About Karma

It was reported on The Straits Times on 27 May 2008, that Sharon Stone was slammed for saying that the May 12 Sichuan earthquake was karma for China's treatment of Tibet.

She was quoted to have said:

"I'm unhappy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don't think anyone should be unkind to anyone else... And then all this earthquake and stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma? When you're not nice, the bad things happen to you."

Well, I definitely think that the comments were uncalled for and extremely inappropriate.

However, I believe that this is the concept of Karma many people have. Do good and you reap good. Do bad and bad things happen to you.

Until just a few weeks ago, that's was what I believed karma to be too.

But a few weeks ago in the Sunday Dharma class at Buddha Dharma Mandala Society, Venerable Dhammika provided an explanation of karma which shattered my idea of karma which I have held for a long time.

Ven Dhammika explained that Karma conditions the type of experience we have. The effects of Karma is really experiential, not physical.

That is, if we strike a lottery, it is not because of the good Karma. Striking lottery is just luck and is not intrinsicly good nor bad. A person striking lottery may experience happiness as he shared his fortune, or he may experience insecurity or negative emotions hording the money. Thus, karma is not winning the lottery itself. Karma is in the experience the person experiences. If a person has cultivated a generous heart, he will derive happiness from the lottery winnings. Conversely, a person with greed and jealousy is like to suffer negative emotions.

That is not to say that there is no causal relationship between things that happen to us. If I work hard and get rewarded for it, there is definitely a cause and effect here. But not every cause and effect is Karma! While there is a causal relationship between hard work and reward, it is not the Law of Karma that determines the reward!

I was a little disoriented initially. It took me a long time to digest this, for this basically undermined some of my long-held beliefs.

But this also explained a very important question I had for a long time: that is if Law of Karma determines the "good" things that happens to us, then does the agent has free will? For example, if I worked hard and I was rewarded by my boss, did my boss reward me out of his free will or was he compelled by the Law of Karma. If we say a person met a cruel death because he had been cruel in his life, then does it mean the murder was simply carrying out the karmic effects, and therefor did not commit any bad karma?

I had been perplexed by question for a long time, and now Ven Dhammika solved it.

If I worked hard for the right reasons, I will have positive experience, whether or not I get a reward. However, if I was greedy, even if I get rewarded, I may still have negative experience, such as feeling angry that the reward was too little. The reward itself is not the results of karma. Karma is in the experience I have.

So "do good and you reap good" still holds. But the "good" results is not the things that happened external to you, but the experience within you.

Well, at least that's how I understood it. I am still internalizing it.