This is the printer-friendly version of: http: / / www.berzinarchives.com / web / en / archives / sutra / level2_lamrim / initial_scope / karma / introductory_lecture_karma.html Alexander Berzin Xalapa, Mexico, May 2, 2006
world exists. This is quite different from what many others have said. Some others have said, for instance, that the up-and-down of happiness and unhappiness that we experience is basically because of reward and punishment: from following the laws or not following the laws. The basic issue for feeling happy or unhappy was obedience, according to many teachers. But Buddha said: no, that wasn't the case. The actual cause was our confusion, not an issue of obeying or disobeying; it's being confused about life. Then, Buddha went on to say that that confusion was not an integral and necessary part of life, of how we experience things. It didn't have to be there: it is something that can be removed, and it can be removed completely, so that it never returns. Then he said that the actual way to do that was to change our way of experiencing things. Getting rid of that confusion was not a matter of asking somebody else to get rid of it for us, but it was basically a matter of changing our own attitudes, our own understanding about reality. If we can replace misunderstanding with understanding, and then have this understanding all the time, then we discover that we don't have this constant up-and-down of happiness and unhappiness, and we don't perpetuate that up-and-down of happiness and unhappiness. So that's a very basic teaching of Buddha, putting it in very everyday language.
specifically to one aspect of that entire process. So if we want to understand the mechanism of karma, we have to look at it with a little bit more precision, in some detail.
point here is that you create a mess, and you have to experience the mess. We create messes in life, and as life goes on, we get into more and more messes; basically, it works like that. More specifically, we act in a certain way toward others, and we will experience others acting in a similar way toward us. But another very important principle here with karma is that this doesn't work instantly. We could speak very kindly and gently toward someone, and they still get very crazy, yelling at us with anger. This is why to really understand karma, one has to bring in the whole discussion of rebirth, that things take a very, very long time before they produce an effect, and that they may not produce an effect in this lifetime. In fact, most of the time they don't. That's not terribly easy for us as Westerners to accept. For some people it sounds as though Buddhism is saying, "Be good in this lifetime and, in the afterlife, you will experience the results in heaven; be bad and, in the afterlife, you will experience the results in hell." We have to really examine this quite closely: Is Buddhism saying the same thing, or is it different? That's not a very easy topic, it is very complicated topic, because to really understand karmic cause and effect, we need to understand rebirth - the Buddhist concept of rebirth, not some non-Buddhist concept of rebirth. Who is it that commits a karmic cause and who is it that experiences its result? Is there a "me" that can be rewarded or punished. But, leaving the issue of rebirth and who experiences it aside, as I mentioned in the beginning, Buddhism is not speaking about a system of reward and punishment based on obedience of laws. Buddhism is not saying that this life is some sort of test, and we will get the results of the test in our next life. It's simply saying that things take a long time to produce their effect. We can see that in terms of the environment. We act in a certain way and it produces some effects in our lifetime, but it is going to produce an awful lot more effects in the lifetimes of future generations. It is something similar to that.
dimension. It comes from whether we act in a destructive way or a constructive way. If we act destructively, the result is experiencing unhappiness; we act constructively, the result of that is experiencing happiness.
sense of consideration or care - I call it the "caring attitude." But sometimes we are very naive, we think that I can say anything to you and it doesn't matter. I don't really take your feelings seriously. Then we lack a caring attitude. If we act with these types of mental factors - greed, anger, no sense of self-worth, no consideration for how what we do reflects on others, not caring, not taking seriously that what we do is going to have an effect on others and also an effect on ourselves - what is the result of that? Unhappiness. This unhappiness, though, is not a punishment. We need to think really quite deeply about this. Could that state of mind with all these negative factors really be a happy state of mind, and could it really produce an experience of happiness in us? Or could it only produce unhappiness? If we think about it more and more, it actually does make sense that that state of mind, that negative state of mind, would result in experiencing unhappiness, and if we have the opposite state of mind, without greed and anger and all these other things, that would produce happiness. Therefore, we have these general categories of behavior - constructive and destructive - and they're going to result in our experiencing happiness and unhappiness. Then, in addition, we have specific types of actions that we do: yelling at somebody, or being kind to somebody, and so on, and these also have their effects in terms of tendencies to repeat that behavior and tendencies to get into situations in which others act that way toward us. Another result of our karmic behavior - but there's no need to go into great detail here concerns what type of rebirth we have: are we going to be reborn with the basic body and mind of a dog, of a cockroach, of a human being. What kind of body and mind will we have as the context for experiencing certain things happening to us and our acting in a certain way. There are many other details here, but I want to just cover, in this introductory lecture, the most general principles.
Free will, on the other hand, is a little bit like somebody sitting in a restaurant, holding a menu in front of them and deciding what to order. Life is not like that. To imagine that life is like that, Buddhism says, is incorrect, it's confused. It might seem and feel like there's a separate "me" - separate from life, separate from experience, and who outside of everything that is currently happening can look at life like a menu and choose items on it. There's no "me" separate from life, or separate from experience, and what's going to happen to us doesn't exist like little items on the menu that we can choose, as if they were sitting there already, and then we just press the button and it comes out of the vending machine, or something like that. I think that's a useful image to see how silly it is. It isn't that experiences are existing like candy bars inside the vending machine and you choose which one you want; press the button, put the money in, and out it comes to you. Life isn't like that, is it? It isn't that we decide beforehand, "Today, I will experience happiness and I will experience everybody being nice to me." Then we put our money in the machine of life and out pops what we've chosen. That's free will, isn't it? It's free will to decide what is going to happen to us and what we are going to do. But what happens to us is far more subtle and sophisticated than these two extremes of determinism or total free will.
quality - not a type of happiness that is mixed with confusion, and not the type of happiness of "I've won the game and so here's my reward." It's a type of happiness that one experiences from being free of a difficult situation. I think a simple example, although not an exact example, for approaching what this is talking about would be the happiness that we feel when we take off our tight shoes at the end of the day - it's a joyous relief that we are free from this pain. Also, what we experience with liberation is that our actions are no longer driven by these compulsive urges of karma with which we act in a certain way, experience certain things. Rather, if we are working, beyond just liberation, to become a Buddha, what drives our actions is compassion - the wish for others to be free from their suffering and causes of that suffering.
Concluding Words
This is a basic introduction to some of the principles involved with karma. There's much, much, much, much more that can be said and explained. Some of it is explained with certain general principles, like this type of action results in this type of effect, and if this factor is there the result will be stronger, and if it's not there - if you do something by accident as opposed to doing something on purpose - the effect is going to be different, and so on. There's a lot of detail there. Also, in terms of what actually is going to ripen right now, that is very difficult to generalize with principles, because that is affected by everything else that is happening all around us. What happens to us now, we can't just generalize that from general principles, because what happens now is affected by everything else that's happening. Just think about if you have an accident on the road, what brought that about? It's karma that brought everybody else on to that road from their sides, and the traffic conditions, and the weather, and the condition of the road. So many things have brought about that particular thing of having an accident that is ripening now. If we are interested in this topic, there is a great deal of room to explore many different aspects of it. The more we learn about karma, I think the more helpful that is in overcoming being under the control of karma, so that we not only get liberated ourselves from samsaric suffering, but we're in a better position to be able to help everybody else as well. [For a more detailed explanation, see: The Mechanism of Karma: The Mahayana Explanation, Except for Gelug Prasangika {1}.] What questions do you have?
Questions
Participant: In this context, guilt is out of the picture? It has nothing to do with guilt here, does it? Alex: Correct. The Buddhist explanation of karma has nothing to do with guilt. Guilt is based on thinking in terms of a very strong solid "me" as a separate entity and what I did as some other separate entity, like two ping-pong balls, or something like that. And then we believe that entity "me" is so bad and that entity "what I did" was so bad. So there's also a judgment of
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these two seemingly solid entities and then not letting go - that's guilt. It's like never throwing away the garbage from your house, but just keeping it inside and saying how terrible it is, how bad it smells, how dirty, and never letting go. Participant: It sounds very clear and very logical, and I can understand the whole system, and how to get rid of the confusion, and the urge, tendencies and everything. But I think that understanding it is not enough to get rid right now of the experience or the impulse of acting compulsively. Alex: Correct. Yes, that's why first we need to exercise ethical self-control. Remember, we mentioned that there is a slight interval between when I feel like saying, "What an ugly dress you're wearing today," and when I actually would say it. If we can catch that space, then we have the ability to decide what the effect is going to be if I tell this person that she is wearing an ugly dress. And if we see that that would not be a productive thing to say, we don't say it. That's where we start - with ethical discipline and self-control. Also, we can examine what emotion am I feeling when I want to do something? Is my wish to do something based on a disturbing emotion, such as greed? Is it based on anger; is it based on naivety? Do I think that saying that your dress is ugly is not going to have any effect on you? Or is my wish to do something based on kindness, and these more positive things? This is why the definition of a disturbing emotion or attitude is very helpful: it is a state of mind, which, when it arises, causes us to lose peace of mind and lose self-control. You can tell when you've lost peace of mind: our heart beats a little bit faster; we feel a little bit uneasy. So we try to notice, for instance, subtle things, like am I saying something out of pride? For example, somebody says, "I didn't understand that," and you say, "Oh, but I did!" You'll notice a little bit of uneasiness, there's some pride behind this, some arrogance, and so this is what you look out for. But to understand reality, which means gaining the understanding of voidness and so on, is very, very difficult, and even when we get it, we have to accustom ourselves to it, so that we have it all the time. That's why we start with ethical self-discipline, to stop ourselves from acting destructively. Participant: I got a little lost. I think you mentioned that there are two emotions that perpetuate this happiness and unhappiness, these fluctuations. Were you saying that one of these is craving, and another one was what? Alex: What I was explaining were the two factors that activate karmic tendencies - this comes from the teachings on the twelve links of dependent arising. One is craving, the other - I was simplifying - the other is actually called an "obtainer attitude or emotion," and it is a list of about five different possibilities. This is what will obtain the result, and so the most prominent one is identifying a solid "me" with what we're experiencing, with what's going on. Participant: Is this identifying a solid "me" in relationship to something? It's clear that there's confusion here, and that we have to take care of that and get rid of the confusion. But what exactly are we confusing and what are we confusing it with? Alex: That's not an easy question to answer in a simple way. We are confusing the "me" that does exist, the conventional "me," with the false "me" that doesn't exist. What we're doing is imagining that the actual "me" that does exist exists in some impossible way, it's an
Questions 11
exaggeration. It's adding something that's not there. For instance: I am happy or I am unhappy. It's not that you are unhappy; I am unhappy. When there is an experience of happiness or unhappiness, we refer to that in terms of I'm happy. It's not that you're happy or somebody else is happy - I'm happy. That "I" or "me" is the conventional "me," which does exist. Let me use an example for this conventional "me." Suppose we watch a movie and let's say the movie is "Gone with the Wind." In it, there is a happy scene, then an unhappy scene, and then another happy scene. Well, what's going on here? This happy scene is a scene from "Gone with the Wind" and that unhappy one is another scene from "Gone with the Wind." "Gone with the Wind" is how we would conventionally label the whole thing, all the scenes, both the happy and the unhappy ones. "Gone with the Wind," however, is just a title, just a name. But when we talk about "Gone with the Wind," we're not just talking about the title. We're talking about the actual movie - what the title refers to. That's the conventionally existent movie: it exists. The movie is not something separate from each of those scenes - a movie separate and independent from those scenes would be a false movie. It doesn't exist. The conventionally existent movie is merely what can be labeled or imputed, we say, on the basis of the scenes. Similarly, we have happy moments in life, we have unhappy moments in life and so on, and how do we refer to all of that? We refer to it as "me" - the conventional "me," which does exist: it's not you, it's "me." Similarly, that movie is "Gone with the Wind," it's not "Star Wars." But there's no "me" that's separate from the moments of experiencing happiness and unhappiness and which is experiencing those moments. That would be a false "me," a "me" that does not exist. And "me" is just a word; so "me" is merely what that word is referring to on the basis of all the moments of experience of a life. The confusion, then, would be to think that there is some separate "me" that is inside this body, inhabiting it, connected to it somehow, pushing the buttons, and now that "me" is experiencing a pain in my foot, and I'm very unhappy and I don't like that. It is as if there were a separate "me" from that whole experience inside that alien thing called the body. Then, on the basis of confusing this separate "me" - this false "me" - with the conventional "me" and identifying with that false "me," we feel, with craving, "I've got to get parted from this unhappiness, from this pain, from the unhappiness that I experience with the physical pain." Of course when we don't have that misconception of a solid "me," that doesn't mean that we just sit there and continue to have the pain. If our foot is on fire, of course we take our foot out of the fire, but the concept of the "me" that's behind it is quite different. There's no panic. But this concept of a false "me" versus a conventional "me" is very complex and advanced. So, let's leave it for now. Let's end here, instead, for this evening with a dedication. We think: whatever understanding, whatever positive force has come from this, may it go deeper and deeper, grow stronger and stronger, and act as a cause for reaching enlightenment for the benefit of all.
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