Kamma and the Middle Way

Zenshin

I don't suppose anyone has any links to Suttas/Sutras from either the Pali Canon or any tradition on the Buddhist view on Karma and the middle path between determinism and non-determinism with regard to it.

I may have some wrong views from my forays into Vedic Hinduism and Pagan Mysticism in my youth that I'd like to correct.

Thanks.

SattvaPaul

Here are two suggestions:

Kamma - A Study Guide by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Understanding Karma - Lama Zopa Rinpoche

federica

I may have some wrong views from....Vedic Hinduism and Pagan Mysticism in my youth that I'd like to correct.

Yeah, they can be a real bind, huh....?

The AccesstoInsight website (SattvaPaul's first link) has extensive readings on the subject of Kamma. just type 'kamma' in the search box...

Zenshin

@Federica.....Yup!

Over at Dharmanet I just found a good explanation from Ven. Narada Mahathera.

I'm going to take a look at @SattvaPaul's links now - thanks folks.

Jeffrey

From a free biweekly teaching e-mail student/teacher question. It is found on Lama Shenpen Hookham's sangha website, sanghaspace Buddhism Connect.



Summary: Karma refers to the way in which our actions have consequences and it is impossible to understand it fully without a complete understanding of reality, which none of us has. Nevertheless, we can say something about it, and here Lama Shenpen talks about it in relation to our personal mandala.

A student asks:

Can you explain something which Rigdzin Shikpo said in a talk? He was talking about connections. So often people ask how, if we are not reborn as our present selves, karmic actions are carried on to the next life. Rigdzin Shikpo said that "conditions change but the centre remains the same". So could it be that the karmic resonances we have set up in this life affect the centre, but because the conditions change the person becomes a different aspect of that centre yet includes those karmic resonances? I'd be very grateful to know what you can tell me about this.

Lama Shenpen replies:

You are of course asking about karma which the Buddha alone truly understands. It remains mysterious even for the high level Bodhisattvas. It is worth considering why that might be so. If only the Buddha is truly one with infinite totality, then it’s obvious that everyone else including high level Bodhisattvas fall short of such a view. Nevertheless I think there is more that can be said in principle in terms of how karma works.

The way I think of it is that each of us is a point of view on reality that is not separate from the totality of reality and which one could perhaps symbolise as the centre of the mandala of totality. We are each unaware of our identity with the centre and so could be symbolised as a point a bit removed from the centre. But since this is a symbolic representation there is something not quite true about it. We are not really a bit removed from the centre but to us it seems so – hence the need for a path.

If we think of our personal mandala – the way our life of lives manifest to us – it’s as if we are dealing with an individual level of reality a bit removed from the centre and spreading out around us as if at right angles to the line from the centre to the centre of our personal mandala.

I would say karma happens on that individual level spreading around us into the connections we make on that level. We meet with other beings on that level who share the same karmic world as us and then as we die we dissolve back into the centre before striking out again manifesting again along the line that radiates out from our particular point of view. Again if we do not recognise that we are actually nothing other than the centre we identify with a point of view a bit down the line – a partial view, a limited view, but a view shared by the beings we have connections with. So the connections manifest as conditions at a particular time and place that constitutes our individual mandala. So whatever we did in relation to all the connections within that mandala will be affecting and conditioning how our individual mandala is going to manifest.

We won’t re-manifest again as the individual at the time and place we were in our past life. The conditions have changed even though the connections they were based on are still there somewhere in the totality of everything. We will still be our own particular point of view though and so it will be to us that the next life will manifest. In that sense it will be our own karma that influences and manifests in our future lives – even though we didn’t go anywhere and fundamentally the totality of reality has not changed in the slightest.

I wonder if this makes any sense at all and whether it at least addresses your question even if it doesn’t answer it.

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Mandala: Any structure with a centre and periphery. Anything that appears in our awareness takes the form of a mandala consisting of a central focus and what surrounds it. Mandalas have a structure and dynamic in the sense that they are held together by connections between centre and periphery, with emotionality at the boundaries and where one mandala touches on another. In most contexts one can substitute for mandala ‘world’, as used in the metaphorical sense. For example, we talk of the world of our experience, our social world, our psychological world, our whole world collapsing

Karma: ‘action’ or ‘work’. Although it refers to our volitional actions that have inevitable consequences for us in this and future lives, the term is commonly used to refer to the consequences themselves, especially in the way they manifest as happiness and suffering in this life.

Zenshin

@Jeffrey - cool post Jeff, made sense.