The Power of Karma

I’d like to talk about what you were doing just now as you meditated. You were learning a skill. You told yourself to breathe in a comfortable way, then you tried to breathe in a comfortable way, and then you judged the results. If the results were good, you kept them up. If the results were not good, you could change. Even if you were doing it just for stress reduction, what you were doing could be explained by the Buddha’s teachings on karma.

You may not welcome this idea, largely because there are many misunderstandings about the teachings on karma. We tend to think of karma as something negative that comes from the past and cannot be changed, and that the present moment is totally shaped by our past actions—which sounds fatalistic. But actually, that’s not how the Buddha taught karma. As he said, if everything were determined by the past, there would be no path to the end of suffering. His actual explanation was that what you experience in the present moment is a combination of three things: the results of past karma, your present karma—the choices you’re making right now, which are not necessarily determined by the past—and then the results of your present actions. This means that even though you may have some bad karma coming in from the past, you don’t have to suffer from it if you’re more skillful in how you act in the present moment.

Now, these actions follow a certain pattern, but because you have freedom of choice in the present moment, the pattern is not deterministic. This combination of a pattern plus the freedom to manipulate the pattern is precisely what allows for you to develop a skill. If there were nothing but a pattern but with no freedom, you wouldn’t have the ability to change your actions. If there were freedom with no pattern, you couldn’t learn anything that you could use in the future. In other words, what you learned today might not help you at all tomorrow. This combination of a pattern that you are free to manipulate. Which is what allows you to learn a path to the end of suffering.

So tonight we’d like to talk about some of that freedom you have in the present moment. That’s one of the reasons why this talk is called “The Power of Karma.” You have the power, through your present actions, not to suffer. As the Buddha said, your present moment experience comes from the raw material coming in from the past, but your actual experience of the present moment requires that you shape that raw material with your intentions in the present moment. Those intentions are your present karma. The Buddha calls those intentions saṅkhāras, which we translate as fabrication.

Fabrications come in three kinds. There’s bodily fabrication, which is the way you breathe.

There’s verbal fabrication, which is the way you talk to yourself—what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation. In other words, you direct your thoughts to a particular topic and then you evaluate it, you make comments on it; you ask questions about it and try to answer the questions.

Then there’s mental fabrication, which consist of perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things, basically identifying what they are, like “This is a microphone, these are my glasses.” But you also identify what their meaning is, as when you see a red light at an intersection. You can identify the color as red. You also know what it means. It means stop. Those are all perceptions. As for feelings, those are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain.

It’s through these three kinds of fabrication that we actually have an experience of the present moment. Without them, we wouldn’t experience the present at all.

The Buddha noticed that we suffer because we do these fabrications, these processes, in ignorance. But if we do them with knowledge, we can make them a path to the end of suffering. This is one of the reasons why, when we meditate, we consciously focus on the breath. We talk to ourselves about the breath and the mind, so that we can find better and better ways to breathe and then better and better ways to bring the mind to stay with the breath.

Then we also work with different perceptions of the breath. You can think of the breath as the air coming in through the nose, or you can think of the breath as energy that flows through the body, down through the nerves, down through the blood vessels. Then you can ask yourself, “Which perception creates a better sense of well-being in the present moment?” As you do this, you’re trying to create feelings of well-being in the body and the mind.

The fact that you’re doing this with knowledge and awareness means that this is now part of the path to the end of suffering. As you get more skilled in doing this in meditation, you begin to notice that you can also get more skilled in these processes as you go through your life, day-to-day. If somebody does something that makes you angry and you know that you tend to do stupid things when you’re angry, you can ask yourself “Is the way that I’m breathing aggravating the anger? Or is that actually helping to calm the anger down?”

The same with the way you talk to yourself: You can talk to yourself in ways that aggravate the anger, or you can talk to yourself in ways that calm the anger down. Which would be better?

The same with mental fabrication: You can hold perceptions in the mind that make the anger or the situation in general hard to bear, or you can hold perceptions that have the opposite effect. This means that you have more freedom in the present moment. You don’t have to be a slave to your anger.

So even if some bad situations are presenting themselves because of your past karma, what you do with that raw material in the present moment will determine whether you suffer from that raw material or not. It’s like being a good cook. You open the refrigerator and there’s nothing but bad food in the refrigerator. But because you’re a good cook, you can still make good food out of it. The food in the refrigerator is your past bad karma; your skill as a cook is your present karma.

The Buddha talks a lot about the skills you can develop in this area. The image he gives is a big hunk of salt. If you try to put the salt into a small cup of water, you can’t drink the water because it’s too salty. But if you put that salt into the Rio Bonito, you could still drink the water because there’s so much of it. So how do you make your mind like the Rio Bonito? One, the Buddha says, is that you try to develop your virtue. Two, you try to develop discernment. Three, you learn to train your mind so that it’s not easily overcome by pain or pleasure. This is basically what we learn in concentration practice.

For example, because of your past karma, there are potentials for pains in the body. But by the way you breathe, you can reduce that amount of pain. Or even if you can’t reduce the pain, you can focus on the breath in the areas of the body that you can make comfortable, which makes it a lot easier for you to bear with the pain.

As for not being overcome by pleasure, again, this is one of the skills you’ll learn in concentration practice. One, if you don’t want to be stuck on pleasures outside, you can provide a sense of well-being inside by the way you focus on the breath. As for the pleasure of the concentration itself, you discover that if you leave the breath and go to wallow in the sense of pleasure, your concentration blurs out. So you have to learn how to be with the pleasure but not wallow in it. You let it do its work while you stay focused on the breath. That’s how you maintain your concentration. The fact that you’re not wallowing in the pleasure means that you’re not opening the door to wallowing in pain.

And finally, the Buddha says one of the skills you need to develop in the present moment is to make your mind expansive like the Rio Bonito. That refers to the brahma-vihāras, developing an attitude of unlimited goodwill, unlimited compassion, unlimited empathetic joy, and unlimited equanimity.

As the Buddha said, if you develop these skills, then even though you have some past bad karma, you don’t have to suffer from it.

So this is one of the ways in which we talk about the power of karma. You can develop skills that you use in the present moment so that even if you have some past bad karma coming in, your mastery of present karma means you don’t have to suffer from it.

The other meaning of the phrase, “The Power of Karma,” is to understand that karma is the Buddha’s most basic teaching. It underlies everything else he taught. If you want to understand any of his other teachings, you have to understand them in the context of karma. For example, with the four noble truths, the first noble truth, the truth of suffering, is the result of unskillful karma. The second noble truth, the three forms of craving, is the actual unskillful karma. The third noble truth, the cessation of suffering, is the result of skillful karma. And the fourth noble truth, the path to the end of suffering, is the path of skillful karma.

When you understand that karma underlies everything the Buddha taught, it helps to prevent a lot of misunderstandings about a lot of his teachings. For example, sometimes you hear people ask, “If there is no self, then who does the karma? Who suffers from the results of karma?” Those questions come from taking the teaching on not-self as the most basic context, and then trying to fit the teaching of karma into that context—and it doesn’t fit. Sometimes you hear people saying that if you think that you are doing the path, that’s wrong view, because there’s nobody there to do the path. And you have no choice in the matter anyhow. There’s no self to make the choices.

In both of these cases, these people have got the context backwards. The true context is the truth of karma, that your actions do have power, and that there are skillful actions and unskillful actions based on skillful intentions and unskillful intentions. In that context, the teaching of not-self takes on a different meaning. Because not-self is a perception, and perceptions are mental actions, then the question is, “What kind of action is that perception? When is it skillful and when is it not?”

You begin to realize that as you go through the day, you already are using perceptions of self and not self. The problem is that you tend to do this in ignorance, so it leads to suffering. For instance, suppose you’re a child with a younger sister, and some bullies down the street are beating up on your sister. Because she’s your sister, you go and protect her. That’s when you have a strong perception of self around your sister. She’s yours. But then you bring her home, and she starts playing with your toys without asking your permission. At that moment, she’s not your sister anymore. She’s the Other. Your perception has changed.

This is something we do all the time, switching back and forth like this, but as I said, we often do it in ignorance, so it can lead to suffering. The Buddha wants us to bring more alertness to what we’re doing. In that context, when the Buddha teaches not-self, the question is: When is the perception of not-self useful? What kinds of perceptions of self are useful, and when? For example, when you’re developing the path, you need to have a good strong sense of self: that you’re capable of following the path, that you’ll be responsible for following the path, and that you’ll benefit from following the path. That’s a skillful sense of self that you need on the path.

If you have too strong a sense of not-self as you do the path, that can actually get in the way. For instance, if you try to get the mind into concentration, and it’s not going very well, when you tell yourself, “Okay, that’s just the nature of concentration, it’s not self,” that’s not an insight. It’s laziness. Or when you’re driving down the road and you go over the speed limit: When the police catch you and say, “Why did you go over the speed limit?” if you say, “There’s nobody here,” it’s not very skillful.

So as you’re following the path, as I said, you need a strong sense of self that you are capable of doing it.

Now, when the path is completed, that’s when you let go of the path. That’s when you develop the perception of not-self for everything, because the path has done its work. You don’t need to hold on to it anymore.

You may remember the Buddha’s image of going across the river. The side of the river you’re on is dangerous. The other side is safe, but there’s no boat to come and pick you up to take you across, and there’s no bridge over the river. So you have to make a raft. What do you make a raft from? The things you identify with on this side of the river: bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, mental fabrication. Then you hold on tight to that raft as you swim across the river. When you get to the other side of the river, that’s when you can let the raft go. In other words, you’ve followed the path to the ultimate happiness. There’s nothing more you have to do. That’s why the path is called the karma that puts an end to karma. You let everything go and there’s the ultimate happiness.

So it’s important to see the teaching on karma as the most basic Buddhist teaching. This is just one example of how it helps all the Buddha’s teachings to make sense.

This means that there are two ways in which karma is powerful. One, in the sense that karma as a concept helps to explain everything the Buddha taught. But even more importantly, the reality of karma is that you have the power to not suffer in the present moment. If you learn the skills of the three kinds of fabrication, you have the power in your hands not to suffer. Now, with the power comes responsibility, but even though that responsibility requires some work, the results are well worth whatever effort you put in.

For those of you who will be going on the retreat, this is just a first taste of what we’re going to be covering in the retreat. For those of you who are not going to the retreat, we recommend that you start bringing more knowledge to the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, and the way you use perceptions and feelings in the present moment. You’ll find that with these skills comes the power not to suffer. You may have noticed that when the Buddha taught, he didn’t ask people, “Do you deserve to suffer? I only teach the end of suffering to people who don’t deserve to suffer.” No, he taught the end of suffering to everybody. And you’re one person in that “everybody.”