Karma Dharma and Meditation

Section I

KARMA and DHARMA

Chapter I

Introduction

Karma is a Sanskrit word which strictly speaking means action. But what follows from action is a result, a consequence, which is why we call it the law of cause and effect. All of us take this law for granted in our daily lives such as when we put the car key in ignition, we expect the car to operate, we push some keys of computer and we get the desired information and so on. The whole world operates according to cause and effect and there is direct relationship between these two. It is same with mind. Every thought we have, every word we say, every action we take, create a cause and over a period of time all these karmic causes ripen to become effect. Every moment constantly shapes our karmic destiny. The good thing about the law of karma is that we have it in our power to create the causes for whatever effects we wish. Many people think that karma equals fate or predestination and think that one does not have any power to change. This is a misunderstanding. It is we, who create our own karma and we can change it in a powerful dynamic way. We are creating thousands of such cases every day of our lives. But unless we have good mindfulness, we may not even be aware of it. So we see how important it is to subdue our minds to be fully present in each moment. It is not only the big thing we do that matters. We do not have to do anything as dramatic as defraud our employees or with a large cheque to a charity to create negative or positive karma. Both of these actions, like all others, begin as ideas in our minds, so that it is here, in our mind, that karma arises. We all tend to have habitual thoughts or attitudes, and we need to be very careful about these as often they build and have a cumulative effect which is immense. If we want to know how our life will be in future, we should look at how we think and act today. We are the sum total of the decisions we take or say our present condition is not something causeless nor is it something caused by chance. It is something we ourselves have steadily constructed through our series of past decisions and the actions of body, speech and mind that arose from them.

The aspect of karma is significant in revealing that we are the authors of our own future happiness or misery. Even in the most desperate circumstances, we still have the opportunity to create limitless positive or negative karmas. The small business owner going through bankruptcy, the middle-aged wife, whose husband leaves her for a young woman, even the forty something man struck down with a life-threatening illness – all these people still have a choice in the attitude they adopt, which will determine their future experiences. In karmic terms they create the causes for still further unhappiness in the future. By contrast, through ridding ourselves of our we focussed attitude, the most traumatising adversity can be faced with far greater equanimity than would otherwise be possible. Personal tragedy can actually be transformed to become a cause for limitless future happiness and we do not have to look far to find examples of people, who are able to rise above personal tragedy to help others. Therefore, karma is challenging subject because it turns upside down the idea that all our joys and despair arise from what happens in the world around us.

But it is ultimately the more-empowering psychology than the one most of us take for granted, because it offers us the chance to transform our whole experience of reality. All great men use the analogy of planting seeds, when talking about future. It is good analogy not only because of the direct association between cause and effect but because of the implied factors which come into play. Those factors may be described as conditions. In order for a seed to germinate and grow to a healthy plant; it requires soil, moisture and sun-shine. Similarly, karma needs the right conditions if it is to ripen. In our quest to rearrange the external circumstances of our lives, we are quite frequently like a foreman, who lavishes the very best soil conditions and fertilisers on his land, installs a state of the art irrigation system and expectantly awaits an abundant crop even though he has failed to plant a single seed. At times the people do all the right things but whose ventures end not in wealth but in failure. It is because all the conditions may have been alright but without the karmic seeds in place, success was never even a possibility. Therefore, just as conditions alone will fail to yield a positive outcome, so too will seeds without appropriate conditions. Hence the seeds plus conditions is the approach we need to adopt in seeking karmic results. It is an approach which resonates with many people, on both the rational and intuitive levels. But even there, why is it that the most exclusive suburbs of the world, major cities are not populated entirely by our most generous, patient and ethical fellow citizens.

Sometimes bad things happen even to the good people. We know karmic farmers, who not only tend to conditions but are punctilious about planting seeds as well. An entrepreneur, who not only runs a thriving business but is also involved in several charities, sometimes nasty happens the entrepreneur’s company is hit by a sales slump leaving him with a humiliating prospect of bankruptcy. Farmers’ crops are wasted by unseasonal cycles and so on. Here we have to accept that mind stream seems to have existed since beginningless times and such happenings have to be seen as karma ripening in our mind stream, which is why there has been a sales slump or the seeds which gave fruit two times may have failed once or it can be attributed to our own destiny. Our karma is subject to constant change. Because our mind stream is dynamic so too are the karmic seeds being planted and those coming to fruition through appropriate conditions will change from moment to moment. For this we have to purify the negative karmas and cultivate boundless positive karmas. The inheritor of even the heaviest karmic debt has it within his power to achieve enlightenment within a single lifetime and for this we have to take responsibility for ourselves and for our destiny. Acceptance of the laws of causes and effects invariably has the most transformative effect on our lives and at times we come to realise that our own selfish interest lies in being altruistic. Just as the flowering of the lotus transcends the filth of the swamp, so too is it that those of us who normally think of only ourselves start to behave in a way that gives rise to outcomes far beyond our imagination.

For this it is in our own self-focussed best interest to maintain strict ethics, because in doing so we are maximising our own future happiness and peace of mind. The more mindful we become of our thoughts and behaviour, the more alert we will be to our thoughts and behaviour, the more alert we will be to the opportunities to cultivate causes for future positive effects. It is the life’s curious paradoxes that the goals to which we have greatest attachment are most likely to escape us, while those we do not care so much about just fall into our laps. The important thing is that we should not care too much if we lose, we should always put the deals up rather than giving a damn and in course of time we shall be winners too. Most sentient beings have only the most limited opportunity to create positive karma and develop their minds. Their short lives characterised by fear and aggression, it is inevitable that the karma they create will be overwhelmingly negative. We, on the other hand, have limitless opportunities to create positive causes but how well do we fare? Looking at our actions of body, speech and mind on day-to-day basis, how much of what we do is a cause for positive or negative future effects? This precious life, one which only the tiniest proposition of sentient beings enjoy, presents us with a rare opportunity to break through altogether from the endless cycle of rebirth and suffering. It is up to us to make the most of it. If we do not we shall be like a trader going to an island of jewels and returning home empty handed.

In the value of thought there is no more pervasive unifying structure than karma. It is the doctrine or law that ties action to result and creates a determinant link between an individual’s status in this life and his fate in future lives. Because of karma ubiquity, the doctrine is not easily defined. The bare meaning of the term karma is action. But as a doctrine, karma encompasses a number of quasi-independent concepts viz. rebirths, consequence fruit and the valuation or ethicization of acts qualifying them as good or bad. The same person enjoys the fruit of the same sinful or meritorious acts in the next world in the same manner and to the same extent according to the manner and extent to which that act has been done by him in this world. Despite karmic dominance in those thoughts, a detailed knowledge of its history has always eluded the thinkers. The differently scholars encountered in seeing one karma’s result may be attributed to some degree to the arcane nature of India’s ancient textual tradition, the vast corpus known collectively as Vedas. At the outset, Vedic culture was situated in the North West corner of Indian sub-continent and had shed its overt connections to its Indo-Aryan part. Since the karma doctrine has no obvious clear antecedents in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature, some scholars have suggested that karma’s origin lie outside the sphere of ancient Vedic culture. According to the Hindu philosophy of karma, nearly all primitive and pre-literate societies possess simple theories of birth, theories that through a simple transformation can evolve into a karmic eschatology. This transformation occurs with the introduction of a link between the nature of actions in one life to either a state of retribution or reward in the next life, a transformation that is referred to as the ethicization, of the simple rebirth eschatology. The supposition that non Vedic stream made a significant contribution to the karma doctrine is likely correct. Moreover it opens up what may be the most significant question in undertaking the history of karma that is when and how the systematic ethicization of actions occurs.

Chapter II

Ethicisation of Actions

However, the ethicization of actions cannot be seen in the Brahmanic Upanisdic milieu. Still within the context of the ritual performance, the Brahmanic authors do distinguish between good and bad ritual acts and as in other ethical systems this valuation is based on the consequences of actions. A passage declares when the Agnihotra is being offered, what he does mistakenly, either by word or deed that cuts off his vigour, his own self or his children. In other words within the narrow confines of the Vedic ritual system, a rudimentary ethical system does indeed exist. The Hindu tradition has looked to the Vedas as a model of cultural prestige and the legitimizing force for all sorts of religious behaviour. Moreover, because these texts were created not by individual authors but represent the thoughts, directives and observations of communities of inspired sages as they were recorded over successive decades, they are not highly systemised. As a result as they now stand and have stood so far the Vedic texts contain multiple and sometimes contradictory teaching on the same subject but at the cover, Vedic traditions, and certain other values exist. Foremost are those relating to the acts of sacrifices despite the changes in the thought and practice that may have occurred of the Vedic texts composition and compilation, the core remains clearly discernible, the acts of sacrifice—though variously enacted and variously interpreted by the Vedic religionists – stands always at the culture of the Vedic tradition. Karma is the critical component of this core. In early texts, the term karma typically denotes the action or performance of the sacrificial ritual, a usage that is so common that the term karma is then synonymous with the Vedic rites. As subsequently reflected in the Upanisads, karma emerges as a doctrine that is in a formulation that has a definite and extensive meaning and is rectified above and beyond its ordinary connotation. To understand karma’s history it is first necessary to examine these early doctrinal formulations, a point that leads back to the action of the Vedic sacrifice. The term karman appears frequently in the Vedic context. As such karma is not understood here as a doctrine but simply as a term denoting action in particular the action of the sacrificial rituals. However, with the presentation of Upanisads, karma is presented as a doctrine, one in particular that expresses the notion that actions in one life directly affect the condition of future life/lives. Brihadaranak Upanishad speaks about action (Karma) and one indeed becomes good or bad action and man becomes good by good actions and bad by bad actions. This passage appears to present the fundamental premise of the karma doctrine as it dominates the later Hindu thought that is that an individual attains a state of the death i.e. direct result of the ethical quality (good or bad) of his activities before death. Although the central idea presented here that one becomes good by good actions and bad by bad actions does evoke the later formulations of the karma doctrine, but the passage fails to explicate several key elements that would tie it with certainty to the later karma doctrine in particular the question of what constitutes good or bad action and what is the precise action of the individual’s post death existence, stands unanswered here. Karma again appears in Brihadaranak Upanishad in discussion of the fate of the individual upon the event of his death, this denotes that the individual approaching death becomes one as the vital energies together enter the individual’s heart and gathered in the heart these elements then depart through one of the body’s orifices, an event signifying the end of the individual’s emanate existence. At the moment, at what appears to be the bruise of the dissolution, the deeds (karma) and knowledge and memories take hold of him (the deceased). This taking hold of apparently leads to the acquisition of new body just as a goldsmith takes a piece of gold and turns it into another, so the self makes another new and more beautiful shape, like that of the ancestors, gods or other beings and how one gets and how one behaves so that one becomes as the doer of good to become good and doer of bad becomes bad. This mentions of the new body being acquired but does not mention about the rebirth specifically - a critical component of the later karma doctrine – but to some sort of other worldly after life existence. It only states that that one together with his actions, he goes when his inner mind is attached and when he reaches that the end of his action (karma), which he did in this world here, then he comes back to this world back to action, but not every-one returns to this world, the man who does not desire, his breaths do not depart Brahma and he is as