Archive Result

20030707GRRU

7-7-03

Looking at Life through the Wide Angle Lens of Karma

Tonight my subject is: Looking at Life through the Wide Angle Lens of Karma. Whether wide angle or zoom, it is karma. Last week we talked about reincarnation. If you think about reincarnation your perspective on life is much bigger. Life does not just start at the time of birth and it does not end at the time of death. This life is a chapter in a much larger book. It is a section within the melodrama of our lives.

Karma is very strange. I don’t want to say that karma is controlling us, but it does manage most of our life. Sometimes we want thing to turn out in a particular way, but it does not happen. Something else takes place. You could almost say that karma has a mind of its own. We fee that we are not managing the events of our life. We are subject to the karmic consequences. At other times, we don’t expect a great result. We are not that well prepared, but the result turns out to be outstanding. Again, it is the karmic result. It is so powerful. It overrides everything else.

We have a picture here of Buddha lying down on his right side, with his right hand under his right cheek. This is the position in which he is said to have passed away. In Buddhism we say that he passed into maha para nirvana. That is according to the ancient Indian culture. But what it means is that he passed away. So even in case of a Buddha, with all his spiritual development, karma cuts through. Buddha is no longer with us. It is only for a limited time that a Buddha appears as Buddha and demonstrates how one can become a Buddha.

Buddha was born as an ordinary human being, like you and me. Unfortunately he happened to be an Indian prince. I am saying that this was unfortunate, because if he would have been the son or daughter of a sweeper, it would have been even better for us today. But at that time in India, the royal connection was considered very important. It did help him to have a greater effect on people. Still, he was just a normal, ordinary human being in the beginning. He had the opportunity to get spiritual information and he was able to utilize that and meditate. Through that he overcame all difficulties and obstacles and became fully enlightened 2692 years ago. And even today we here in the United States, far away from India, know who he was and admire his qualities. He has become a teacher and role model for how we can develop ourselves.

Again, the way how he could achieve so much is only possible because of karma. You may think now that karma has decided one day that this person should become a Buddha. But karma does not decide anything. Karma has no life. Buddha himself decided to become what he wanted to be. He had to work very hard even to discover what was wrong. He was born as a prince in one of the most powerful and wealthy kingdoms in India at the time. There were a great number of small kingdoms in India. His happened to be one of the largest and most important. People in his kingdom were waiting for the appearance of a chakravartin raja. That is a universal king. They were waiting for a strong king who could unify all the hundreds of smaller kingdoms and rule over the whole of India. People were praying for a long time and when Buddha was born they thought he could be the one. There were a number of soothsayers around the royal court. They were psychics with the ability to foretell the future. The king consulted them and they confirmed that Buddha would indeed become the universal king, provided he stayed in the royal palace. The king then decided to take any conceivable precautions to make sure that Buddha would never leave the royal palace. They made sure he had all the comforts a human being could desire. They kept all suffering and discomfort away from him and provided the most luxurious life possible, so that he should not have any reason to run away.

They built a whole artificial life for him. The palace itself was fantastic. When the Indians want to build a palace, they really know how to do it. Just look a the Taj Mahal. Even the Red Fort in Dehli is such a beautiful palace. There is a fresh water swimming pool with running water. The water is directed through rooms in the palace, where it provides running water and also supplies the swimming pool. And all that is done without any modern technology, many hundred years ago. Everything was done to make Buddha’s life perfect. There was music 24 hours a day. Only young, beautiful and handsome people were allowed to surround him. Even someone with a cold would not be allowed near him. In the eyes of that young prince suffering did not exist. If he as much as glanced at a pretty young girl, they would immediately make her a queen. In that way he came to have 500 queens.

But Buddha was not satisfied with his life. We wouldn’t be either. No matter how beautiful the environment, if you are not allowed to go anywhere else, we would not be happy. So one day, Buddha decided to venture out of the palace. He sat in his horse cart and told the driver to move out of the palace gates. The driver obeyed and they went through the city and countryside. Buddha for the first time saw people who were old, sick and dying. When Buddha asked the driver about that, he answered, ‘O King of Kings, this is sickness, old age and death.’ Buddha asked, ‘Will I also be subject to these sufferings?’ The driver said, ‘O King of Kings, even you are not immune from those.’ Buddha further asked, ‘What about my family and what about all the subjects that I am supposed to rule and protect?’ The answer was, ‘Look at them. These are all your subjects.’ This is how Buddha discovered suffering. He learnt about the true nature of life. Now he was really wondering what he could do about this suffering, whether there was anything he could do to stop it. He decided to look for the truth of existence deep down. Where did all these problems come from? How did all these circumstances arise? He wasn’t after some great spiritual development. He wanted to know the truth. And he did discover it. What is known as Buddhism today is all based on Buddha’s personal experience. Buddhism is not a religion as we understand it in the western sense. It is an exploration by a person who tried to get to the bottom of our existence and find out what is really true. Buddha came up with the Four Noble Truths. The first of them is the truth of suffering. He then wondered if this suffering was something that could be changed of whether it was something you couldn’t do anything about. He found that we can change it.

He found that there is no use in fighting the symptoms of our suffering, but that we have to fight the cause. The Second Noble Truth therefore is the Truth of the Cause of Suffering. That is where karma comes in. Suffering is something which we create ourselves. We are responsible for our own actions. That is the bottom line of karma.

Buddha said that to discover how karma functions is even more difficult than discovering the absolute truth. When you discover absolute truth, you have solved the mystery of life. Until then we remain confused and because of that we get anger, hatred, obsession and so on. Sometimes we are happy, sometimes sad, sometimes we fight, sometimes we make friends. All this adds up to the strange melodrama of our life. We are subject to the results of our own confused actions. That is karma. When I create the cause I will get the result. If I don’t create the cause I can never have the result. That is the basic principle that Buddha discovered. He didn’t find out easily, but had to go through tremendous suffering. He was destined to become a great king, living in the most luxurious palace you can imagine, yet he had to escape in the middle of the night, leaving his 500 queens behind. He took one servant with him for a while. When he reached the forest he cut his own long hair off, exchanged his royal clothes with those of the servant, and sent him back along with his horse to the royal family with the message, ‘Don’t search for me. If I find the truth I will come back.’

In his search for truth Buddha went through extremely difficult times. He sat there in meditation for long times, without getting food. For six years he basically did not eat, except for one or two grains a day. At the end of this ordeal he found that extreme sacrifice is not the answer. He had five disciples with him who followed him in his extreme austerity. People who saw them reported that at first they couldn’t figure out whether they were looking at tree branches or human beings. In the end Buddha accepted that extreme practices are not the answer. Even today there are many who are prepared to burn themselves, offer their finger as a candle light and so on. That is not the worst. There are those who sacrifice other beings.

When Buddha discovered that in order to be successful at his practice he had to eat and get some strength, luckily a farmer’s daughter walked by. She looked at Buddha and his disciples and felt so sorry for them that she went back and fetched some milk for them to drink. In the ancient accounts it says that she boilt down the milk of 500 cows to make it fit into one bowl. I don’t know whether that is true or not. In any case Buddha took the milk that was offered and the others refused. The other five were horrified that Buddha accepted the milk. They said to each other, ‘What is happening to him? He was such a good practitioner until now and suddenly a farmer’s daughter comes by and he couldn’t manage himself. He had to take the milk. Fine, let him do whatever he wants to.’

Through taking the milk Buddha slowly rebuild his energy and with powerful meditation was able to discover the truth and soon became a Buddha. After he attained enlightenment Buddha said, ‘I found something wonderful, nectar-like. But if I talk to anybody about it, they will never be able to understand me. Therefore, I better keep silent and stay in the forest, meditating.’ However, the gods and angels all came to him and said, ‘You discovered this. If you don’t share it with people, what is the use of it? Whatever happened to your bodhimind, the promise to help people? Please do share.’

When he asked them who would be able to understand what he discovered they said, ‘Start with your old five disciples.’ He said, ‘They left me.’ But they said, ‘They will come after you. Don’t worry about it. If they don’t come after you, you better go to them.’ So Buddha went to them. At first when they saw him approach they decided that they wouldn’t even get up and they wouldn’t give him any respect. However, when he came closer they all automatically got up and bowed down. They addressed him as Gautama, but he said, ‘Don’t call me Gautama any more. I am a Buddha now.’ That was the first step towards breaking the ice.

Then he began to explain what he had found and the first thing was the Four Noble Truths. The bottom line is that whatever happens in our life is due to our own actions. I am the one who made my life into what it is. I am the engineer of all the good and bad things in my life. I create my own karma and I have to experience the consequences. The good news is that because of the same reason we are also the ones who can make a difference. That does not mean that there are no blessings or divine intervention. But even the divine blessings cannot reach us if we are not open to them. Even Buddha himself, with all his realizations, has not been able to liberate many of us until today. We are still here, suffering. That is because we didn’t do our part. We haven’t created the karma to be able to do it.

In one way karma is such a huge monster, governing our every experience. On the other hand it is just a thing that we have made ourselves. In principle it is very simple. If I kill someone, I may escape the police and the courts and prisons. But I can never escape the court of karma. I am my own witness. For my deeds only I will have to answer.

One time, during the Buddha’s life time, there were 500 queens. They decided to go to retreat together and meditate. They had a few attendants accompanying them. During their retreat, the house caught fire and burned down. Those queens were spiritually quite highly developed and had certain magical powers. When the fire broke out they all flew up into the air. It sounds like a fairy tale, a little like Harry Potter, except these queens didn’t need brooms to ride on. They just flew up in the air. But for some reason they couldn’t get away. They got sucked back in. The most important queen of them all went into meditation and then told the others, ‘If we don’t pay for our karmic deeds, who else could pay for them?’ With that she jumped back into the fire. All the others followed. They all burned in the fire. Then, among the servants there was on hunch back old lady. She had no power to fly, but she managed to escape through the sewage system. That is karma.

There are many stories like that, but I don’t want to talk too long. Just a few more things. Karma has special rules and characteristics. One of them is that it multiplies. I think it multiplies much more than mosquitoes. Good and bad karma both functions the same way. Good karma has no advantage over bad karma nor the other way round. So, if we have some good karma and if we don’t lose it, it will keep on multiplying, like a good investment. Just like that, bad karma, if we don’t purify it, will give us multiplying liabilities, like a bad investment that you cannot get rid of.

One time, Buddha was going round the community begging for food in his begging bowl. There was a poor couple and the woman was eating some channa, some roasted peas. She had nothing else to offer to Buddha so all she could do was throw some of her roasted peas into Buddha’s begging bowl. It was just five or six peas. Buddha appeared to be very happy to get those and said to the woman, ‘By the virtue of this you will attain enlightenment.’ Her boy-friend was jealous and shocked and said to Buddha, ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell such a big lie for the sake of five peas.’ Buddha answered, ‘No, it is true. Buddha never tells a lie. Look at this huge tree over there. Under its shade you can see five horse carts parked.’

The heat in India is extreme, so the horse cart drivers were always looking for shade. The ancient text I am reading from actually said that 500 horse carts were parked under that tree, but over the centuries two extra zeroes must have crept in. Still it was a huge tree. Then Buddha said, ‘In the beginning there was just a tiny seed. It has grown so big over time that now you can park 5 horse carts underneath. This is what you can see externally. If externally things can grow that much, why not internally?’

If we can purify our negative karma it can’t keep growing. That is why we go to temples and churches. We meditate and pray, so that we can reduce our negativities and totally eradicate them. Why is this possible? Because our nature, our basic consciousness or soul is pure. It is like the beautiful, clear, open, spacious blue sky. Our negativities are like clouds in the sky. If the right type of winds comes it will blow all these clouds away and the beautiful blue sky will remain. Our nature is like that. The negativities that we create are temporary. That is why purification works. That is also why divine intervention works and why miracles are possible. Negativities are not our deeper nature and they are impermanent. No matter how much wrong we have done, we can become perfect, because our nature is pure.

In the vajrayana rituals there is this mantra:

OM SVABHAVA SARVA DHARMA SVABHAVA SHUDDOH HAM

Allen Ginsberg translated it as follows:

Nature empty, everything’s pure, naturally pure. That’s what I am.

This shows that in nature we are pure and wonderful. We are not bad. We are great. We do have those clouds disturbing the natural purity, but they are not part of us. We created them and we can purify them. If we don’t have these clouds our mind is beautiful and clear and luminous.

Another characteristic of karma is that it is definite. If you create negative karma the result will only be suffering. If you create positive karma, the result will be joy, happiness and pleasure.

There is an example. Lets say you want to grow a mango tree and collect the mangoes. Actually, there is a funny story. The only people who didn’t know what mangoes are the Tibetans. Mangoes don’t grow in Tibet. So there was this king who wanted to know what mangoes were and one of his advisers tried to explain. Mangoes have a lot of fibre. So this adviser put a lot of honey into his beard and told the king that mangoes are like that. Anyway, if you think that mangoes are too sweet and you want them to be more sour, it does not work to grow a lot of jalapeno peppers round the mango tree. The taste of the mangoes won’t be influenced by that nor will the taste of the peppers change.

In this way karma is definite. The other two characteristics I would like to mention are that you will never meet a result if you haven’t created the corresponding karma and fourth, if you have created a particular karma it won’t be lost. At some time, no matter how long it may take it will ripen. So karma is not strange, imposed on us by some external force. It is nothing but our own deeds. The bottom line is that we are responsible for our deeds and we can make a difference to ourselves, our families and our world. If you really want to attain lasting satisfaction, this is the key. With your karmic key you can open the door to happiness. That is why every spiritual tradition in east or west will talk about discipline, about morality and all those things. It is not just somebody’s idea, but it has been tested over thousands of years with millions of people.

This also tells us that our future is in our own hands. I do hope we will use that key and help ourselves.

Thank you