The End of Kamma
Because the unawakened mind is so quick to change that it can’t really trust itself to act consistently on skillful intentions. After working hard to develop good qualities, you can easily get attached to their results. If those results don’t lie outside the round of rebirth, they’re going to be impermanent. Your efforts to hold on to them will likely develop into unskillful qualities—such as greed and possessiveness—leading to unskillful kamma, which will pull you back down to the suffering you’ve been trying to escape. The only happiness that’s truly reliable and genuinely harmless all around is the happiness of nibbāna: free from impermanence, free from attachment. Once it’s attained, it requires no kamma, good or bad, at all.
That emptiness is conditioned. It, too, is the result of actions—subtle perceptions, but perceptions are actions nonetheless. The freedom that’s truly unconditioned lies right next to our freedom of choice in the present moment. Unconditioned freedom doesn’t cause freedom of choice, but it’s right next to it. The only way to know unconditioned freedom is to get more sensitive to our freedom of choice. And we do that best by trying to get more sensitive to what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in our actions. As this sensitivity develops, we’ll be in a better position to judge when we’re still making subtle choices, and when we’re experiencing something in which no act of intention is involved at all [§46].
There’s no intention at the moment of awakening. But when fully awakened people return to the world of the senses, they still experience old kamma. They also have new intentions, but they destroy the potential for those intentions to yield results as kamma. In the Buddha’s image, they destroy the seeds as they create them. But to understand what that means, you have to gain awakening yourself [§47].
Nibbāna is not a place [§§50–51]. When there’s no more kamma, there’s no more becoming, and every place that we experience—both in body and mind—is a type of becoming.
The Buddha describes nibbāna as the ultimate happiness and freedom, and he states that it really exists, but beyond that, he doesn’t define it. And because people are defined by their kamma [§49], awakened people after death—when there’s no more kamma at all—can’t be defined, even as existing or not. But again: To know what that means—and to see if nibbāna really is the ultimate happiness and freedom—you have to follow the path of skillful action to find out for yourself.
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In fact, the only way to know for sure if the principles explained here are true is to gain the first stage of awakening, when you have your first glimpse of nibbāna, outside of time, outside of space, and free from all activity. It’s only on returning from that experience that you can know how your actions shape your experience of time and space.
In the meantime, though, as the Buddha pointed out, it’s wise to take as working hypotheses the basic principles of kamma:
Your actions are real.
They come from your choices.
They have results.
Those results are determined by the intention behind the act.
Those results follow patterns that shape both the present moment and the future, even beyond death.
You can learn the patterns underlying actions and their results.
Having learned the patterns, you are free to choose to change the way you act so as to get the results you want.
A central principle of those patterns is that your present actions determine whether or not you will suffer from the results of past actions.
And you can act in such a way that you can put an end to suffering—and to birth, aging, and death—altogether.
If you don’t accept these principles, the path to the end of suffering is closed to you. If you do accept them and try them out in your actions, it’s open.
Despite the complexity of kamma, the choice is as simple as that.
