The Kamma of Meditation

The reason why we’re focusing on training the mind in the present moment is because of the way the Buddha taught kamma. That may seem ironic, as most of us think of kamma as having to do with past and future—and it does. But it actually has to do with all three time frames—past, future, and present, and it hinges on the present.

As the Buddha said, kamma lies at the beginning of right view. Mundane right view is all about the principle of kamma, the influence of kamma on shaping your life and lives to come. Sometimes we think that everybody back in the Buddha’s time taught about kamma, but they didn’t. There were a lot of people who denied that kamma was real or, even if it was real, that had any impact or that you had any choice at all in what you were doing. But the whole point of how the Buddha taught kamma is that you have choices, your actions have an impact, and there are patterns that you can learn. There’s freedom within those patterns, which is why meditation can be practiced as a skill.

The patterns are things we know about: Actions done under the influence of unskillful intentions, based on greed, aversion, and delusion, tend to lead to suffering. Actions done without the influence of greed, aversion and delusion tend to lead to happiness.

Right there is where the Buddha’s teachings are important, different even from those who did teach kamma in the past. There were groups of people who said that your physical kamma was most important, but your mental kamma was not. Yet, as the Buddha pointed out, it’s your intentions that determine the quality of the act. That’s why we focus on training the mind.

The beginning of the training, of course, is with the precepts, to train you to want to act in ways that are skillful—no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no intoxicants. You take these precepts on, not simply to be obedient, but to focus on the quality of your intention. You’ll break a precept only when you intend to break it. If you happen to step on a bug inadvertently, the precept isn’t broken. But if you intend to step on that bug and kill it, then it’s broken. So the focus right there is on the mind. And even more so when you learn about the complexity of how kamma works out.

You remember on the night of the Buddha’s awakening: He saw that those who acted on unskillful intentions with wrong view tended to go to low destinations with a lot of suffering. Those who acted on skillful intentions with right view tended to go to higher destinations. The important word there is “tend,” because, as the Buddha saw, you can do skillful things but then have a change of heart—decide that you don’t believe in the principle of good kamma anymore. If you hold that change of heart all the way to the time you die, then the good things you’ve done will eventually give fruit but they’ll be blocked by your change of heart, and you’ll tend to go to a bad destination. Vice versa, if you’ve been doing bad things, have a change of heart, start believing in kamma, even if it’s only at the moment of death, then that change of heart will take you up. The bad things will still give their results, but you’ll be in a better place to handle them. After all, you don’t do just one act per lifetime. You do many actions. So the general tendency toward the end is what matters.

And the fact that you can change your heart points you to the point where the Buddha’s teachings on kamma are really different from everybody else’s.

As he said, there are two types of causes that act in shaping your experience: One is when you do something now and the result comes up immediately; you stop doing it and the result stops. That’s kamma right here in the present moment. Then there’s kamma that has an influence over time. You do something now and at some point, the result will be felt. Then when you stop doing it, and sometime in the future the result will also stop.

An example of the first kind of kamma is putting your finger in a fire. You don’t have to wait until the next lifetime for it to hurt. It hurts right away. You take it out, it stops burning. An example of the second one would be planting a seed for a tree. You plant the seed now. You don’t get the tree for quite a while, but when the tree comes, it’ll bear fruit. But because the seed is also impermanent, the tree itself will eventually die. But it won’t die at the same time the seed disappears. It dies much later.

So you’ve got these two principles interacting, which means that in the present moment you’ve got influences coming in from past actions, you’ve got your present intentions, and you’ve got the results of present intentions—and those present intentions don’t have to be shaped by the past. This is where there’s freedom in this pattern.

In fact, without present intentions, you wouldn’t be experiencing the present moment. Look at dependent co-arising: The factors of fabrication, intention, in name and form, come well before the six senses. Now, the six senses are your experiences of the results of past karma. So you’re approaching the results of past karma through your present karma, and that present karma is free to change. That’s what we’re training. That’s where the focus is—because right there is your power. You can train the mind in the skills it needs so that it doesn’t have to suffer from the results of past bad kamma.

That’s what we’re doing as we meditate—we’re learning the skills. There are the three kinds of fabrication: The way you breathe—bodily fabrication. The way you talk to yourself, what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation—verbal fabrication. And perceptions and feelings—mental fabrication. Those are your choices in the present moment.

You can choose to breathe in different ways. You can choose to talk to yourself in different ways. You can choose your perceptions. You can choose the feelings you nurture. It’s because we have this range of choices that meditation makes sense, is possible, gives results.

You do have the power to change your mind at any moment. Now, as the Buddha said, the mind is very changeable. There’s danger there in that changeability, of course, because it can change in directions that are not all that good. But we’re trying to direct it toward habits that go in the right direction.

So, as you’re meditating here, you’re engaging in kamma. You’re also engaging in freedom of choice. You’re dealing, to some extent, with results of past actions. The body you have sitting here right now—your experience of it—is shaped by what you’ve done in the past. Things that come up spontaneously in the mind are shaped by the past. It’s what you do with them, how you approach them now: That’s where you can be trained. That’s where the focus of the meditation is—what you can do right now.

It’s so ironic that there are teachers out there who say that the teaching on kamma is either irrelevant or a mistake. Irrelevant, in the sense that some people say that there’s nothing you have to do anyhow, you just sit here and be the knowing, be aware, and that’s awakening, so why think about doing anything?

There are those, however, who say that there’s nothing you can do. Their interpretation of kamma is that everything is totally determined by the past causes and conditions. There’s nothing you can do, so you just have to accept what’s coming up.

Then there are those who say, “Well, there’s nobody here anyhow, so there’s nobody to do anything.”

All of these are wrong views. They take the meditation away from the Buddha’s teachings on kamma, and so they miss the whole point. There are things you have to do—good qualities you have to develop. The whole path, of course, is a type of kamma, what the Buddha called “kamma for the ending of the kamma.”

Right view is also a type of kamma. You adopt right view because of the impact it’s going to have on your mind. We’re not trying to arrive at right view. We use it as a tool to arrive at the deathless. And because, as the Buddha said, we do have this freedom of choice, the people who say that we have no choice at all know nothing about what the Buddha taught.

Finally, there are those who say there’s nobody there. The Buddha never said there’s nobody there. He did recommend the perception of not-self, but there’s that old question, “If there’s nobody there, who does the kamma? Who reaps the results?” Someone once asked that question of himself as he was listening to a talk given by the Buddha. The Buddha said, “There may be some foolish people who think thus.”

He never taught that there is no self. He never taught that there is a self, but he did teach that there is the perception of not-self, there is the perception of self. Those perceptions have to be understood in the context of kamma, as actions. When you have a perception of self as capable, responsible, that you’ll benefit from the practice—those are perceptions of self that the Buddha recommends. Then there are perceptions of not-self: When you’ve trained yourself in virtue and concentration, you develop discernment to see that even the good things you’ve developed in the path as you’ve let go of everything else, you’ll eventually have to let go of those good things, too. There’s a time and place for using the perception of self. There’s a time and place for using the perception of not-self. They’re actions. They have to be understood in the context of kamma. In fact, all of the Buddha’s teachings are best understood in the context of how they fit into his teachings on kamma and what they recommend that you do within that context.

So be very clear on the fact that what you’re doing right now is a type of kamma. This is especially important when you start getting into states of spaciousness or what seems to be pure consciousness. Those states are fabricated. You are doing things. You’re holding onto perceptions that allow you to get there. Some people say that consciousness is always there every time you turn your mind to it—therefore, it must always be there. But, as I’ve said, it’s like saying, “Every time I open the refrigerator door, the light is on, so it must always be on.” The light is on because you open the door. The dimension of consciousness is something you contact because you’ve turned your mind to it, but it is fabricated.

So when you keep the teaching about kamma in mind, it can save you from a lot of wrong view. And it can focus you right now on what you should be doing: How are you breathing? How are you talking to yourself? What perceptions and feelings are you focusing on? You’re free to choose good ones. So take advantage of that freedom.