Is Karma Fact or Fiction?

 

Looking back over the years this word, karma, has been misrepresented by so many people. I've lost count of the number of times so-called entertainment celebrities have spat out the word and who probably haven't a clue as to its real meaning. You get the likes of Madonna, Kim Kardashian, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson and other narcissists - you know what I mean? It follows on from these other celebrity-chat catchwords of recent years: awesome, chilling out, bodacious, dude, OMG (oh my god), etc, etc.

But the word karma; what exactly does it mean? I came across this word many moons ago when I got interested in it, initially in Hinduism, and then Buddhism. In the West, back in the day, the word karma was translated as cause and effect. You have a cause - something happens - and then you have an outcome to the cause - the effect. If only it was as simple as that.

The word 'karma' comes from the ancient Indian languages of Sanskrit and Pali that goes back over 3,000 years ago. In this blog, I shall try to describe karma from the Buddhist perspective. Basically, karma is action with intention. When you think about it all our actions have some kind of intention. In one case we want ‘this’ to happen but in another case, we ‘don’t want’ this to happen.

Here's a real-life example of karma. A friend of mines back in 2019 was pulled up in his car by traffic police; it was in a supermarket car park. He was told to get out of the car by the two policemen. One started asking about his car insurance, road tax and MOT whilst the other walked around the car checking the tyres, etc. To cut a long story short, the police had carried out an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) device check and discovered he had no car insurance or road tax and no MOT. He was fined £300.00 for the offence(s). He explained to me that losing his job a year earlier had caused him to try and save money which resulted in this sorry tale. But, this was karma 'in action'. Had he maintained his car insurance and road tax payments, and ensured his car had an MOT, then this would have not happened. It was his actions that resulted in bad karma coming back to haunt him. Lessons learned, as they say.

I’m sure that most of you can look back in your lives and recall similar instances of personal karma. With karma, and by our actions, we cannot so much control our lives but remove the possibilities of bad karma. Of course we shall always look for the good karma in ourselves: helping the ill and the sick, helping an old-age pensioner (OAP) cross the road, also give up your seat on a packed bus or train to an OAP, feed the birds or rescue a lost dog in the street, give some money to those with little or none.

So are we talking fact or fiction? Well, it certainly is not the latter. Karma does not necessarily mean past actions. It embraces both past and present deeds. Buddhism, of course, has reincarnation or rebirth as a central doctrine. As your present state of mindfulness and understanding animate and condition your current thoughts, words, and deeds, so your current actions are moderating the effects of past thoughts, words, and deeds. This is why I cannot emphasize enough to try and live a clean, honest life because what you do in this life will determine one’s future incarnation.

I shall end this blog with a quote from the Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Traleg Kyabgon (now deceased) from his excellent book, Karma - What It Is and What It Isn’t and Why it Matters: ‘Our actions are dependent on our perceptions of things, what we think about them, and the types of emotions we consequently experience and this brings us back around again to the sort of actions we perform. How we deal with these multiple layers of experience determines, in the end, whether we become a noble or an ignoble person.’