Introduction

Good evening, and welcome to our retreat. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you, and I hope that you’ll find the retreat useful.

The title of this retreat is The Power of Karma, a phrase with two meanings. The first meaning refers to the power of the concept of karma, or intentional action, in that the teaching on karma is the Buddha’s most basic teaching. Once you have a proper understanding of this teaching and see it as the context for all his other teachings, it helps you to understand those teachings correctly—and not only to understand them, but also to put them into practice so that you can put an end to suffering.

This connects with the second meaning of the phrase, which refers to the power of the reality of karma: the power you have, through your own intentions and actions, to bring about happiness here and now, and ultimately to bring about the total end of suffering.

Now, this interpretation may conflict with what you’ve heard from other Buddhist teachers, even from some Buddhist monks, who tell you that karma is irrelevant to the Dhamma. The Dhamma is all about the present moment, they say, whereas karma deals with past and future. Some will tell you that the teaching on karma was a mistake, adopted from common beliefs in India in the Buddha’s time—either by the Buddha himself or by his later followers—without thinking about the implications of some of his other teachings. Many will teach you that the issue of karma plays no role in the teaching. Some will say that it’s because there’s nothing for you to do, that the path will grow on its own. Others will tell you that there’s nothing you can do, because everything has been determined by the past. And some will even tell you there is nobody to do it anyhow.

We’ll show in the course of this retreat that these interpretations grossly misrepresent what the Buddha taught. They actually get in the way of following the path to the end of suffering.

The teaching on karma is relevant, in fact is actually necessary for understanding the Buddha’s teaching. Karma does deal with the past and the future, but its focus is what you can do right here and right now in the face of past influences so that you can have a good influence on the present and on into the future. Also, the path to the end of suffering is something that you do. And you have to do it. It’s not a mushroom that grows on its own in the jungle. You are free to choose to do the path or not, because your past actions don’t totally shape the present moment. As the Buddha said, if we were not free to choose what we can do in the present moment, there would be no path to the end of suffering and no idea of anything that should or should not be done, because everything that’s done had to be done that way.

This is the point that is probably most misunderstood about karma. People don’t like the teaching on karma because it sounds like a negative, deterministic, fatalistic force, coming from the past. When things go poorly, you’ll often hear people say, “It’s my bad karma.” Yet when things go well, people don’t usually say, “Boy, that’s my good karma,” which is not fair. As the Buddha taught, the fact that generosity is meaningful, the fact that gratitude is meaningful, comes from the fact that we have freedom of choice. This is probably the most important point to remember from this retreat.

Now, it’s true that actions and their results follow patterns of cause and effect, but it’s possible to manipulate the causes so that they give the effects you desire. You have that freedom, and it’s the combination of a pattern of cause and effect that you are free to manipulate that allows you to develop any skill at all, and especially the skills of the path. The existence of that pattern operating over time is what allows you to learn lessons today that you can apply on into the future. The freedom is what allows you to adjust that pattern right now to get the results you desire.

The pattern in general is that if you act on skillful intentions—free of greed, aversion, and delusion—you’re going to get pleasant results. If you act on unskillful intentions—with greed, aversion or delusion—you’ll get painful results.

Here it’s important to understand the difference between good intentions and skillful intentions. In English, we have an expression, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” That’s because good intentions—even though they’re well-meaning—can often be deluded and so can cause harm. This is why an important part of the Buddha’s teaching lies in his instructions for how to turn your good intentions into skillful intentions without delusion.

We’ll focus on the pattern of cause and effect more toward the end of the retreat, as that requires the least explanation, and as it’s also relevant to your life outside of the retreat. We’ll focus first on your freedom to choose a course of action, because that’s most relevant to the meditation we’ll be doing in the course of the retreat, and also because it requires the most explanation.

To begin with, karma is basically the intention that motivates an action in thought, word, or deed. The Buddha teaches that your experience is shaped by a combination of old intentions and new intentions. He analyzes your experience of the present moment in this way: the input of the six senses is the result of past karma. Present karma comes both prior to the experience of past karma and in response to past karma.

Here we’ll focus on the karma that comes first, because that’s the most powerful. Prior to the input of your senses, there are two sets of mental factors that are related to your intentions. You’ve probably seen them at work in your own experience. If you’re already angry with somebody, then when that person does a little thing that’s wrong, you’re going to focus really intensely on that wrong. It’s going to be very large in your awareness. But if somebody you love were to do the same thing, you probably won’t even notice it. In other words, we approach experience with a lot of preconceived notions and attitudes, likes and dislikes.

The Buddha’s most detailed explanation of the causes of suffering—dependent co-arising—lists what some of these preconceived notions are. First of all are what he calls the three fabrications—in Pali the word is saṅkhāra—and the three types are bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication.

• Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe in and out.

• Verbal fabrication is how you talk to yourself. The Buddha divides this into two types of activities. One is directed thought; the other is evaluation. Directed thought is when you choose a topic to focus on. Evaluation is when you ask questions about the topic, analyze it, or make comments.

I’ll tell you a story. I had an American friend who was teaching in Thailand. She was blonde and had blue eyes and she fell in love with a Thai man. Of course, there was the language barrier, and she was trying her best to learn Thai so that their conversations could be more and more direct. One night, she was talking about something that meant a great deal to her. He was looking deep into her eyes, and she was thinking, “He must really understand me.” When she was finished, he asked her, “Those blue eyes of yours: Do you really see with them, or are they just ornaments?” In this case, he was directing his thoughts at her eyes and not at what she was saying, and his evaluation was about how blue they were. That’s verbal fabrication.

• Mental fabrications are perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things—either as individual words or mental pictures. You use them, first, to identify what something is; second, to identify what it means; third to identify how important it is. For example, with a red light at an intersection: You identify that it’s red, you identify that red means stop, and then you identify that you really need to pay attention to it—you really ought to stop. Those are perceptions.

Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain.

It’s through these three types of fabrication that we shape our experience of the present moment.

Then there are two other sub-factors in dependent co-arising that also help shape our experience. One is attention—in other words, the questions you pay attention to. The other is intention, what you mean to accomplish by an action.

Even before you experience the results of your past actions, these internal factors shape how you’ll approach it. If this is done in ignorance, it can lead to suffering. If it’s done with knowledge of the four noble truths, it can be part of the path to the end of suffering.

Expressed in another way, karma from the past provides the raw materials for the present moment. Your present karma—in terms of the three fabrications, attention, and intention—is what turns that raw material into an actual experience of the present moment.

It’s as if you’re a cook. The raw material from the past is like the food in your garden or your kitchen. Your present karma is what you actually do with that raw material, those ingredients, to make the food you’re going to eat. Just as cooks can sometimes be so skilled that they can use bad ingredients to make good food, one of the purposes of meditation is to learn how to do these factors with more knowledge so that even bad karma coming in from the past doesn’t have to make you suffer. This is why meditation focuses precisely on these factors.

For example, with breath meditation, focusing on the breath: That’s bodily fabrication. One of the things you want to learn is that there are many different ways of breathing that you can learn how to master.

The Buddha never taught you just to be with whatever way you’re breathing. He recommends that you learn how to breathe while being aware of the whole body, how to breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure, gives rise to rapture, gives rise to gladness in the mind. There are lots of different ways you can breathe, and he says, basically, to take advantage of them. That’s bodily fabrication.

With verbal fabrication, you’re focusing your thoughts on the breath, and then you’re evaluating the way your breath goes through the body, trying out different ways of breathing to see what works best.

As for mental fabrications, you’ll also use different perceptions of how the breath moves through the body, and you’ll take advantage of the fact that you can make it flow in a way that feels pleasant.

That’s all three fabrications right there.

Of course, you’re also doing this with an overriding intention, which is to bring the mind to stillness so that you can see more clearly what’s going on in the mind. You’re also using acts of attention—what the Buddha calls appropriate attention, trying to ask questions that apply the framework of the four noble truths to whatever problems are getting in the way. In other words, if your mind is not settling down, you don’t ask yourself, “Why am I such a bad meditator? Why is my meditation so hopeless? Why is everyone else in the room so calm when I’m not?” Those are inappropriate questions to ask. Make it simply, “What kind of breathing would feel better and help me to settle down? If I’m forcing it too much, how can I be a little bit more lenient or forgiving?”

I’ll tell you a story. When I was a young monk, I made friends with a young Thai monk who had also just recently ordained. Every morning, we would go up to an old wooden meditation hall on the side of the hill. Pretty soon, the mosquitoes were biting, my legs were hurting, my mind was not settling down. I looked over at the other monk. He was sitting very still. I said to myself, “I have to preserve the good name of Americans. I’ve got to keep at this.” So I kept on sitting there in spite of the pain. I found out later that he was sitting there, mosquitoes were biting him, his legs were hurting, his mind was not settling down. He looked over this American monk who looked so calm. He told himself, “I can’t lose out to the American.” So, we maintained our good intentions but our motivation was probably not the best.

The important lesson is that while you’re meditating, you’re learning how to create good karma in the present moment, to shape the present moment well. Which means that all the teachings on karma are directly relevant to what you’re doing right now as you meditate.

By the time the retreat is over, we hope that the talks will clear up any misunderstandings you may have on the teachings of karma, so that you’ll be able to develop these good potentials not only as you meditate, but also as you go through daily life. You’ll find that there is a lot to like in the teaching of karma, because it points out what powers you have to bring about happiness. It gives you instructions on how you can make best use of those potentials.

So to get started, let’s meditate so that we can see how skillfully we can shape the present moment by maintaining the intention to focus on our breath.