Living With Karma

"There may be moments when we feel that we have been unfortunate. We might wish that we had a different life, different parents, or a different birth place and get bogged down in disappointment and blaming. During these moments, karma is the only thing that makes sense. It helps us to find a place of equanimity in which we can rest."

Sojong Reminder April/18 from Anam Thubten

Dear Dharma Friends, Karma is a not a concept. It’s an accurate way of describing how everything works in this world.

There is collective and individual karma. Individual karma is the condition we’re living in as a result of actions that we have taken and states of mind that we have been cultivating. Some part of it can be easily understood, but much of it is not understood by our rational mind.

Collective karma refers to the conditions people in a particular nation or community share. Crossing a bridge that marks the U.S and Mexico border between Tijuana and San Diego gives one an immediate understanding of collective karma. On one side, there’s a third world country where poverty is rampant, but the people are full of big heart. On the other side, there’s a nation with unbelievable amounts of wealth that also has its own problems. Vast populations of its citizens have been enjoying good karma with democracy and personal freedoms incomparable in much of the world. At the same time, its luck might not have been so good in other areas, such as the environment. High living standards require huge quantities of the world’s resources in order to feed that small percentage of the world’s population.

The family we are born into also has a tremendous impact on our personal life. It’s hard to be totally free from the karmic chain we have inherited from our family. Through no choice of our own, our state of mind and psychological conditions (not to mention economic and health related conditions) are shaped by these factors. In that sense, these karmas are intertwined and cannot be compartmentalized as two disparate phenomena.

Karmic factors have causes and conditions that were formed in the past and each of us can see how our own life is partially a product of collective karma. Since we have no control over the past, we could accept these karmic conditions without judging them in terms like “this should happen” or “this should not be happening”.

The good news is that there are two ways we can work with karma. The first is to take action to change these karmic conditions given that they are not permanent. We can change the both collective and personal karma with right intention and right action. Another way to go beyond the chain of karma is to awaken to the ultimate truth or the “great emptiness”. This is our inherent ability to cut through hope and fear by seeing the illusionary nature of the world based on our own mental constructs.

There may be moments when we feel that we have been unfortunate. We might wish that we had a different life, different parents, or a different birth place and get bogged down in disappointment and blaming. During these moments, karma is the only thing that makes sense. It helps us to find a place of equanimity in which we can rest. Such peace comes from accepting our conditions as a karmic result and not being disappointed about them. Accepting karma doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t take any action, but rather we under stand the complex nature of all things in this world. We don’t have to take anything too personally.

During this sojong, let’s take this age-old wisdom of Buddha into our heart and see where we might feel dissatisfaction or disappointment regarding the way our lives have been unfolding. Let’s remind ourselves to accept all circumstances as karmic result and feel the inner peace that arises from not fighting against what is. Let’s hold the aspiration to wake up and not continue the wheel of unnecessary suffering, but rather radiate joy to the world.

With palms joined, Anam Thubten