Karma and Past Lives

Recently I listened to a conversation about karma and how could a small child suffer injuries from the fall-out of a bombing.

I wanted to explain how my teachers have helped me with this question combined with some reflection on why this question (in varying ways) always seems to come up.

Karma is simply cause and effect. There is nothing cosmic or supernatural about the concept in Buddhism. For us Buddhist, to deny cause and effect is just as absurd as to deny gravity. Whether you acknowledge its existence or not, you are still subject to it.

A simple example: if we drop a large brick on our bare foot, we are going to experience pain! There is no supernatural force at hand: dropping a brick on one’s foot (the cause) results in pain (the effect). That’s karma!

The difficulty comes when we start working with the notion of karma (karmic imprints) from past lives. As Vajrayana Buddhist, we subscribe to the View that we have lived many lives. Karma – positive, neutral, and negative is what we get to carry from each life. Its our only baggage.

We do not carry our possessions, our bodies, or a soul from a past life, however, we do carry with us our karma. Karma may have immediate effects such as in the case of the pain from dropping the brick. Karma may have a slightly delayed effect such as failing to get a desire job as the result of having a criminal record. Karma may have a longer delayed effect such as being born in a wealthy family as the result of being extremely generous in a past life. It is all still just cause and effect.

The Buddhist View extends this cause and effect into future lives. We do not wipe the slate clean when we die. In fact it is our karma that propels us from one life to the next. This is the part that is difficult to accept as we begin to work with Buddhist teachings.

From a Buddhist perspective, the small child who gets caught in a war, carries karma from past lives. You might ask what did such a person do in a past life to have to face these painful consequences? You could likewise ask what a very fortunate child did in their past life to be so very fortunate?

Shakyamuni Buddha had repeated said that the karma which creates our current life and current situation is way too intertwined and interconnected for us to ever unravel and figure out. Besides, there is no value in trying to figure it out, anyway.

Shakyamuni Buddha likened the situation to someone being shot with an arrow. You come upon the injured person. You could spend your time trying to figure out what the arrow is made of, who shot it, why they shot it; etc. In the mean time the injured person may die. It is better to remove the arrow and attend the injured person. We should focus on helping.

Teachings on karma, I feel, are to remind us that you cannot get away with anything. Cause and effect are infallible - whether you like it or not! Second, we are reminded that no good deed is ever too small. No negative act is overlooked.

Why is karma so difficult to accept? I feel there are three main reason:

(1) We would like to think that we can sometimes get away with things. If you ever took a caramel candy out of one of those big candy bins when you were a child, you would like to think that you got away with it since you were not caught.

(2) We like the notion of an innocent baby at birth. To accept karma from past lives means that a newborn child carries with them karmic imprints from past lives. They are not, as many Western thinkers would contend, a “clean slate.”

(3) One needs to understand rebirth. We need to understand and accept that we have had many lives and will continue to be reborn in future lives (until we attain Enlightenment…but this is a whole different subject).

So karma for Buddhist is indisputable. We cannot avoid the direct connection between cause and effect. Even if the effect is delayed.

While we may not ever understand why certain things happen to us or others. We are well advised to know that it was not just “bad luck.” Then we need to focus on doing what we can to help.

There are other subtopics to this matter I would like to get into in the future including: Purifying Negative Karma, Creating Positive Karma, Moral Conduct, the path of a Bodhisattva, and the reason for practice and Enlightenment.

For now however, I will just conclude with the wish:

May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May you have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May you never be separated from the unchangeable happiness beyond delusion and illusion.
May you live in equanimity.

Many Dharma Blessings,

Geoff