Karma

Just learned from Sharon that the Buddha says karma is inexplicable. I’m glad he and I agree.

I think karma and past lives are very unhelpful concepts. They might be helpful for people needing an answer to the problem of evil - if the people don’t care much about truth. But they are very unhelpful, I think, in responding to injustice, and represent a failing of institutional Buddhism - not as practiced in the West, or by many adherents - to really grapple with it.

Kohelet is so much more correct. Wise, good people suffer, and evil people profit. That is the reality. Now, how do we respond to that? Here’s where I am on it. We accept that the universe is unfolding according to its conditions, and that those conditions do not match our desires - either our superficial desires (for a nice day of weather) or our deep, moral desires (for there not to be torture). I don’t think saying that the president’s incredibly evil actions (I still haven’t written his name, so I’m staying with that) are sowing bad karma that will affect a future incarnation – I just don’t think that’s true, that there’s any evidence for it. And I think it gives a false sense of ok-ness about what he is doing.

Rather, I want to just recognize delusion as delusion. He thinks he is making himself happy, and he is. Were he (or, let’s say, the president of a logging company) to come out of delusion - were he to sit a bunch of meditation retreats and really do them, say - he would discover great sadness buried deep within him when he comes to see the consequences of his actions, how much suffering they cause. However, (a) he isn’t going to do that, (b) he doesn’t see the consequences, (c) he has a set of functioning ideologies that, even when he does see some of the consequences, he can fit them into an overall worldview that makes sense. Therefore, he is happy.

And his delusion, let’s remember, is of a very specific kind. Let’s go with the owner of an unsustainable timber company. He may be very much in touch with the destruction he causes, but he has an idea - that the earth is here for men to use - that puts it in perspective. So it’s not necessarily that these people are ignorant - they have ideas and ideologies that explain what they do. Likewise, it seems to me, with dictators and zealots and al qaeda and whomever. Sure, many of them are simply willfully ignorant of the suffering they cause - you know, like, the Palestinians aren’t really suffering, or aren’t really human. But others know that they are causing suffering, but believe a greater good justifies it. Sometimes, they may even be right. Usually they aren’t.

Where I continue to suffer/struggle with this is in how much response is called for. Part of me really believes that I should return to environmentalism as a vocation. I probably will not be as happy, on most levels. But then, with the practice, couldn’t I be ok with that, and prefer to do moral good? It’s tricky to find that balance. I do have a belief that my teaching and writing may have some effect on changing consciousness, which is the only real way to stop the ecological and other ills. (I focus on the environment because, for a cluster of reasons and many I’m sure I don’t know, that’s what really makes me saddest.) So, I don’t believe that I’m making matters worse. And I really do have the intention to give my money, however much of it there may be, to the causes of the environment, tibet, and promoting spirituality/changing consciousness. Probably some to Israel, too, although it’s more out of love than out of morality.

Anyway, not to go too far afield. I think if you’re going to believe in karma, you may as well believe in Jesus dying for your sins, God writing the Torah and burying fossils in the ground, or any other number of beliefs. This is different from the question of what is reality, understanding perceptions, etc., because it is internal to the process of reasoning, not about the cognition process itself. To the extent we trust reasoning at all, karma as classically understood has to go.

I feel like it’s a Buddhist weakness. Baggage. When the Buddha says it’s inexplicable, that sounds just like when smart Jewish philosophers say resurrection of the dead is inexplicable. It’s an idea, it’s part of our tradition, but, um, yeah.