Present Karma

As we’ve mentioned, your experience of the present moment is a combination of past karma and present karma. Past karma provides the raw materials from which you shape the potentials of past karma into an actual experience of the present moment.

Last night we focused on the potentials coming from past karma. Tonight and tomorrow night I’d like to focus on the skills of present karma that allow you to shape the present moment and the future skillfully.

There are two main issues with present karma. One is how not to suffer even from the potentials of past bad karma. The other is how not to create bad new karma based on past karma that can either be bad or good. This last point is important. You can react unskillfully even to the rewards of good past karma, which is why many people head upwards in the course of their lives but then start falling back down again — out of heedfulness. That’s the issue I’ll focus on tomorrow night.

Tonight I want to focus on the issue of how not to suffer from the results of past bad karma here and now.

A good way of perceiving the relationship between past karma and present karma is that you’re like a cook trying to prepare good food from both the good and the bad produce coming in from your field of past karma seeds. The raw material coming in from the field: That’s what’s coming from your past karma. Your skills as a cook: That’s your present karma.

Here it’s important to note one of the most important features of present karma: You can look at the results of what you’re doing, and if they’re not going well, you can make adjustments. To put this in terms of the cooking analogy, you can taste the food you’re making. If it doesn’t taste good, you can add whatever you think is needed until it does taste good. The Buddha calls this process “commitment and reflection.” You try your best, and then judge the results. If they’re not good, you can change your actions. This is how you train your good intentions to become skillful intentions — i.e., not just well-meaning, but actually yielding good results. To return to the food analogy, this is how you develop the skills needed to become a really good cook.

We’ve noticed that these cooking skills come under two main headings in the Buddha’s teachings. Under the category of name, there’s attention and intention. Under the category of fabrication, there are three kinds: bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrication, which is directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrication, which is perception and feeling.

Usually, we want to have a choice as to the kind of food coming in from the field, but sometimes the field is producing nothing but bad karma. You can’t really feed directly off the crop then. So you have to feed off your present karma instead.

This will also include the skills and right views that you’ve developed over time, which means that they’re another type of past karma: in other words, our experiences and skills gained from our past sessions of meditation. Having experience in meditation is like having a spare field to produce alternative crops when the main crop is bad.

This is one of the reasons we have to keep practicing meditation again and again: so that these alternative crops will always be ready to sprout. We keep applying right view to our actions so that it becomes habitual. Otherwise, think of how badly the mind will thrash around when faced with illness and death.

The Buddha talks about how your present state of mind can make a huge difference in your experience of past karma. He gives the image — or perception — of a large salt crystal, which stands for past bad karma. If you put the salt crystal into a small cup of water, you can’t drink the water, because it’s too salty. But if you put the crystal into a large, clean river, you can drink the river water because there’s so much more of it. In the same way, if your mind is narrow, the results of past bad karma can really cause you to suffer, but if your mind is expansive, you hardly feel the effects of past bad karma at all.

Then the Buddha lists the skills that make the mind expansive: the four sublime attitudes of universal goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity; virtue; discernment; and the ability not to let your mind be overcome by pleasure or pain.

The basic principle here is that karma is not tit-for-tat. In other words, if you kill three people, you don’t have to be killed three times in response. The actual principle is that karma tends to create a certain type of result, in terms of pleasure or pain—notice the word, “tends”—but the strength of that result depends on the state of mind when the karma ripens. The skills in the Buddha’s list make all the difference when past bad karma is ripening.

Virtue helps minimize suffering and pain because you can face it with a clear conscience. Discernment helps in enabling you to see that the pain and suffering don’t have to invade the mind — we’ll focus on this topic more tomorrow morning.

Then there’s the skill of being large-hearted. This is a matter of fabricating goodwill and all of the other brahma-vihāras, or sublime attitudes. If you can develop these qualities of heart and mind, they’ll mitigate the results of bad past karma by filling your mind with clean, clear water. As your awareness expands to cover the whole universe, your own pains and difficulties will seem small in comparison.

The four brahma-vihāras are attitudes of unlimited goodwill, unlimited compassion, unlimited empathetic joy, and unlimited equanimity. The first one, goodwill, in Pāli is mettā. Often mettā is translated as “loving-kindness,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Mettā has nothing to do with love, because love is partial by nature. Mettā actually means goodwill, a wish for true happiness. That’s an attitude that can be universal. You can have goodwill for people without loving them and even without liking them—in fact, when you don’t like people, that’s when you need to develop mettā the most, so that you’re not tempted to treat them in an unskillful way.

When understood in the light of karma, goodwill is the wish that people understand the causes for happiness and be willing and able to act on that understanding. This is something you can wish for anyone without hypocrisy, even people who are very evil or whom you dislike intensely.

A second misunderstanding about mettā is that universal mettā is an innate quality of the mind. Actually, unskillful and skillful habits are both innate to the mind, and you have to learn how to develop the skillful ones very consciously and work to maintain them, because the mind is quick to change direction. You need to keep developing goodwill and the other brahma-vihāras because ill will, harmfulness, resentment, and passion are no less innate to the mind than they are. This is why the Buddha says you have to be determined to develop an attitude of universal goodwill as a task to always keep in mind: Partial goodwill is easy; universal goodwill is hard.

In some instances, this will require more effort than in others. With some people, you just think about them and you immediately feel mettā for them. In other cases, you really have to exert a fabrication. And this involves all three of the fabrications we’ve been talking about this week.

First you try to breathe calmly to get a feeling of ease and fullness in the body—this is bodily fabrication combined with one aspect of mental fabrication.

Then you direct your thoughts toward that person and you evaluate why you find it difficult to feel goodwill for him or her. Then you reason with yourself, reminding yourself that there really is no good reason not to feel goodwill. And however skillfully you can think your way into an attitude of goodwill, that would count as verbal fabrication.

Then you try to use whatever perceptions would make it easier for you to feel goodwill. This would be the other aspect of mental fabrication. For example, if it so happens that you can’t think of any good qualities in a person you’re angry at, you have to cultivate compassion. Here the perception to hold in mind is the Buddha’s image of seeing someone out in the desert lying alone on the side of the road, sick, with no one to help him. Instinctively, you would feel compassion for that person whether you knew him or not. In the same way, if you see people with no good qualities at all, you really have to feel sorry for them: They’re creating a lot of bad karma for themselves. This is a skillful use of perception. That’s the first brahma-vihāra.

The next two brahma-vihāras—compassion and empathetic joy—are extensions of mettā. Compassion is what you feel if you have goodwill for all beings but you see that there are some beings who are suffering or are doing actions that would lead to suffering. You have to feel compassion for them and wish that they would stop suffering, or the actions leading to suffering.

Empathetic joy is what your goodwill feels for people when you see that they’re happy or are doing things that will lead to happiness. You don’t feel resentful of them; you don’t feel jealous of them. If you do feel some jealousy, the Buddha recommends this perception: In the many, many lifetimes you’ve been through, you’ve experienced the same pleasure that that person is experiencing now. It left you, and in time it will leave the other person. The fact that the other person may be better off than you right now means very little in the larger scheme of things. There’s no need to be jealous. It’s the same way with compassion. If you see someone suffering, you remember that you’ve suffered in that way, too.

In this way, your compassion is not condescending and your empathetic joy is not a hypocritical disguise for jealousy.

The fourth brahma-vihāra is equanimity. Equanimity is expressed in a different manner from the other three. The first three are expressed with the phrase, “May all beings be happy,” “May they do this,” “May they do that.” In other words, it’s a wish. Equanimity is expressed by a statement of fact. “All living beings are the owners of their actions, heir to their actions,” and so forth. This is not a wish; it’s a statement of fact. There’s no “may” there at all.

Equanimity is the appropriate emotion to feel when you see that there are beings who are doing things that will cause suffering and that no matter what you do, they will not stop. Or they’re suffering from something in their past actions, and no matter how hard you try to help them, you cannot stop that suffering. So for the time being, you have to put your concern for their happiness aside, remembering—being mindful of the fact—that you have limited abilities and a limited amount of strength. If you waste your energy trying to help people you cannot help, it saps the strength that you could have devoted to people you can help. So for the time being, you have to put aside your concern for the people you can’t help and focus instead on the areas where you can make a difference—realizing that some day there may come a time when you can help, but for the time being you have to be patient. In this way, equanimity is not hard-heartedness. It’s simply bringing discernment to your goodwill.

If you can develop these unlimited mind states, you can begin to trust yourself more as you deal with difficult people and difficult situations. In this way, the brahma-vihāras provide you with protection from the results of any unskillful karma you did in the past.

So they’re good attitudes to keep in mind, and skillful qualities to develop with ardency. They help put your sufferings into perspective as you allow your mind to encompass the entire universe.

Then there are the skills of not being overcome by pleasure or pain. The purpose of working both with pleasure and with pain in our meditation is to develop these two skills.

One of the ways we learn not to be overcome by pleasure is by learning how to develop the pleasure of concentration. By gaining mastery over this type of pleasure, we can learn to see sensual pleasures as less and less important. And in the course of mastering concentration, we also have to learn how not to be overcome by the pleasure of the concentration itself. You may have noticed when the breath becomes pleasant and you’ve dropped your focus on the breath to focus on the pleasure, the mind gets very fuzzy and then begins to drift away. To maintain your concentration, you have to maintain your focus on the breath.

That means that you have to learn how not to be overcome by the pleasure. You let the pleasure do its work, whereas your work is to stay with the breath. As you master this aspect of concentration, you learn an important skill in not being overcome by the effects of past karma, whether good or bad.

When dealing with either pleasure or pain in the present moment, attention plays a major role: asking the proper questions when either pains or pleasures arise. For instance, when dealing with pleasure, you treat pleasure not as a goal but as a tool. In other words, you don’t try to wallow in the pleasure as much as you can, asking yourself, “How much happiness can I squeeze out of the pleasure by indulging in it?” Instead you ask, “What can I do with this pleasure in order to improve the quality of the mind?”

The reason you don’t want pleasure to take over your mind is because if you open the door to let it in, pains will come in as well. So to protect yourself from pain, you have to protect yourself from heedless attitudes toward pleasure, too.

These are some of the skills that protect us from suffering from the results of past bad karma. When you use the three fabrications to develop the brahma-vihāras, virtue, and discernment, and to train the mind not to be overcome by pleasure or pain, then you’ll find that you can deal much more skillfully with bad karma that’s coming in from the past, without really suffering from your past karma at all.

So try to develop these skills on a daily basis. That way, you’ll have your alternative field of karma ready to draw on when your other fields yield nothing but rotten vegetables.