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Taking bad karma, on purpose?
Zayl
Veteran
So, what do you all think of someone who, say, decides to purposefully disregard proper action, thought, and speech? What would you think of them if you found out their motivation was purely for the benefit of others? They get into violent engagements, so others do not need to face that choice. They speak harshly, what is on other peoples minds, what people do not say, but want to? That they perform in their mind is a "necessary evil" so that others, innocently free from the choice that the individual in question made, can enjoy the benefits, without the drawback? Say, in a purely rhetorical situation, a pacifist group of monks was being harassed and physically assaulted by another group, and then the morally ambiguous individual of which this thread is focused on, straight up murders and/or beats those aggressors into the ground?
The monks would admonish and reprimand him I'm sure, but if the individual did not care, if he willingly took on all of that bad karma, so that others could live in peace, free from making negative choices which are at times, necessary, How would that all work out do you think? I keep hearing that the intention of the action is almost more important than the action itself. Would you consider that person to be "evil" or simply misguided? Do you feel people such as they are needed in this world? someone to make the hard choices, someone who has blood on their hands, if that means other people can remain pure and free from that burden? Especially if the person is conscious of all of this? and that is his motivation? Wouldn't that be a paradox?
The monks would admonish and reprimand him I'm sure, but if the individual did not care, if he willingly took on all of that bad karma, so that others could live in peace, free from making negative choices which are at times, necessary, How would that all work out do you think? I keep hearing that the intention of the action is almost more important than the action itself. Would you consider that person to be "evil" or simply misguided? Do you feel people such as they are needed in this world? someone to make the hard choices, someone who has blood on their hands, if that means other people can remain pure and free from that burden? Especially if the person is conscious of all of this? and that is his motivation? Wouldn't that be a paradox?
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So what do you think? how would they balance out karmically?
Of course some of the time cops are overwhelmed by their emotions and overreact.
If someone who is untrained steps in they are almost guaranteed to be attached to the situation and quite possibly overreact with violence creating karma for themself.
I don't think the karma is there waiting for someone to take it on.
I think the whole argument of this thread can be unraveled with one simple sutta passage..
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.01.budd.html
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.
and some more evidence: simile of the saw
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.021x.than.html
"Monks, even if bandits were to carve you up savagely, limb by limb, with a two-handled saw, he among you who let his heart get angered even at that would not be doing my bidding. Even then you should train yourselves: 'Our minds will be unaffected and we will say no evil words. We will remain sympathetic, with a mind of good will, and with no inner hate. We will keep pervading these people with an awareness imbued with good will and, beginning with them, we will keep pervading the all-encompassing world with an awareness imbued with good will — abundant, expansive, immeasurable, free from hostility, free from ill will.' That's how you should train yourselves.
"Monks, if you attend constantly to this admonition on the simile of the saw, do you see any aspects of speech, slight or gross, that you could not endure?"
"No, lord."
"Then attend constantly to this admonition on the simile of the saw. That will be for your long-term welfare & happiness."
That is what the Blessed One said. Gratified, the monks delighted in the Blessed One's words.
Personally I think the "hard choice" is non-violence... violence is the easy choice that is pervasive in the world. If it comes down to someone killing for me or me dieing, I'd rather die, at least I will die knowing I have a clear conscious, of course someone with a family and more attachments may think differently. The bottom line imo is that I do not think the person doing the killing will not take on some sort of kamma for the murder. Whether its suicide, straight up murder, or murder in the defense of others, it's still murder and still haunts people(look at what police go through when they have to shoot, or what a war zone does to soliders..22 veterans kill themselves every day, they've seen and been through shit I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy). There may be a lesser degree of kamma depending on the intention and circumstances but kamma(action) breeds vipaka(fruit).This does not mean you should judge people for their actions,however, not in the slightest.
The Bad Karma Buddha
There was once a temple that had an empty, covered basket always sitting by the front gates. A monk named Jan Yun volunteered to check the basket every morning. This was the monk's special duty for his entire life inside the temple.
Occasionally, a baby would appear in the basket overnight, the mother not able to keep it due to shame or circumstance. Then Jan Yun would take the baby and either find it a home in the surrounding villages, or give it to the other monks to raise if it was a boy and no adoptive parents could be found. The monks kept a herd of goats to supply milk for this purpose.
But sometimes there would be a litter of newborn kittens in the basket. The people in the towns and villages around had hit upon the solution of getting rid of unwanted cats by dumping them at the temple so the owners of the mother cat would not accumulate the bad karma of having to kill the animals. The kittens were Jan Yun's problem now.
The monks could not keep the kittens, since they could not supply meat or allow the cats to kill birds and mice inside the walls of the temple, and besides the temple would soon be completely overrun by cats if they allowed them to stay. Neither could Jan Yun find anyone willing to adopt the unwanted animals. So Jan Yun killed the kittens, as quickly and painlessly as possible, taking on the bad karma for himself.
Eventually Jan Yun grew old and died, having killed thousands of cats in his life and never once complaining.
When the Master of the temple asked for a volunteer to take Jan Yun's place, none of the other monks were willing to do such a terrible thing as kill kittens for the rest of their life and accumulate enough bad karma to take countless lifetimes to work off. Thus it came as a surprise when the Master ordered a painting of Jan Yun be placed alongside a painting of the Buddha in their great hall, and told the monks that in the entire history of the temple, only Jan Yun comprehended the Dharma and deserved that place of honor and had certainly attained Nirvana.
The monks never understood, because killing must always be bad karma. The dharma is clear about that. How can Jan Yun be worthy of sitting next to the Buddha?
If you were Jan Yun, what would you do with the kittens?
For a start what most refer to as karma is actually karma-vipaka..the ' fruit ' of karma.
Karma simply means ' action '..
There is a traditional story which makes the point.
A man has a son who has grown to adulthood and has taken over much of the work on the family smallholding..
One day the son finds a beautiful white horse on their land. The law says that it is his to keep.
Father goes to the local Buddhist priest and says 'what good karma I must have..! '
The priest says nothing.
The following day while riding his horse the son falls and breaks his leg..
'What evil karma ! Cries the father to the priest..'what must I have done to deserve this ? '
The priest says nothing.
The following day the local warlord and his army arrives in the village and forcibly conscripts all the young men in the village to fight another local warlord..the young horse owner cannot go because of his broken leg.
'What good karma I must have' says the older man to the priest.
'Will you never learn ?' sighs the priest
also these monks seemed to have a lot of stuff, whats the point of the basket, goats? why do they want cats to kill mice?
you can count me among those who will never understand, probably because this story seems very mahayana.
How do you answer the final queston? Would you have dropped the kittens into the surrounding woods, and thus their deaths were not your bad karma? In other words, rejecting the gift of bad karma from the villagers is certainly one option. Predators would soon kill the kittens then, or eventually starvation and exposure. But you can say with honesty it's the fault and bad karma of the mother cat's owner who first decided to get rid of the kittens, not your karma. Or can you?
Peter Parker found out the hard way when he saw he could have stopped the killer before he shot Uncle Ben. Sorry about the Spiderman reference, lol.
Now if we see a defenseless being get abused and or killed and we do something about it which leads to the death of the bad guy... That particular cycle of violence ends.
Which is the decision that has the least potential for harming other beings?
To me the decision is easy. I would hold no ill will towards the attacker and I would not even stop loving them or having compassion for them. I would do my best to stop them, however.
I can forgive them for knowing not what they do but that doesn't mean I will stand by and let them continue to do it.
I know that if I ever went snappers and tried to kill anyone, I would want somebody to stop me. The common good is more important than this "self" thingy.
This is a very interesting question, one I doubt could be answered any time soon!
It's not like we are reaping our 'bad' karma every moment of our lives anyway. It's 'bad karma' to be born at all, isn't it?
Most of the problem trying to figure this out is trying to get a sense of 'what would I do??' in dire situations, and there's no way to know what you'd do. Anyone who'd been in such a situation would tell you that.
Seems like the BEST thing you could do for the sake of your 'personal' karma is to purify yourself with your practice diligently, and with mindful investigation, seek to know the nature of reality in your own mental stuff, actions, and their consequences.
Then, unhappily, if a terrible situation comes, how you naturally respond will be the best you can do, and hopefully it will be good enough.
As a nurse who takes care of dying people, I turn up narcotic drips and hasten their deaths (by a few days at most). I have a hand in the multiple causes of this person's death. What is my intention? That they do not experience the agony of their cancerous tumors squeezing nerves, cutting off blood supply, or the rising toxins in their bloodstream as the major organs fail. Honestly I have no internal 'struggle' with what I do, though quite a few other nurses do. Maybe I should? I don't know.
Just my rambling thoughts . . . this is a good thing for us all to ponder. Not just cops and nurses etc etc are confronted with potentially taking on 'bad karma' in a deliberate way.
Gassho
A law of karma describes cause and effect.
If ignorance is the cause, then how does trying to insulate an ignorant person from the consequences of their actions, result in anything other than an unrelenting ignorance.