Tricycle | Awake in the World

I believed I understood karma, both good and bad and how it affects our lives and futures. I thought I understood how it carries over and affects us beyond our death, until recently. Now I am a bit confused. If ultimately in Buddhism, there is no "I", "me" or eternal soul, and none of these carry forward after death, then what does karma affect? If we are just sort of plugged into a 'life force' or the Buddha-nature, and then our bodiess die with no soul to move on to the next life, then how or what does the karma we gather during life affect? Thank you.

Nagapriya responds:

The problems you indicate have been problems for Buddhist philosophers for centuries and I am not sure they have ever been fully resolved. Buddhists have offered various answers down the ages, the most frustrating of which is to say that the workings of karma are beyond human understanding.

Buddhist philosophy sees existence in terms of dependent origination; things arise in dependence upon conditions which, in turn, give rise to other things. Rather than fixed entities that endure through time, there is instead an endless flux of conditions. That goes for us too. We tend to think of ourselves as having a ‘self’ because we have a sense of continuity; we can remember things that happened yesterday, last year, even in our childhood. However, the fact that there is continuity does not imply identity. In what way are we ‘the same’ as our childhood selves?

I sometimes use a genetic model to explain how karmic continuity could potentially continue across lives. Children are the product of their parents’ genes, with consequent family resemblances, but they are not identical with them. While it is often loosely said that ‘we’ will reap our karma in future lives, it would probably be more accurate to say that our ‘karmic genes’ (to coin a phrase) will be passed on to a future being who will inherit some of our patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.

But I also think of karmic consequences as transindividual; our acts have implications not just for some future descendant but also for our family, friends, co-workers, and even the world in general. Our actions reverberate not just across space through our social network but through time as well. In this way, what we do now may have consequences not just for ‘our’ future self but for many other beings. Such reflections may help us to take more care about the choices we make in the present.