Karma (Nichiren Buddhism)
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This document discusses the Buddhist concept of karma. It explains that karma refers to the chain of causes and effects that run through all lives, representing the link between past, present, and future. Actions like deeds, thoughts, and words create karma, either good or bad. Habitual patterns formed by karma influence a person's tendencies. However, through self-awareness and consistent Buddhist practice like chanting, one can change dominant life tendencies and accumulated karma from previous lives in order to alleviate suffering and create a better future.
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Karma (Nichiren Buddhism)
- 1. Part 3 Karma Nichiren Buddhism
- 2. Objectives and Rules • What are our objectives? • Do you remember the rules? 2
- 3. Memorise Numbers Memorize these numbers in alphabetical order: • Eight • Five • Four • Nine • One • Seven • Six • Ten • Three • Two 3
- 4. Say It In Sequence • Say the numbers from one to ten in numerical sequence beginning with “one”. • Stand up (and remain standing). • Say the numbers from one to ten in alphabetical order (when the numbers are spelled out in English), beginning with “eight” 4
- 5. Old Learning Interference • What we have already learned interferes with what we are trying to learn afresh. • It is easier to learn something new if we have a blank, beginner's mind. It is difficult to learn something new if we have previously learned a related skill (or knowledge or belief) in a different fashion. • What are the examples of old learning interfering with new? • Keep an open mind about alternative approaches. • Be aware of your current knowledge and beliefs. 5
- 6. Cause and Effect Karma QuickTime™ and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture. 6
- 7. FATE What is Karma DESTINY • A concept of karma is often misused, described as destiny or fate, something that is inevitable. Wrong! • The concept of karma is linked to the Law of Cause and Effect, central to Buddhist philosophy, similar to that upheld by modern science - everything in the universe exists within the framework of cause and effect. However, Buddhist concept is not limited to those things that can be seen or measured. Rather it includes the unseen or spiritual aspects of life, such as the sensation or experience of happiness or misery, kindness or cruelty. • The word KARMA in the ancient Sanskrit language originally meant ACTION linked to the verbs “do” or “make” • Karma is a term that describes the chain of actions or the chain of causes and effects that run through all our lives. It represents the constant link between the past, the present and the future. 7
- 8. We Create Our Own Karma • All of us we have a dominant life tendency (or a fundamental life state) which is in some measure a manifestation of our karma. It has a key role in everything about us: how we think, how we respond to circumstances, even an expression on our face. • Everyone without exception has karma: good or bad (negative) or both. We create it with everything that we do, which include our deeds, thoughts and words. • Damaging actions create much heavier karma that angry words. • Angry words heavier karma than a hostile or aggressive thoughts, which have never get translated into words and actions. • As we make this continuous stream of causes, we are simultaneously planting in our lives seeds (effects) that will manifest themselves in the future, when the external conditions are right. 8
- 9. Karma as Habitual Patterns • We often talk about karma in terms of habit or habitual patterns of thoughts and behaviour. Confronted with similar circumstances we tend to react in a similar way because of our karmic or dominant life tendency. • We carry with us our dominant life tendency and the latent effects of all the causes that we have made. They will be expressed in actions when the appropriate set of circumstances will come along. • All that is saying that we can’t escape from ourselves. We all know from our experience how deeply past action good or bad or indifferent are inscribed in the fabric of our lives and still have a profound resonance in our lives. Karma in essence is just putting a Buddhist name to this knowledge. It embodies the truth that causes and effects arise from within. • It is also important to remember that in Buddhist terms we carry our environment with us. All that means that our dominant life tendency will attract the same tendency from our environment where we have happened to end up. Compassion within will continue to attract compassion without. Just as anger within will attract anger without. 9
- 10. We Have to Change Within • If we have in our life things that repeatedly cause pain and grief, than changing our circumstances in some cosmetic way cannot have a lasting effect. Just as changing our clothes changes our appearance but cannot have an effect on our behaviour. • With the help of the Buddhist practice, we have to change our dominant life tendency that lies at the root of our troubles. We have to change within. • The critical starting point for any change is self-awareness. That is already a huge step forward. It is like equipping ourselves with a better pair of spectacles, which bring everything into sharper focus. • The awareness is that our actions are not determined by our karmic tendency but influenced by it. Paul & Peter quarrel example. • Awareness by itself cannot change deeply rooted karmic tendencies. Buddhism teaches that only through the consistent and steady daily Buddhist practice we can move our lives from the reactive states, such as anger and hunger towards the proactive life states of learning, realisation, bodhisattva and Buddhahood. • One of the meaning attached to the process of chanting is to bring out our strengths and the power of our Buddha nature. 10
- 11. Karma from Previous Lives • Karma is handed from one life to another. It determines the physical circumstances of this lifetime: appearance, place, health, wealth and even choice of parents. • We may accept the Buddhist representation of life or not. What are the alternatives to explain sufferings and the differences in people’s lives circumstances? 1. Pain and suffering has been created along with everything that have been created in the Universe, by one powerful creator. If one doesn’t believe in a powerful creator, it is not an explanation. 2. The suffering is just simply a matter of chance, a random throwing of a dice. The vast majority of people in the West would sit this camp. Logical position. In human terms it is entirely without hope or consolation. And human being without hope is in a desperate situation. 3. A Buddhist view. It seeks to establish a direct connection of individual responsibility between suffering experience at any stage of life and causes or actions that have been taken at some earlier stage. • At first glance it might seem unjust that this responsibility can be carried from one life to the next. But from a different prospective it also carries a great message of hope in two main ways: – It eliminates the idea of randomness and chaos in the occurrence of suffering (and as such unjust), which can be so disturbing to the human mind, that can become a major cause of suffering itself. – It empowers. It offers the chance of taking action to create a change in the situation. 11
- 12. Changing Accumulated Karma • Karma is about the FUTURE as well as the past. The future is created from this moment on and the causes for the future we make NOW. • An old Buddhist text says: "If you want to understand the causes that existed in the past, look at the results as they are manifested in the present. And if you want to understand what results will be manifested in the future, look at the causes that exist in the present." • Taking actions from now on will change the circumstances effecting and alleviating the way karma will appear in our lives. • Buddhism teaches that the most powerful cause that we can make to change karma is chanting. It enables us to take actions based on the wisdom, courage and compassion brought out from within. This is a break through the habits and patterns of our established behaviour which moves us from our LESSER self to our GREATER self. • In secular words, we all have a mean part of our characters and generous and outgoing one. Buddhism promises that the practice of chanting moves us from the meaner self towards the stronger and more resilient self. • We think that this enthusiastic and energising commitment in our daily practice is a key to changing unhappy karma. 12
- 13. Questions and Answers 13
- 14. The End 14
Editor's Notes
- Ask participants for examples of old learning interfering with new. If necessary, use these examples to get them started: If you have learned to drive on the right side of the road, you will have problems learning to drive in the United Kingdom, Australia, or South Africa where people drive on the left side. During the Olympic Games in Australia, many pedestrians got killed because they crossed the road after checking the traffic from the left side of the road. The accent we acquire during early childhood interferes with our attempts to change it during adult days. The work styles, beliefs, and standard procedures that we learned during successful business periods interfere with our ability to change them to cope with current realities. The stereotypes that we have acquired about other races, religions, and cultures interfere with our ability to accept and accommodate global realities. If we have taught our workers to depend on us for complete directions, it is difficult for them to acquire demonstrate initiative. If we have been taught to think in terms of linear cause-effect relationships, it is very difficult for us to acquire systems thinking. If we expect to learn from authoritative lectures, we have difficulty learning from a jolt.
- There is a close connection from the fundamental life state that we discussed in previous meeting and the elusive concept of karma. Although we all posses in our lives all of those 10 life states we all manifest it in the way that is unique to us. We all experience them in different combinations and with different degrees of intensity. But Buddhism teaching that all our life tend to be dominated by just one for those states. We still experience all of them and shift rapidly from one to another from moment to moment as we go through the day. But Buddhism teaches that we tend to inhabit one or two of them with much greater frequency than the others. We can say that we have dominant characteristics. Or as Buddhism describes this a dominant life tendency What is karma? Even within Asia, where the concept of karma has a long history and has been incorporated in a wide range of cultures, it is often misunderstood. Viewed from a negative, backward-looking perspective, karma has been used to encourage the disadvantaged members of society to accept their situation in life as being of their own making. Present suffering is attributed to negative causes made in the past. Considering themselves to blame for their situation, some people have fallen prey to a sense of powerlessness. This is, however, a distortion of the original meaning of karma as it is used in the Buddhist tradition. To accept the idea of karma does not mean to live under a cloud of guilt and vague anxiety, not knowing what bad causes we may have made in the past. Rather, it means to be confident that our destiny is in our own hands and that we have the power to transform it for the better at any moment. In the simplest terms, karma, which means actions, indicates the universal operation of a principle of causation, similar to that upheld by modern science. Science assures us that everything in the universe exists within the framework of cause and effect. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction," is a familiar principle. The difference between the materialistic causality of science and the Buddhist principle of karma is that the latter is not limited to those things that can be seen or measured. Rather, it includes the unseen or spiritual aspects of life, such as the sensation or experience of happiness or misery, kindness or cruelty.
- All of us we have a dominant life tendency (or a fundamental life state) which is in some measure a manifestation of our karma. It has a key role in everything about us: how we think, how we respond to circumstances, even an expression on our face. Everyone without exception has karma. We create it with everything that we do, which include not only our deeds, but thoughts and words as well. We can think about good karma, created for example by acts of compassion towards others, or courage in the face of difficulty, or bad karma, or negative karma, created for example by slandering somebody or simply being totally thoughtless and having no concern for the effect of our actions on others. Damaging actions create much heavier karma that angry words. And angry words heavier karma than a hostile or aggressive thoughts, which have never get translated into words and actions. As we make this continuous stream of causes, we are, according Buddhist view, simultaneously laying down or planting in our lives seeds (effects) that will manifest themselves at some time in the future, when the external conditions are right. So every action we tale leads to a future actions in an unbroken chain. That in brief is our karma. Some total of the causes and effects that we have generated in our lives. Not fate, not destiny. There is no external power in Buddhism that can predefine our fate. We create our own karma by the way we choose to live.
- That is why we often talk about karma in terms of habit or habitual patterns of thought and behaviour. Confronted with similar circumstances we tend to react in a similar way because of our karmic or dominant life tendency. People that know us well can often predict pretty closely how we are going to behave or respond to a given circumstances. They might even look out for it or make some kind of a joke of how predictable we are. We often berate ourselves looking back to something that we have just done and how can we repeat such a silly error just in the same way. How often do we cringe with embarrassment when we have a moment to reflect on response we’ve made or action we’ve taken. We can excuse ourselves that we have made it on the spare of the moment without time to consider, but that of course is precisely the point! In responding in that particular way, we reveal something that is inherent in our nature. Sometimes, people will frequently describe how successive relationships in their lives often with similar types of people have come to an end, having followed almost identical trajectory. So, karma is us. Thus the concept of karma seeks to teach above all that no one is responsible for our karma except ourselves. There is nothing to b… for blaming others for the similar sequence of events because it means in essence that we are denying our responsibility for whatever that has happened. And so setting ourselves up to repeat the same sort of actions. It is if you like an integral part of our lives, the essential part of who we are now, today. We cannot see or feel it of course, this karma, so we tend to ignore it. But this is ours just as clearly as our faces and figures are ours and in similar way both can reveal the accumulated history of our lives. We take it with us wherever we go, just like a backpack on our back. We can’t go across the world to itsanother part of the world and live it behind with the rest of the house furniture, hope to start again. Yes, we can, of course, but we can’t leave the causes and effects behind. We carry with us our dominant life tendency and the latent effects of all the causes that we have made which will be expressed in actions when the appropriate set of circumstances will come along. All that is saying that we can’t escape from ourselves. We all know from our experience how deeply past action good or bad or indifferent are inscribed in the fabric of our lives and still have a profound resonance in our lives. Karma in essence is just putting a Buddhist name to this knowledge. It embodies the truth that causes and effects arise from within. If we have in our life things that repeatedly cause pain and grief that changing our circumstances in some cosmetic way cannot have a lasting effect, just as changing our clothes can change our appearance but it cannot have an effect on our behaviour. To achieve real change we have to think about changing with the help of our Buddhist practice the dominant life tendency that lies at the root of our troubles. We have to change within. We are responsible for our karma which translates in our circumstances. Blaming others we deny our responsibility and set ourselves up to repeat the same actions. When we were talking of moving across the world, it is also important to remember that in Buddhism terms we carry our environment with us. All that means that our dominant life tendency will attract the same tendency from our environment where we have happened to end up. Compassion within will continue to attract compassion without. Just as anger within will attract anger without.
- The key point however that the karma is not in any way an outside force. The message of Buddhism is positive and constructive since it is about personal responsibility. We create karma as a result of our own actions. We are there entirely responsible for it. And Buddhism argues that we have within us a power to change it. The critical starting point for any change is self-awareness. That is already a huge step forward. It is like equipping ourselves with a better pair of spectacles. It certainly brings everything into sharper focus. We’ll become aware is that our actions are not determined by our karmic tendency but influenced by it. Thus, when Peter starts and aggressive row with Paul, let say, it maybe that Paul’s dominant tendency of anger would normally push him towards direct retaliation. But the awareness of what is really happening may provide just sufficient pause for judgement to come into play. To allow Paul to break the cycle. Instead of reaction to aggression karmicly with a bad cause he defects Peter’s aggression with the humoristic remark let say and restores the mood to one of the human argument. If this were to happen for example, friends of both who were standing by watching the exchange might realised this new unexpected side to Paul’s character, the change of his habitual pattern of behaviour. Awareness by itself cannot change deeply rooted karmic tendencies. Buddhism teaches that it is only through the consistent and steady our daily Buddhist practice that we can move our lives forward from the essentially reactive states, such anger and hunger towards the proactive life states of learning, realisation and bodhisattva and Buddhahood. One of the meaning attached to the process of chanting is to summon up. Changing karma undoubtedly involves summoning up with all our strengths and the power of our Buddha nature.
- Our life entity goes through successive periods of active waking life on this Earth (maybe not only?) and periods of latency. The karma is handed on from one period of life to the next. All accumulated effects from all previous lives without exception are carried forward to the next life. We have no memory of actions of previous lives. In what sense can we be responsible for them? Difficult to accept who has not been born to Asian culture that not only we are born with karma attached to unremembered actions in previous lives but which also plays the determining role for the physical circumstances in our life. It gives the explanations for all the differences of place, health, wealth and even choice of parents. How can we be settled from birth with the effects inherent from someone that we don’t know and can’t remember? Buddhism argues that it didn’t create this concept of karma and the truth of its inheritance, but that it is an observation. Physical laws of the universe are not created by scientists but observed and described. We accept the Buddhist representation of life or not. It doesn’t mean that it will go away. But it does pause the question what are the options? What are the alternatives to explain the differences in people’s lives’ circumstances, which often appears of being totally random and undeserved. These are questions which in many ways are simply unanswerable. But if we were to seek some sort of answer, there are little options to choose from: Pain and suffering has been created along with everything that have been created in the Universe, but one powerful creator. It leaves us the question WHY? If one doesn’t believe in a powerful creator for him it is not an explanation Second option, the suffering is just simply a matter of chance or bad luck inexplicable in a rational sense, simply a matter of a random throwing of a dice. The vast majority of people in the West would sit this camp. This is a logical position. In human terms it is entirely without hope or consolation. And human being without hope is in a desperate situation. The third option is a Buddhist view. It seeks to establish a direct connection of individual responsibility between suffering experience in any stage of life and causes or actions that have been taken at some earlier stage. At first glance it might seem immensely unjust that this responsibility can be carried from one life to the next. But from a slightly different prospective it also carries with it a great message of hope in two main ways. One, it eliminate the idea of randomness and chaos in the occurrence of suffering. It can be so disturbing to the human mind, that become a major cause of suffering itself. The second and most important, the Buddhist proposition offers the chance of restoration of taking action to create a change in the situation. Taking action it is to overcome the suffering in creating a new direction in life. It is not a case for the first two options.
- Can we change karma? Can we transform fundamentally those parts of life that cause us suffering? All Buddhist teaching are focusing on responding this question? Enabling fundemantal change in our lives at many levels: Changing unhappy karma Changing circumstances to increase the sum total of wellbeing in our lives Changing those things that hold us back from fulfilling our potential The very heart of Buddhist teaching is that karma is about FUTURE in our lives as well as the past. The future is created from this moment on and the causes we start to make NOW. This is the message of the greatest hope and optimism. The low level of cause and effects is immutable - at some point of the future we will inevitably experience the effect of harmful or damaging causes we made in the past. The actions that we take from now on will effect and alleviate the way those effects appear in our lives. It teaches that the most powerful and great cause that we can make is chanting and taking action on the wisdom, courage and compassion that brings out in us. In this way we can break through the habits and patterns of the behaviour that have been established in our life and continue to cause grief. It talks about moving of our lesser self to our greater or essential self. We don’t necessarily have to use this sort of language. We all know that we have a mean part of our characters that we are not particularly proud of. Inversely we have a more open, generous and outgoing dimension of our lives that gets us involved in kind of things that make us feel good about ourselves. The promise is that the practice of chanting steadily moves us from the meaner self towards the stronger and more resilient self. This is enthusiastic and energising commitment in our daily practice that we find a key to changing unhappy karma. What started to be seemingly negative proposition has a potential for a positive outcome “ Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and you will feed him for life.” The practice pf Buddhism in this contest may be seen as a spiritual rod. In the final analysis Buddhism argues that seeking happiness for ourselves is not enough. No man is an island. Real happines come only from taking the opportunity to create value not only in our own lives but in the lives of others with whom we become in contact. It is a long journey - to travel form changing our own negative karma to the taking care of the happiness of the world. But this is the journey Buddhism asks us to travel. And the ultimate goal of the Soka Gakkai, the lay organisation basing its activities on the Buddhist teaching of Nichiren Daishonin is the World Peace. Buddhism asks us not to be limited by the narrows of our vision.