportman throughout the season - he might carry around a record of all those things, but what really counts is the effect they have on the sportsman. Skipping on a training session but entering it on the written training record doesn't actually contribute to his or her training - you don't get fitter by writing down that you have trained, you get fitter by actual training.

Actually attributing misfortune and lack of success to 'karma' is a misuse in two important senses. (It is also right in an important sense and I will say more about this below). The first important sense in which this is both wrong and destructive is that deliberate action/karma can only be in the here and now. Certainly you can refer to your past actions and choices as guides and lessons, or as salves to accept the present with equanimity but the only field in which karma is created is the present instant. The upshop of past action is technically called 'the fruit' of the action. It is hardly surprising that past teachers of ethics turned to agricultural metaphors when their audience mostly lived on the land and by the land. So biblically we have the maxim 'as you sow, so shall you reap', and six centuries before that the Buddha was teaching about actions and their fruits. Neither teacher suggested that accepting the consequences of previous actions absolved one of responsibility for present actions. Quite the opposite in fact - if you see yourself rushing headlong toward disaster it is sensible to do something to avoid it, if at all possible.

There is a sense in which 'karma' can seem like destiny and it is important to understand that so as not to confuse it with real predestination and thus simply waiting like animals before a slaughterhouse for the outcome to happen. Suppose you stand on the top of a cliff and you are told that very shortly you are going to have to jump off the cliff. You have a choice between strapping on a heavy boulder to help you or alternatively being strapped into a hang-glider. If you opt for the heavy boudler, when you jump of the cliff you will plummet down ... well like a stone. You may be able to grab on to a branch on the way down ... but it will be hard to hang on to because of the extra mass you are carrying. You still have some freedom to choose and act, but you have already chosen, right at the beginning, to attach your future to something which limits and controls your choices. You may have heard the expression 'heavy karma': falling off a cliff strapped to a boulder would be a good image for what that really means.

Suppose instead you chose the hang-glider. You may not have much experience with a hang-glider, and you may not figure out how to control your descent before its too late but it has given you a much better chance and more choices than the boulder did. So, in this sense past karma can seem very much like destiny, and there really is no point in refusing to accept it - you can't wish the past away. However, as the saying goes, 'you play the cards you are dealt' - that too is very much a karma/'fruit' attitude, the only difference being that you are the dealer (and you've rigged the deck).

In traditional Buddhist teaching karma is said to be one of the most complex things to understand, not because of the inherent complexity of the ideas (though it is true that they are slightly more involved than I have presented here) but because of the vast number of deliberate actions that each of us have made and woven into our existence over an inestimable length of time. Compared to understanding this, something as huge as the human genome project seems minute.

As with most teachings in Buddhism the punch line comes down to personal responsibility. Understanding yourself and the world in terms of the indelible trace woven into your being by each karmic (deliberate) action of thought, word and deed might make you pause to think about what you want to build yourself out of. (Given the number of people who want to build their bodies out of cheap fatty burgers, it really doesn't give that much hope for what they'd want to build their characters from).

There is quite a lot in traditional Western ethics that uses the same ideas as the teachings of Karma. Just to take one example, we have the expression that 'virtue is its own reward'. Cynically this may be used to convince people to do something of no obvious benefit to themselves (and quite possibly for the benefit of the person advocating the magnanimity). A less worldly view of this is that virtuous actions are not rewarded afterwards, but in their actual doing. You might think of this like disolving sugar in water. The water isn't sweet because it wants to reward you for adding the sugar - it is sweet simply because it has been changed by the adding of the sugar.

One final note: you may have been wondering where 'Karma Sutra' comes in. Well it doesn't - its actually 'Kama Sutra' (that is the famous one with the infamous illustrations). Its a completely different word. 'Kama' means 'sensuality' and whilst there may be quite a lot a deliberate action involved in following the instructions of that famous document, its whole different story. (Sutra, by the way, is related to the word used by surgeons for stitches - sutures - but the story behind that can wait for another day).