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If something happens to someone you love, is it your bad karma or theirs?
So if someone you love is suffering, but that suffering is causing you to suffer, is it due to your bad karma, her bad karma, or a mixture of the two?
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If her suffering is causing her to lash out at you then it is pointless to look externally for the cause of your suffering.
It helps but you have to do more than say the words.
The underlying question, when does individual karma end and collective karma begin, is a good one. But again, karma is only a fancy word for action. When does what I do effect other people and become part of their karma? It's hard to think of anything I do that doesn't. Even what I decide not to do is karma. If I hike up to a mountain to spend my life, the actions in my solitary cave might not have an effect. But the people I leave behind who no longer have my company are effected by my leaving and continued absence. So in this way, there's no individual/group karma. There's only karma, a big wonderful sea of it that we're all swimming in.
Well said above, Cinorjer!
I like that, Kind Sir! Please forgive my bad or good karma in cleaning up your English. I realize that this is an International forum, but whatever happens is just karma afterall.
Attachment to the feeling of helplessness and succumbing to being overwhelmed by your emotions, also does not create bad karma. But it inhibits your progress....
Look up the twin arrows of suffering.....
Could you say why assigning your suffering to being either your bad karma, their bad karma or a mixture of both, matters to you?
The [precise working out of the] results of kamma is an unconjecturable that is not to be conjectured about, that would bring madness & vexation to anyone who conjectured about it[...]"
AN 4.77
You reap what you sow.
The Anguttara Nikaya deserves a thread all by itself, since it's unique and fascinating. Sometime in the distant past, some temple did a cut and paste job on thousands of teachings, separating them into the number of items on each list. So this "Book of Fours" consists of every teaching where supposedly the Buddha said "There are four things to remember..." and there's also a Book of Ones, a Book of Twos, etc.
The fourth item in this particular list is hardly ever brought up because it's "pondering the origin of the world" and unless our scientists are bedbug crazy, it's as obviously wrong as saying pondering karma makes one mad in a literal sense. What we seem to have here is a bit of hyperbole that made it into the sutras, and since the list was cut out of whatever story is behind it, we'll never know what is supposed to have gotten the Buddha so frustrated. Since I have also told my kids that "You're driving me insane with your behavior" I suspect the one being driven mad at the time is the monk, being constantly asked these questions instead of something relevant.
A Pali scholar could probably clarify it by going back and examining the translation of the words "madness & vexation" in Pali so we can see what it really means. I find it highly unlikely that the Buddha meant to say that just pondering karma will put you in a mental hospital.
To see a fellow human being suffering and "pass by on the other side" with the thought "It is their karma that brought them to this" or, colloquially, "It's their own fault" turns karma into a punishment/reward system, far from any Buddhist understanding of the process. It becomes a Calvinist approach, judgmental and, ultimately, dehumanising.
. . . however you get over yourself with practice. You and Mr Cushion get married all the Buddhas come to the wedding and everyone lives happily ever after in the Purelands.
The karma psychiatric team have been notified, the white van is on its way. Buddha have mercy on the soul I sold to the man with the nice tale and promise of the release of the suffering hordes . . . :screwy:
The Anguttara Nikaya deserves a thread all by itself, since it's unique and fascinating. Sometime in the distant past, some temple did a cut and paste job on thousands of teachings, separating them into the number of items on each list. So this "Book of Fours" consists of every teaching where supposedly the Buddha said "There are four things to remember..." and there's also a Book of Ones, a Book of Twos, etc.
The " Glossary of Enumerations" can be found in the Nyingma Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism-a wonderful writing by Dudjom Rinpoche. The numbers are a great learning device. Best