Norden wrote:smcj wrote:People say there are many supporting conditions for a result to take effect. For example, someone is murdered, the supporting conditions are: right time, right place, right incident, etc. but these are only supporting conditions, right? The final result is that person get murdered, so that person who get murdered, died young, is the result of killing. This is the precise result of kamma. It's known to us, so how is that imponderable?
Can you go back through the police files and determine who the victim had previously murdered? Or better yet, can you come up with a plausible karmic cause for 250,00 people to be wiped out by the Christmas Tsunami?
What I'm saying is, the law of kamma is the law of cause and effect, right?
One cause will result only in certain consequence.
For example:
Killing (cause) results in short life (result). But how short is the life, no one knows, because kamma is imponderable.
Another thing to use "imponderable" is, killing (cause) results in poverty (result). This too is imponderable.
If kamma is cause and effect, which one of those is the correct one?
If the latter one is possible, that means plant apple seed (killing) will result in banana fruit (poverty).
I'm not sure I've ever heard that killing results in poverty, but in any case I think that is the wrong way to address the issue.
There is an underlying, inviolable principle that there can never be an uncaused effect. In karmic law that means whatever we experience is a result of previously enacted intentions. In general, it means negative actions result in negative effects and positive actions result in positive results. We can often see that pattern worked out through explicit activities within a single lifetime, which provides sufficient evidence to reasonably classify specific actions as negative or positive. This allows us to begin ordering our thoughts and behaviors in particular ways to produce particular results. That part is easy enough for ordinary beings to work out.
But there are too many exceptions for that to be a sufficient description of karma. Therefore, we need to add in the factor of rebirth. That is a little harder to grasp, but still well within the reach of ordinary beings. Since there can be no first (i.e. uncaused) birth, the experience of today could have its causal roots in actions committed in any previous lifetime.
We can work this out to the level of categorizing many types of negative and positive actions that are likely to cause certain types of negative and positive experiences. But when we try to identify the precise action that caused this particular result, we’re in over our heads. Even within the more obvious activities of a given lifetime we often identify the wrong causes. This is because even though karma is “personal”, meaning that each mental continuum can only experience its own karmic results, karmic law refers to
interdependent causality.
Berzin makes the point (in his recorded course on
Wheel of Sharp Weapons from 2006) that, regarding the statement, “everything is the result of karma”, it is a selfish notion to think, “everything is the result of MY karma”. The extremes are: “Nothing is my fault” versus “Everything is my fault”. The middle way is that every conditioned situation is the result of everyone’s karma acted out in concert. Such complexity is completely imponderable for ordinary beings. Therefore, we have to rely on the teachings of masters who have previously established the karma to interpret Buddha’s teachings and provide us with guidance about how we can most effectively redirect our actions to produce more positive karma.