Tricycle | Awake in the World

Karma has taken a firm hold on the Western imagination. Everyone, it seems, knows about it, many believe in it, and a few even puzzle over its mysterious workings. A popular sitcom—“My Name is Earl”—has been dedicated to it, as have episodes of shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Sex and the City,” among others. In short, karma has become part of the popular Western vocabulary, but perhaps not for the best of reasons. If it is to be truly useful in the process of spiritual transformation, our understanding of karma may require a serious makeover.

Karma is commonly taken to mean something like “what goes around comes around” or “you reap what you sow,” gesturing toward a principle of cosmic justice. Its attractiveness to the contemporary Western world may lie partly in its seeming preservation of the ethical order of Christian morality, without all the God stuff. The idea of karma seems to fulfil a deep-seated need for a just world; after all, if good is punished and evil rewarded, then what is the point of being virtuous? Karma seems to reassure us that bad people will not get away with their offences and that good deeds will be rewarded.

Yet this understanding of karma contains several problems that make it an uncomfortable fit for our post-modern world. The concept of karma evolved within Indian religions, but modern Western discourse has removed it from its original context. Traditionally, karma offered a crude, carrot-and-stick model of ethical conduct. As such, it served as a method of crowd control, keeping the unruly masses in some sort of order. Karma is also inextricably linked to the notion of rebirth, or reincarnation, in some traditions.
Thus, karma is an instrument of punishment and reward, and a blunt one at that. According to tradition, if we act well we will generate merit, which will lead to positive outcomes, while if we act badly we will exhaust our merit, leading to negative outcomes. In rough-and-ready terms, this may seem common sense. Yet, if we look a little closer, life does not conform so easily to this model. Are rich people necessarily the most compassionate, generous, and ethical individuals? It may be quite the opposite: it may be precisely a person’s greed and indifference towards others that enables him or her to live a sufficiently blinkered life to amass wealth. A tender conscience is no recipe for worldly success.

Similarly, if we look at people who are poor and suffering, are they the most unethical, most selfish, and the least concerned for others? Many unfortunate people lead virtuous lives. So if there is no correlation between our conduct and the benefits we enjoy or the hardships we endure, what does this say for karma? It would seem a redundant concept, at best encouraging a deluded wish-fulfilment, at worst rationalizing the suffering of some and indulgences of others.

Admittedly, this model sees the benefits and penalties of karma in only material terms, but this is how Buddhist texts tend to talk about it. Physical beauty, high social status, and material well-being are all seen as indicators of previous good karma. A further difficulty here is that karma is seen as operating over more than one lifetime, perhaps many lifetimes. So it may be that someone who acts badly in this life enjoys material benefits, even prestige and influence, but karma reassures us that they will be “punished” in a future life. At the same time, while our good acts may go unnoticed, we are investing in our future; it will pay dividends in the life or lives to come. Consequently, as traditionally conceived, karma demands a considerable level of faith. But what if we don’t have that faith? What if we don’t—or can’t—believe in rebirth as traditionally understood?

First of all, we should remember that karma is all about intention: its primary impact is on our own minds. Whether or not our deeds have worldly repercussions, they will certainly impact our minds. If we act from skilful motives, we will develop creative habits of thought, feeling, and behaviour; unskilful motives lead to destructive patterns. Karma, then, determines the kind of people we choose to become; we are perpetually unfinished paintings, retouched with every brushstroke of thought and action. It follows that many of the decisive consequences of karma will be intangible. How, for instance, do we measure the value of contentment? What is a clear conscience worth?
Moreover, in terms of worldly consequences, the benefits of good karma may not be that dramatic. Our good karma may ripen in subtle ways: a smile from a stranger who catches our eye in the street; an old friend calling us out of the blue; a courteous wave from a motorist we admit into traffic. These may seem scant rewards for our efforts, but they serve to build a world of dignity, respect, and mutual sensitivity.

But thinking in terms of rewards leaves us with a very restricted platform for creative behaviour. A further limitation of karma, as commonly conceived, is that it is self-referential. In other words, it encourages us to think in terms of how what we do will affect us, now and in the future. It speaks to the urge for self-preservation, which on the one hand promotes fear, and on the other, moves us to act ethically for selfish reasons. One might say, Well, whatever works. But if our sole motivation for acting ethically is to avoid punishment and generate personal rewards, what happens when these things do not follow? We are placed in Job’s position; our faith is severely tested.

A further problem with this self-referential conception of karma is that it requires us to imagine ourselves in a future life, as the inheritors of our present karmic legacy. However, given that Buddhism rejects the notion of an enduring self, it will not be “us” who inherit our karma anyway, but someone else: we won’t remember our past lives. So why bother? We may as well live for today, taking life on credit and letting someone else (albeit with some of our habits) pay later on. This line of thinking seems to be the signature of our relentlessly disposable culture, best exemplified in the deepening ecological crisis. We don’t think of the consequences for tomorrow, which allows us to continue to lay the ground for planetary disaster today.

There is, however, a different motivation for pursuing ethical conduct, one that moves beyond self-reference, fear of punishment, and hope of reward, yet involves an imaginative projection of our conduct into the future. This model of karma, revamped for present-day realities, appeals to our generosity but remains impeccably traditional. Such a model encourages us to be more concerned with what future generations will reap than with how we will benefit here and now. One might explain this model of karma as a universal version of family inheritance.

Many parents aspire to build wealth, in part so that they can pass it on to their children. In doing so, they don’t think only of how they will benefit, but are able to imagine their children’s lives after they are gone, picturing their children enjoying the fruits of their labors. They want to invest not just in their own futures, but in the futures of their children. Rather than leaving their children to pick up the pieces of their broken lives, a loving parent will want to give their children a positive legacy to build on.

Legacies are karmic as well as financial. Through our thoughts and actions, we sow a karmic legacy that others will reap. Some of the fruits of this legacy will be tasted by us and those around us, but others will mature in the future, to be harvested by later generations. The question is: What kind of legacy do we want to leave? If we envision the future as something that we can donate to those who come after us, our donation is our karma.

This model reflects a central theme in Mahayana Buddhism, and especially the Bodhisattva Ideal. The bodhisattva (awakening being) does not pursue awakening for himself alone, but for the benefit of all beings. Through his conduct, he hopes to ultimately create a Pure Land, a utopia to which all are invited and where all may gain complete awakening. The myth of the Buddha Amitabha (Amida), as told in the Longer Sukhavati (Happy Land) scripture, embodies this theme of spiritual generosity. The aspiring bodhisattva pledged to build a Pure Land that incorporated the best features of all other Pure Lands. In transferring his vast store of merit, he enabled all beings to enter his Pure Land simply by calling his name.

In some Buddhist traditions, the merit we accrue from our skilful conduct is dedicated to our own future spiritual development. However, in the context of the bodhisattva path, this merit is seen not as our possession but as something we hold in trust for all beings. The entire universe is a shareholder in our merit and we consequently have a duty to all beings to create as much spiritual capital as possible, in order to benefit as many beings as possible.

Empathy for future generations encourages us to pursue skilful conduct in the present, not solely for our own benefit, but because we care about the mess we might otherwise leave behind for others to clean up. As individuals, we may not be able to replicate the cosmic aspirations of the bodhisattva, but perhaps we can do so collectively. The sum total of our conduct may pave the way for the Pure Land.