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Karma and prejudice
My study and practice of meditation and understanding of Buddhism are new and wide open. So much seems to fall in place, and then there are a few things about a Buddhist perspective that just don’t sit right. One of them is karma. My biggest sticking point has been wondering how racism (and sexism and anti-Semitism and homophobia—basically any institutionalized harm by one cultural group against another) is explained or understood when karmic “law” is applied. It seems that karma can be understood to undergird racism—that a whole group of people must have done something in their past to bring this on. For real? That can’t be right. When I have asked a few people who have engaged in more formal study and practice than I, they have not been able to offer a response that helps me to understand karma in a different (i.e., not-racist) fashion. Can you?
(signed) Karen Johnston
John Baker replies: Karma is the law which governs the world of samsara, confusion, and suffering. That is, sentient beings make an error (’krul pa in Tibetan) creating samsara: they separate out “other” from the wide open field of reality. Suddenly there is a figure, an object, against the ground of being. This implies the existence of an observer of the “other,” which is “I.” The doctrine of karma explains the developing and complicating relationship between the fictional “I” and “other,” a relationship informed by doubt and fear. “I” and “other” are lies, their relationship a frightening story we tell ourselves in our mental events (thoughts, emotions, etc.), a story full of hope and fear for an imagined future. So, falling into the error of duality, sentient beings become actors in their own scary stories.
The law of karma is the law which governs the dualistic fictions, the dualistic dramas we live. And these dramas are not nice: they are always self-centered at best, selfish and much worse when they become really mean and neurotic. Racism, sexism, homophobia, prejudice, and discrimination of all kinds are some of the many crimes that make the fictions of samsara so dangerous. The Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche described the two worlds—of confusion and of sanity—in the text, The Letter of the Black Ashe:
When fear and doubt occurred
Towards the confidence which is primordially free,
Countless multitudes of cowards arose.
When the confidence which is primordially free
Was followed and delighted in,
Countless multitudes of warriors arose.
-- Shambhala: The Sacred path of the Warrior
