A very intelligent student asked me the other day, "What is karma?" Although this woman has an academic background, it was clear to me that my answer, "Karma? Karma is physics.." was not either adequate or satisfactory. So, what is karma?
Karma is the Sanskrit word that is used for the relationship that exists between causes and the resultant associated effects.
We deal with "karma" everyday, and we discover that karma has two distinct kinds; proximate or direct karma, and secondary or cooperating karma. Let us take a common effect and work backward to illustrate this principle. Yesterday I was walking under the edge of a roof and some snow slipped off the roof and landed on me. Here we can see many kinds of causes. In the case of the snow itself, its cause was the moisture in the air and the cold weather. Of course it doesn't take us even a moment to see that we have simplified a great deal here and left out the karma of the water vapor, etc. etc. However, the sun shining on the roof is also a karma, and this karma also was a part of the process, because it was the partial melting that allowed the snow to slip in a large clump off of the roof to the ground below. At this point we have left out some other steps, although even the karma of gravity ought to be considered. For the sake of simplicity, we will leave out a lot of smaller pieces. We will get to these pieces later, but for the moment, just knowing that they exist is sufficient.
So, the snow is there, ready to fall, perhaps already beginning to fall, and I walk under the edge of the roof. PLOP! Does the snow hit me, or miss? "Ah!" you think, beginning to understand, it depends on my karma! This is quite true! The factors that put me outside at the exact time that the snow begins its fall are so many that it would literally take a lifetime to recount them. Likewise, if the snow does hit me, as it did, the matter of whether it made just a small discomfort or broke my neck is also attributable to karma.
In the ordinary view, we overlook these things, we pay little or no attention to them, but if we miss the central idea, we become hopelessly confused. What is this central idea? It is that we, you and I and our friend and family and even the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are all subject to karma. No exceptions, no "special rules," no divine intervention, no suspension of the laws of the universe just because it pleases us or benefits us. Gravity and electricity do not "turn on" or "turn off" -- they are constants that we can understand enough to make use of in daily life, but from a fundamental viewpoint, we do not "understand" them. Ask any competent physicist and he or she will tell you that what is NOT known about these things is significantly greater than what is known. "Not completely understood" is not the same as "not useful." When we look at karma in an "overall" sort of view, we see that there are other ways to divide karma that the "proximate" and "secondary" classifications. Proximate, in our example, being both the snow on the roof and our walking outside. Secondary, being the fact that we were in the vicinity and that there was snow that was melting. These other ways have to do with what I shall call, for lack of a better term, the mental ingredient of karma, that is, the desire and attitude of person or persons doing the acting. To illustrate this, let me modify my example. In this case, the snow, instead of falling off the roof, is thrown at me in the form of a snowball. Here, the proximate cause is the snowball thrower, and again have a multitude of factors. The snowball could have been meant to hit me. It could have been meant to miss. The intention could have been to be amusing or to inflict some harm. These factors are quite separate from what actually happens. A snowball that was to suppose to hit might miss, one that was to have missed might hit, one that was to amuse and be playful might hurt a great deal and one that might have been meant to hurt could have been amusing. So many factors, so little real knowledge.
This brings me to the second major point of this discussion, "The response!" We have already seen that it is impossible to know why we are in a particular place at the particular time in which the snow falls on us. It is also now understandable that we can not know what the karma of the snowball thrower is in relation to us. Perhaps the one who throws the snowball is also unclear about his/her motivation. In such a case how can we possible add up all the factors to see "why" we got hit on the head. Indeed, the snowball is a chilling reminder of how inadequate our knowledge of events is. We also can not know if the "whack" of the snowball was "good" or "bad". Perhaps we know how we choose to feel about it, but this is little indication of the REAL end result. Now OUR karma and OUR thoughts and OUR reactions add to the mix and like an atom in a chain reaction, our course is forever changed. Only if we know the future and what it will bring us can we correctly and adequately judge the result of that snowball, which is of course impossible. But we try to do it anyway, often with very sad results. The Buddha taught us to try to END our involvement with karma by means of the "Eightfold Path" and by the creation of "good" karma to offset the "bad" karma that we always end up creating by our ignorance and delusions. The final goal was to minimize all karmas so that we were not longer tied to the Wheel of Birth and Death so strongly and were thus able to more easily gain our freedom. Karma is not "mysterious" or "magical" -- rather it is ordinary people who engage in magical thinking when they fool themselves into believing that their thoughts and actions are somehow exempt from the normal flow of events in the universe. This foolishness is compounded when those same people turn around and judge themselves and others based on their imperfect knowledge and their prejudices. We are foolish to believe we fully understand this process but we are even more foolish if we do not acknowledge its place in our lives or its effect on us.
