In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."

Friday, February 17, 2012

"Some Other Dude"

Kadam Morten at a Fall Festival review last year explained that we don't need to feel bad or guilty about our negative karma, because it was created by "some other dude or dudette."
Isn't that great? (I heard that some of the English folks attending were stunned, asking each other, "Did he really say 'dude' in a teaching?")
Because most of our karma comes from actions we performed in previous lives, it is as though some other person created them. And yet it is our responsibility to clean them up.
Why?
The karma "they" created is in our mental continuum, and if we want to stop our suffering, we are the ones who need to get rid of it.
In some senses, it was us, but a version of us who's gone. Kadam Morten explained that it's like the scars and tattoos we carry from our reckless teenage years.
Although it's very important that we don't identify too much with the person who did them, there is a connection - a former self, almost like an ancestor.

For me it's helpful to think of parallels between genetics and karma. Before scientists gained the ability to decode the genome, even ordinary people believed we inherited traits from our parents, who in turn inherited them from their parents, and so on, back through generations. We didn't know the mechanism, but we knew there was an association.
Karma is like that. I think part of the reason we don't believe in it is that we don't know the mechanism. (Even though in a lot of cases, we're happy to use things we don't understand - like cell phones, for one. We could simply use the law of karma, but we're skeptical, so we pretend we need logical, scientific explanations for everything.)

Buddha teaches that virtuous actions bring about happiness in the future, when those seed-like imprints in our subtle mind ripen; conversely, non-virtuous actions bring about suffering in the future, when the conditions for those seeds to sprout come together.
By the way, if we keep watering the bad seed, it will continue to grow. That's why in the case of unhappiness, it's so important to know how to turn off the water. For example, when someone insults us, we can choose to retaliate, but in the long term that's only going to make the situation worse. But that's a whole 'nother post.

What is the ramification of believing in karma? You have to be on your good behavior.
If we want to be a decent person, don't we want to do that anyway? Don't you want to help others, or at least not harm them?

In Modern Buddhism Geshe-la explains that one key reason for believing in karma is to "prevent future suffering." Karma is "such good news" as Gen-la Dekyong would say. I'm so happy that there's a mechanism to reduce and finally stop all suffering.
I'd rather be on the hook for my past misdeeds, knowing I can clean them up, than believe that everything that happens to me is random and completely out of my control, and therefore my suffering will never cease.

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