​​​ By Andrea Fella                                                                                              

As we live our lives, we all notice that there are ways that we struggle with life and we suffer, and a lot of this struggle comes out of reactivity.  We see things happening and we don’t like them, so we want to fix them or change them. Or there are things that we want to have, and we make the effort to try to keep them and hold on to them. There is this way that we engage with the world which is out of this automatic process where we get rid of things we don’t like and hold on to things we like. This process is really one of the ways we end up in suffering. If we’re trying to change the way things are we are not happy with the way things are. It may not be a massive kind of suffering. The term suffering often seems a little too grand. But we do experience a sense of dissatisfaction. The term that is translated as suffering from Pali, the Buddha’s language, is Dukkha and it has a much broader meaning than just suffering. It means dissatisfaction, stress, unease, and really does incorporate a wide range of experiences and we all experience this at some point in our lives.

Every day we experience a sense that things just aren’t quite right. A lot of the reason for that is that we are reacting to things, we want things to be other than they are. Often it feels like we are responding and reacting to the environment, to our friends, and situations. It’s almost as if we don’t have a lot of say in how we react. It feels almost hardwired or very programmed. The very strong habits and patterns that each of us has in the way of responding and reacting to the world creates our sense of dissatisfaction. Sometimes it feels like this reactivity is out of our conscious control and it’s not something that we can really get a handle on. The feeling of things being out of our control, it’s not only the reactivity to wanting things to be different, but we see that this reactivity itself is unpleasant and a source of our suffering. We get angry at somebody, but we don’t really want to be angry, yet we don’t seem to have much control over that. We suffer because we feel like we should have control and we don’t have control. So why do we suffer? These habits and patterns of ways that we have behaved for a long time are so ingrained that they are almost below our level of our conscious ability to connect with them. For most of us, much of the ways that we react and respond to all these habits and patterns are below the level of what we have conscious access to, so we suffer. The Buddha’s answer to why we suffer has a lot to do with these “under the radar” habits and patterns that essentially are choices made out of conditioning. Choices that are made out of habits and patterns that we’ve built up over the years of our lives. We don’t want to be reactive to things, but we’ve been reactive for so long that it’s almost like we don’t have control over it. These choices are being made by the habits and patterns.

From the Buddhist perspective, the reasoning for why we suffer is explained in his teaching on karma. What is karma? The term is used in everyday language a lot. I think some of the ways in which we use that term in common speech are not exactly what is meant by karma in the Buddhist teaching. So, I want to describe a little bit about what karma means from the perspective of the Buddhist teachings. The terms “karma”, which is the Sanskrit term, and “kamma” which is the Pali term, literally mean action or work. The Buddha’s teaching on karma is around intention and action and is very strongly connected to the teachings on cause-and-effect. The Buddha talked about it not as something that was a good idea to believe in but rather as a natural law ingrained in the fabric of the universe and humanity. Much the way gravity is a natural law, whether or not somebody describes gravity, gravity functions. You hold something up and it drops, that is the law of gravity at work. It doesn’t matter whether someone has said “this is the law of gravity”, that is the way things behave.

 Likewise, the law of karma is a description of the workings of our minds. We can think of this as a natural extension of the way the universe works. The universe is governed by laws. For example, there are laws about the environment and genetics. If you plant an apple tree, then an apple tree grows. There are laws about how the weather works and laws of physics. These natural laws don’t necessarily have much to do with how our minds work, my point is that the universe runs in a lawful way.

Some of the laws pertaining to the workings of our mind are a little different than the laws of karma. A good example would be sense impressions, when an object meets the eye and it produces a vision and you see something and recognize it. That kind of unfolding is also a natural process. Then there is the law of human behavior, of how we relate to our world and what the consequences are of that relationship. In the simplest terms, the law of karma is that actions have consequences.

Some common aphorisms that reflect this are “we reap what we sow” and “what goes around comes around”. These are reflections of the law of karma that we know just by living in the world. The technical description of the law of karma is the capacity of our intentional actions to produce a morally or ethically appropriate result. What does this mean?

The first thing that I want to talk about is intention. Every single action that we take whether it’s an action of body, speech, thinking, or emotion, every single action that we engage in has an intention behind it. Before we move, there’s an intention to move. Before we think, there’s an intention to think. Before we speak, there’s an intention to speak. Whether or not we are consciously aware of that intention, and this is crucial, because I think often when we use the word intentional we mean something that we’re conscious of. We say, “I intended to do this” or “I didn’t intend to do that, it just happened.” We were thinking “I didn’t choose that”, but a choice was made. If you are engaging with somebody and you’re thinking that you shouldn’t say something then suddenly you blurt it out, you might think, oh, I didn’t mean to do that. You might think that it wasn’t intentional. But from this perspective there is an underlying intention that was motivated by some type of pattern. Every action we take has an intention behind it. It’s an impulse that motivates us. It’s the link between the mind and behavior. We’re not going to do something unless there’s that mental impulse behind it. If there’s no mental impulse to move it won’t happen. Unless it’s gravity. If you are sitting up when you die, you fall forward, it’s not intention that’s creating the movement it’s the law of gravity. That’s the distinction between some action that might not be generated out of intention. The vast majority of our behavior has an intention behind it. This intention is in and of itself ethically neutral. Any behavior has this energetic impulse behind it. It’s the moment where we can know before something happens that is about to happen. And we can actually see this as we bring mindfulness to our experience, we can start to see that we know were going to move before we move.

As an example, while in sitting meditation you notice that your nose itches, you might notice that you’re going to lift your arm and scratch the itch before it happens. That’s noticing the intention. Noticing the impulse of something that you’re about to do. This energetic impulse is a mental event that moves our behavior. It’s a mental event that moves our behavior. I’ll give this analogy: if you have a soccer ball and you kick the soccer ball, the energetic movement of your leg, the swinging of your leg has some energy in it and it gets transferred to the soccer ball. That’s kind of how intention works. There’s this energetic impulse and it motivates something to happen. When you swing your leg to kick the soccer ball the soccer ball moves. You’ve got the cause, that impulse, that swing, and then the impulse gets translated into the movement, the result of the soccer ball moving. Our intentions move us in a direction. The direction that we end up moving if you have a soccer ball. You can kick it from one side and the soccer ball will go that way and if you kick it from the other side it will go the other way. So, there’s a directionality in the example of the soccer ball that you can kind of move the ball in a particular direction based on where you kick it from and likewise in our minds the directionality of our intentions is defined by what motivates those intentions. The intention itself is neutral.

Accompanying that intention is a motivation; why that intention is being put into place. Let’s say you’re getting ready to say something to somebody. There’s that energetic impulse to speak and there’s a reason why you’re getting ready to speak. You’re getting ready to speak because you want to convey some information or because you’re a little ticked off and you want to say something in response, or you’re getting ready to speak because there’s this sense of wanting to connect or help somebody. There’s all kinds of reasons why we do things. So, it is not just the intention but the intention and the motivation together. the intention itself is neutral.

The motivation is what gives the spin to our actions. That spin, that motivation, can be either skillful or unskillful. If it’s unskillful it’s generally motivated out of greed, aversion or delusion. It’s motivated out of some of these deeper habits of wanting to hold on to things that are pleasant, wanting to get rid of things that are unpleasant and spacing out about things we don’t particularly care about or notice. Not connecting with things. Those motivations, if we are acting out of unskillful motivations, if we’re acting out of greed, aversion, or delusion, the teaching on karma says that those actions will tend to lead us in the direction of suffering. If we’re acting out of skillful motivations; non-greed, non-aversion, non-delusion or to put it more positively: non-greed out of generosity, non-aversion out of kindness and compassion, non-delusion out of wisdom and clarity. If were motivated out of wisdom, clarity, compassion, kindness, generosity that tends to move us towards happiness. So essentially the definitions of skillful and unskillful are those things that are unskillful move us toward suffering and those things that are skillful move us toward happiness. The definitions of skillful and unskillful come out of this natural law that when we behave in ways that are motivated out of greed, aversion, or delusion we tend to suffer. Again, the Buddha talks about this as a natural law. It’s not something that he says is just a good idea to believe it’s just what’s happening. This is just what’s happening. Whether you believe it or not it’s happening. Just like the law of gravity. It’s just happening. So, the definition of skillful and unskillful, the definition of what takes us to happiness or takes us to suffering comes out of this natural law.

The teaching on karma is the capacity of our intentional actions to produce a morally or ethically appropriate result. The intentional actions being motivated out of greed, aversion, or delusion produce a result that leads us toward suffering. The actions out of non-greed, non-aversion, non-delusion tend to lead us toward happiness.

Now I need to talk a little bit about the distinction between karma and the result. The karma itself is that the movement, the direction of the impulse, the intention combined with its motivation, that is our karma. The result of karma is the effect that happens as a result of those motivations. So essentially you can think of karma as being the cause and the result as being the effect. Again, the example of kicking that soccer ball. When you kick it from the right side it tends to go to the left. In this case, to make this analogy, the karma is the moving of the leg kicking from the right-hand side. The result or the effect is that the ball moves to the left. In this case, the karma is the intention combined with the motivation. That’s a little different from how we typically talk about karma. The way I mostly hear people using the word karma in everyday conversation is that they say “oh well that happened. That’s just your karma”. They’re talking about the result. They’re using karma to mean the result of karma as opposed to that intentionality. So, with the result we often think in terms of cause and effect. As something that happens there’s a cause there’s an immediate effect. With karma the effect, or the result, may or may not be immediate. It may not happen right away. This is where the soccer ball analogy breaks down because when you move the leg to kick the ball the ball moves immediately. So that’s an immediate result.

With karma, with the way we engage in our lives, certain things that we do may not produce an immediate result. It’s kind of like the karma is a seed that is planted. Karma is very often talked about as being a seed. Kind of like the potential for something. The capacity or the potential of our intentional action to produce an ethically appropriate result. The seed represents potential. You plant the seed in the ground and it takes causes and conditions to come together for that seed produce the plant. It takes time for that seed to produce the plant. That seed might sit in the ground for months before enough water comes along to moisturize it and create the sprout. It’s similar with karma. We plant the seeds based on the way we behave. If we are engaging in actions of greed we’re planting a lot of seeds of greed. When the conditions are ripe those seeds will sprout. A simple example: suppose you tell a lie to somebody. Immediately the impact of telling a lie, I can envision a couple of different ways that it might impact you. If you tell a lie to somebody you might have an immediate impact of feelings, some agitation or worry. “Is that person going to find out I told this lie?” There might just be this immediate kind of agitation as a result or perhaps there might be a sense of relief because we don’t have to deal with that person, that’s over, I can just let that go. The immediate result may be widely varied depending on what’s going on for you. Suppose five months later that person finds out that you lied to him. There may at that point be consequences. Painful consequences that come up. The seed was planted and then the conditions came together years later or months later for some of the results from that intention to manifest. When the karma comes into its result, and often this is spoken about in the Sutras’ as “the karma ripens”, the result is felt by us as happiness or painfulness depending on the seeds that were planted. If the seeds of greed, aversion, or delusion were planted there will be some kind of painfulness that results from those seeds. If the seeds of generosity, kindness, compassion, wisdom and clarity were planted there will be some kind of happiness that results from those seeds.

The results of karma are not deterministic. This is the place where people sometimes misunderstand the teaching of karma and in fact this is a way in which the Buddhist teachings have diverged from many of the teachings of his day. There was a contingent of teachers in his time that felt like if you behave this way these are the consequences. The teaching on karma is a teaching on cause-and-effect. Skillful actions tend toward happiness and unskillful actions tend toward suffering. Rather than it being a kind of deterministic thing, that if you do this thing, for instance if you are murderer you’ll go to hell. That kind of simplistic notion that if you have murdered somebody You’ll go to hell. That’s one-way that deterministic teachings are taught. That’s simplistic. Certain actions lead to certain results. The Buddha said actually karma is much more fluid than that. It depends on the web of causes and conditions that come together.

It’s a network of vast causes and conditions that come together and the karma that happens in a moment, the attention and the motivation that happen in a moment, are arising from a field of experience and conditions and that field will greatly impact how that karma is experienced, what the result of that karma is. So, there’s many conditions in the world and many conditions in our minds that impact that tendency towards suffering or happiness. The Buddha said, “for anyone who says that in whatever way a person makes karma, that is how is it experienced.” (essentially in the deterministic way, i.e.: somebody does this then you have this result) There is no living of the holy life. There is no opportunity for right ending of stress or suffering but for anyone who says that a person makes karma to be felt in such and such a way – that is how the result is experienced – there is the living of the holy life there is the opportunity for the right ending of suffering.”

What that means is when a person makes karma to be felt in such and such a way, essentially, it’s saying that when we act out of greed aversion or delusion we will tend to experience unpleasantness, there will be some unpleasantness that results from that, the degree of that unpleasantness may vary widely.

Likewise, with skillful actions we make actions out of non-greed, non-aversion, non-delusion that will result in some pleasant or happy experience, the degree of which may vary widely. Further into this teaching he says there is a case where a trifling evil deed done by a certain individual takes him to hell. There’s a case where the very same sort of trifling evil deed done by another individual is experienced in the here and now and for the most part barely appears for a moment. So, this is really pointing to the conditions he says that the reason for this has to do with the climate in which that action happens. If we keep using the soccer ball analogy it’s as if in kicking that soccer ball, there’s a strong wind blowing and if the wind is blowing in this direction and you’re trying to kick the soccer ball in that direction it’s going to tend to go in that direction but then it’s going to get carried with the wind. Or if the wind is blowing same direction that you’re kicking soccer ball if you kick it in that way it’s going to get amplified it’s going to go even further. The wind in this example is like the climate of our minds. If we have cultivated a lot of unskillful actions, if we lived in a way that has not been so wholesome then our unskillful actions have stronger consequences. But if we do that same unskillful action, but we have been generally engaged in wholesome actions like being kind, like being compassionate, not harming or engaging in non-harming, of engaging ethically in the world, it’s as if we’re kicking the ball into the wind and it mitigates the result of that action. Does this make sense?

The mental climate in which an action is made impacts the result. This is not a deterministic teaching it’s not a hard and fast thing. The Buddha gives another analogy, he says that suppose a man were to drop a salt crystal into a small amount of water in a cup. Would that water become salty and unfit to drink? Yes. It’s a small amount of water and you’re putting a relatively good size chunk of salt in it. He goes on to say if you take that same salt crystal and drop it into the river and then take a glass of that river water you’re not going to taste the salt. The salt is there. It is there but it is diluted by the size of the river.

There’s another aspect around this teaching on karma that not only does the climate of our mind impact how karma unfolds but our intentional actions are mitigated by the climate in which the action occurs whether we have generally engaged in wholesome or unwholesome behavior. The action we choose to do now if we engage and try to act skillfully, act in wholesome ways, can radically alter the tendencies if we have been behaving in very unskillful ways. So that climate of our mind can be radically altered by choosing in this moment to begin to act skillfully.

There is a story in the Suttas about this. I love this story because it really speaks to me about this possibility of transforming ourselves. It’s a story of a mass murderer in the time of the Buddha. There was a man named Angulimala, mala means garland or chopped necklace and anguli means finger, and he was a mass murderer. He off the little fingers of each of his victims and had strung them onto a garland that he wore around his neck. So Angulimala means finger garland. He killed many, many people. The story says he killed 999 people and he was greatly feared. The king at the time was trying to find ways to catch him. It seemed as though he was unstoppable. Anybody who would go into try to stop him would end up being killed. The Buddha found out about him somehow and the story goes that he kind of surveyed Angulimalas’ mind with his own mind through his psychic powers of mind reading and he discovered through looking at his mind that he actually had the capacity to become free from suffering. To wake up.  To be completely purified, to radically let go of this path that he was on and shift toward a path of purity and freedom. So, he put himself on Angulimala’s path, but the story goes that Angulimala, seeing the Buddha, thought this victim will be easy. He had set out to get 1000 fingers, so he thought this was his last one. The Buddha, through his psychic powers, made it appear as though the he was walking very slowly and no matter how fast Angulimala ran to try to catch him he couldn’t catch him. Angulimala became frustrated and yelled at the Buddha “stop, stop” and the Buddha said, “I have stopped.”. Angulimala said, “You haven’t stopped. You need to stop.” And this somehow turned Angulimala’s mind. And to make a very long story short I don’t have time to tell the whole story, he decided to become a monk under the Buddha and practiced meditation and he became completely enlightened. He let go completely of his unskillful actions.

 I can only imagine what it must have been like for him to sit in meditation and remember his actions. It must’ve been extremely painful to do that kind of purification, the very painful purification that is the result of his karma. The mental pain and suffering of sitting through the memories, of reliving those murders and realizing how much harm he had done. Those were some of the results of that karma. And then it was said that after he became fully awakened he would go out for an alms round and the people in the villages wouldn’t give him any food because they knew he was a mass murderer and they didn’t want to support him. He was ordained as a monk and they didn’t particularly want to kill him or anything, but they would throw rocks at him and he would come back with nicks and cuts and bruises and stuff like that. After going on the alms round. The Buddha said to him, “Bear it, you are suffering here now in a minor way for that which you might have burned in hell for thousands of years.” So, to me this teaching really points to the fact that even with massive unwholesome tendencies we can turn around the action by bringing our attention to our experience. It takes strong mindfulness, courage, dedicated attention and it really is mindfulness that is the key. This teaching of Angulimala really points us to the present moment.

It is through the present moment that we can transform our karma. We can transform our choices. The only place we can choose is now. We cannot change our choices from the past. They have been set in place, they been set in motion. By choosing now how we respond to our situation, given the choices from the past, choosing skillfully now begins to turn our minds toward happiness. It may be a slow turn. But the understanding of this teaching of karma is that it does turn us toward happiness. The power here is mindfulness. It Gives us the ability to start to see these choices. These choices I talked about in the beginning as being under the radar. These choices that come out of habits and patterns that we feel that we can’t see or control. Mindfulness begins to lower the horizon of the subconscious. In my own experience I have seen that the choices that we make, what seem to be subconscious choices coming out of habitual patterns, they can be seen as mindfulness get stronger and it is mindfulness that does this work. Beginning to be able to be continuous with our mindfulness to just notice moment to moment what is happening. As we get more continuous with mindfulness these subtler choices start to be revealed to us and as those choices are revealed, as they become apparent to us, we begin to have a choice.

When we see that there’s a choice being made we have the opportunity. There’s a place where we can decide because in that moment of intention the action has not yet happened. So, in seeing an intention arise and seeing a motivation arise with it we begin to have a little bit of say. Do I follow through on this? It’s a slow process. Some of what we get to do is see our choices. See an unskillful motivation and see that the momentum of that is strong. And we get to see that the choice was made and then we get to experience the consequences of that choice. And this is not a mistake. This is how the minds begins to understand. So part of the way the training works is that as we see the choices that are made and understand how choices are made and we understand the results of those choices, the mind itself in a very natural way, again this is a natural law, it feels that some way in which our minds and bodies are put together that when the mind begins to understand that it’s choices out of habits and patterns are leading us to suffering it begins to let go of those choices because ultimately our minds and bodies don’t want to suffer. When we see how suffering is constructed, constructed, it begins to dismantle itself. It sounds kind of magical but it’s actually like a natural law in a way. The reason why it doesn’t happen automatically is because we have a fundamental misunderstanding about what happiness is. We think happiness is getting what we want and getting rid of what we don’t want. And in a moment, we feel a little bit of relief from that movement. We feel a small amount of relief when we get something that we want or get rid of something we don’t want. I figured out for this moment I have some control. I have figured this out. And that feels good there’s a sense of control there. Yet what we haven’t seen is all of the momentum of greed and aversion underneath. And we aren’t really getting to see the ultimate consequences of those choices. As mindfulness begins to reveal the choices and the consequences the practice does its work on us. So that’s the fundamental teaching around karma.

One of the main areas in which people get confused around this teaching on karma is because often the teaching on karma is connected to the teaching on rebirth. There is this notion of past lives coming in and influencing what’s happening to us now. That’s how people talk about the teachings on karma. They say karma means that the things I did in my past lives are impacting me now. The understanding of it is basically what I’ve described around choices that we make. Choices that are made. The intention and the motivation that come together in the moment. That process is what is understood to be the kind of arc of the law of karma. With respect to rebirth the understanding is simply that the process is simply more than just fitting into this single life.

We think about karma as a flow of energy, that there may be a flow of energy that comes from a previous life into this life. Now I don’t know about this. I don’t have any evidence about that in my own experience for rebirth. And for me the issue around karma with respect to the teaching of rebirth is a little bit of a red herring. It’s not that important to me because I have clearly seen that in this life moment to moment how this teaching unfolds. It’s really very clear to me that when I behave skillfully my life moves in the direction of more happiness of more peacefulness. It’s very clear to me that this teaching of looking at my choices that I’m making and the motivation behind them in this moment is what is making me happier in my life. That is what I care about with respect to this teaching. Whether or not the stream of conditions comes from the beginning of my birth or from thousands of lives before is less relevant. The way to engage with this teaching is in this moment. Can you meet this moment with the skillful choice? That’s the only moment you have any control and it’s not even really control it’s more like there is some choice that can be made in this moment. And this is the only moment that we can do that. This is the place to engage. Here and now. Whether or not it continues in future lives I don’t know. If it does I’m on a path that looks like it would be helpful. If it doesn’t I’m happier in this life. So, to me it feels like engaging with this teaching it’s not so necessary, at least for me, to really have the sense of belief of previous lives.

 The above material is the transcript of a Dharma talk presented at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California on October 7, 2010 by Andrea Fella.                                       Printed with permission of the author.  

 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License  

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