The Concept of Karma
I have a group of students who are very analytical. They are having a difficult time with the concept of karma. Do you have any allegories, analogies, simple stories that can get this point across?
(signed) Kenneth F. Kuzmich
Asst. Professor, Humanities Dept.
Mitchell College, New London, CT
John Baker replies:
There are different aspects to the theory of karma. In its simplest form, it says that everything in samsara (the world seen through the veil of confusion) is the product of infinite causes and conditions, extending back through time. Taken to its logical extreme, absolutely everything that has ever occurred is a cause—proximate or remote—of everything else.
One might ask then, do I have free will, or is everything predetermined? The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche used this analogy to answer: It’s like a game of chess: Your position right now is the product of all your past moves. In the present moment, you have a certain amount of freedom: not unlimited freedom, but significant, as long as you continue to play the game. For instance, you can move your knight but only in the prescribed way. When you finish reading this, you can stay in the room where you are sitting or you can walk out, but you cannot fly out. On the other hand, you can stop playing the game altogether—step off the chessboard, as it were—which is what it means to become enlightened.
Another aspect of karma, according to the Yogacara School of Mahayana Buddhism, says that all our experiences are stored as seeds (bija) in the “storehouse consciousness” (alaya vijnana), which is similar to the unconscious in Freudian theory. Our memories are stored in the unconscious until something in consciousness triggers them into life. You are not thinking of your mother, but as soon as I mention her, the memory of her is activated.
These seeds “perfume” the storehouse consciousness. This means that even though I know nothing of your past, if I meet you, I may sense certain aspects of your past in your demeanor, your behavior. Your past “perfumes” your present.
Further, when events in the present trigger past memories, those memories color the way we experience the present, planting new seeds in the storehouse consciousness that will eventually be triggered into consciousness. Here’s an example. Imagine that a small boy is bitten by a dog. Naturally, the event is traumatic for the child, and is associated with pain and terror. But eventually it becomes just a memory, and the child does not think of the dog when no dogs are present. The seed of the experience, however, lies dormant in his unconscious, perhaps even changing the child’s personality by making him a bit more nervous in general.
Then one day the boy is walking down the street with his mother and sees a dog in the distance. The memory of his earlier run-in with the dog springs to life and he’s terrified. His mother, however, may not even notice the dog; she’s absorbed with looking in the shop windows.
As the dog approaches, it wags its tail, showing its friendly nature. Coaxed by his mother, the child relaxes and is eventually able to pat the dog on the head. His encounter with the friendly dog plants a new seed in his storehouse consciousness that will affect the way he greets the next dog he comes across.
Our past experiences—going back through countless lifetimes, not just this one—lie dormant until events in the present trigger them into consciousness, where they condition how we experience and respond to the world. You might even say they “create” the world. The child saw the dog; the adult saw shop windows. Different worlds, determined by the action of karma.
