Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Ignyen opens a three-week course on karma with a guided breath meditation before establishing the session’s core insight: our feelings—joy, sorrow, restlessness—arise not from external circumstances or other people, but from past intentions that persist in the mind as karmic imprints. He explores how intention functions moment to moment: how it activates virtuous or non-virtuous mental factors, shaping an action’s karmic weight; how we habitually blame others while remaining blind to our own role; and why observing intention directly is the path to freedom. Through an extended Q&A, Ignyen walks the group through Buddhist mental structure and explores deeper questions: comparing Buddhist and Christian ethical frameworks, addressing rebirth and the stream of consciousness across lifetimes, and clarifying how intention differs from mere thought. Designed for practitioners encountering Buddhist psychology for the first time.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2011 07 13.mp3
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: Karma (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2011-07-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~9,558
So this is a type of mindfulness mindfulness of the body. So we’re seated in a relaxed position. Spine should be reasonably straight. So relaxing the body and then focusing on the breath, we’re watching the or focusing on the contact of the breath just on the inside of the nose. And while we’re focusing on the breath, we’re just letting the mind go just relaxing the mind, just taking note of thoughts as they arise.
But instead of following the thought, we’re just letting it go, just practicing letting go of our thoughts. Now we can finish the meditation just there. Relax. So I wish to welcome everyone here for the course on karma, all about karma. We’re not going to cover all the issues dealing with karma, of course, but we’re going to make an attempt.
We’re going to see what issues we can deal with related to karma over the next three weeks. It’s a huge topic karma and it’s something that we hear about all the time. But the actual meaning of karma is quite profound and really quite ordinary at the same time. It’s something that in a way is simpler than we probably think. It really is.
So karma. What is it? Well, really the simple meaning of karma is it’s just the intention we have in the present moment. Just our volition, our intention to act. This is really what karma is.
karma is a Sanskrit word. It comes from the root ‘kri’ meaning to act, action karma means to act, but it also has the implication of the cause of the action, what’s giving rise to an action. So it’s talking about intention. So as such karma is not physical. It’s a mental activity.
It’s not sensory awareness, it’s a type of mental awareness. The intention to do something. But it’s even though our intention is something that is, you know, so close to us, something we’re so familiar with, we don’t often understand our intentions when they arise. We don’t often understand, you know, all the you know, where they’re coming from. Our thoughts, our states of mind develop and manifest very quickly, very precisely, often in streams that we’re not fully aware of.
This is often the case with us our state of mind is not always very clear to us. True? Why isn’t it clear to us? Our state of mind is often not very clear to us because we have another type of mental awareness: ignorance that often coexists with our intention. And really from a Buddhist point of view the whole nature of the universe depends on this link between ignorance and karma.
But before we perhaps broach that topic, we’ll look more just at the simple meaning of karma. So, karma also, if we look at it perhaps in a more technical sense, as an individual being we have various states of mind that are central to our identity as a human being. Our mind is made up of many different aspects. True? For instance, we have intention, our karma exists.
But also we have feeling. And our feelings are so central to us. Aren’t they? I mean our feelings in the present, how we feel, positive feeling, negative feeling, neutral feeling, it’s always there, it’s an omnipresent state, how we feel. True?
It is, isn’t it? It’s there. And we have mental feeling and we have physical feeling. Now the interesting thing of karma and I think I just want to bring this up at the beginning because it may raise some questions that, you know, we can maybe deal with as we progress, is that our feelings are coming from our karma. Our feelings actually arise from our intention.
And this is one of the most profound aspects of the whole issue of karma. Actually as an individual we often wonder where our feeling is coming from: Why do I feel this way about this? So why should that provoke that feeling? Right? You know: Why am I feeling this today?
Where’s that coming from? You know, oh where’s that difficult feeling? Where does it arise from? Is it, where’s the cause? I can’t see it.
We look internally, we can’t see it. The fact that we don’t see it is due to our ignorance, right? Just not understanding is another type of awareness that we have. So that really from the broader perspective, in the broader picture, our feelings themselves are coming from our past intention our past intention to act in a certain way, act in this way, act in another way. Now, this is a huge statement.
In fact, why am I stating this? It’s because this has been said by many others before. The Buddha himself stated this, and then later on various other scholars have examined this, in India or China, Tibet, Southeast Asia and so forth. Why are they bothered with this issue? Because it’s quite important: where are our feelings coming from?
Because our feelings are so important to us, aren’t they? How we feel. In fact, whole life is made up of the pursuit of happiness which is a positive mental feeling. So we spend a lot of our time trying to work out, you know, where positive feelings come from. And then when we think we have an answer to that, then we try and, you know, set that in place, you know, those conditions in place so we have positive feelings.
Sometimes we think our positive feelings are coming from other people, and we think that, oh, just being connected to that person is going make me happy. But, of course, as we progress day by day, week, month by month, and so forth, realize the other person always not quite the cause of our happiness. Because for something to be the cause of our happiness, there must always be the cause of happiness. Right? Just like, you know, something that gives, you know, fire gives rise to smoke, and smoke is always going to come from fire it can’t come from anything else but that.
Other people are not the cause of our happiness otherwise they’d always be the cause of our happiness. True? There would be no relationship issues if that were the case. We just have to find someone that makes us happy now and that would always make us happy. The application being that the feeling, the mental feeling, the mental positive feeling of happiness is not coming from other people.
It’s coming from a deeper level, a deeper cause. The implication is that it’s not coming from an external cause. And in fact, the feeling itself, the positive feeling is coming from karma. This is one of the profound insights of the Buddha, that our current feeling, whether it’s positive, neutral or negative, is coming from intention, our past intention. Not easy for us to discern this Not not easy at all.
And we may disagree with that. We think: no, that’s not the cause of feeling. And this is something we should examine. And in fact, in this life one of the most important discoveries for us would be what is the source of our feelings. Because like it or not, that’s what we’re that’s in our face, you know, moment by moment, day by day.
Where are our feelings coming from? Who’s the cause of this feeling? Where did that feeling come from? Who’s responsible for that? Who’s responsible for this one?
We have all sorts of feelings and we tend to blame all sorts of things for our feelings. Often the people closest to us, we’re blaming them for our especially the negative feelings we have. You know, oh, am I feeling this? It’s because of, you know, this one or that one. So, first understanding our feelings is important, to be able to step back a little bit and see our feelings, you know, be mindful of our feelings is very important.
But then also to examine a little bit about where those feelings are coming from. Now, in that sense, this also raises the whole issue of ethics, the whole issue of because intention karma is very closely associated with ethics. Right? Intention what is intention? Intention is the motivation that gives rise to our actions.
Often the process is very quick and we don’t really have the opportunity to observe the process of what is going on. But in this process what’s important is the intended action, the motivation, the intent we have when we engage in action. If it’s positive, negative or neutral. Really the karma only comes about we call our intention karma only if it’s positive or negative. Neutral intention is not karma.
Intention becomes karma when it produces a positive or negative feeling or when it has the strength to produce a positive or a negative feeling. That’s what’s producing our feelings. Our mental feeling is said to be coming from our past actions, our past karma. It’s not coming from the outside, it’s not coming from those around us. So anyway, I thought to start off at least with start the discussion with this idea.
Also, please feel free if as we go along, any points or anything you want to raise, I think it’s a good idea that we also have some conversation, you know, to yeah, please. What could possibly be mutual motivation? Oh, just one that’s neither positive nor negative. Yes. Yes.
Don’t understand how a motivation could be neutral. A motivation could be neutral. I mean, if we just do something without well, if we put it into those terms that are more specifically value oriented, like a virtuous motivation to do something or a non virtuous motivation to do something. Now, neutral is just something which is neither of those two. I mean, if we just just do something that is not strong, you know, for not a positive, virtuous motivation, or neither for a negative motivation if we just engage in doing something.
For instance, at work we may just do what we have to do at work, but you know we may have a neutral motivation to engage in that work. It may change. It may change to a positive motivation if we’re getting positive feedback from the boss, or negative motivation if the boss is unhappy with us. Life is just, you know, ordinary every day, maybe we’re more neutral, we’re not. The mind itself is neutral as we engage in an action.
Well, that’s a very good point because we need to be able to assess whether our mind is positive or negative, what the intention is. For instance, we look at our current we have intention in the present moment, don’t we? We have some sort of intention there. Now is that intention positive or negative? Okay.
We have different, but when we check on ourselves is it positive or negative? Okay is this table positive or negative? Intention from its side. Okay. Well, does make okay.
What makes something positive or negative? It’s very important. Okay. This is really important if we we need to be able to discern what our intention is. We need to be able to look inside and reflect: what is my intention?
What is my state of mind in the present? Because the mind itself is called a main mind, right? Actually, we should look a little bit at the mind itself. And now here we’re going to use the Buddhist view of what the mind is, okay? Now, from a Buddhist point of view, the mindthere are six main minds and fifty one mental factors that go along with the six, so all added together is fifty seven.
Right? Now, the six main minds are like eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose, tongue, body consciousness and mental consciousness. Now, consciousness itself is defined as something that’s really just the bare awareness of objects, whether it’s the bare awareness of sound through the ear, bare awareness of aroma, bear awareness of tactile, tactility, heat, cold through the body awareness, bare awareness of like, aroma, flavor, and then mental awareness itself is the bare awareness of anything. Because the mental awareness is by far the most important awareness we have. And we have these six really basic types of awareness.
Now along with those we have fifty one mental factors. Right? We have consciousness and then we have mental factors that go along with them. Now the interesting ones are the mental factors. Mental consciousness, eye consciousness, ear consciousness and so on they’re pretty boring, they don’t do much.
They’re important, we need them. But what’s doing everything for us are the mental factors. Now it’s said that there are five types of mental factor that are omnipresent, meaning that they always coexist with the mind. Right? So there’s feeling, discrimination, intention, contact and attention.
Okay, there’s five that are said anyway, without going into detail, the most important for our discussion here is feeling and intention. Feeling and intention always exist and these are what allow the main minds to function. What does feeling do? Feeling is a mental factor that actually experiences the object. It’s the positive, negative or neutral experience, the taste of the object.
It allows the consciousness to taste the object, if we could put it that way. This is what feeling is doing. Feeling can either be sensory, like we can have eye awareness, and there’s a mental factor of feeling that arises with eye awareness. And what does it do? When we look at something, we might not be aware that we have a feeling associated with eye awareness.
Now what that feeling associated with eye awareness does is that it simply, it can be positive or negative, but when it’s the eye awareness falls on something that is attractive, then a positive sensory feeling can arise. Also, like, maybe easier to talk about, say, tactile awareness. You know, like, when we’re cold and we can feel the heat coming out of the heater, it’s a positive tactile awareness, it’s a positive feeling registering through the sense awareness, right? Okay, so we have, say, feeling that can be physical or feeling that can be mental. Mental positive feeling is like happiness, you know, or negative mental feeling is like, you know, unhappiness or being depressed or and so on.
It can have many different shades, but generally they’re classified in three: positive, negative, neutral. Now similarly, intention is a bit like feeling, it’s divided roughly into three parts. So our intention now here it’s being expressed on a mental level our intention to act can be positive, negative or neutral. Right? Anyone disagree with that?
No, no. Just the impulse to act is positive or the impulse to act is negative. Like, we’re walking down the street and a dog comes out to bite us and we throw a stone at the dog. Now, our intention there is to scare the dog away. It might be to harm the dog throwing a stone at him.
Right? So the impulse to act there is negative. Right? Because it’s to harm the dog. True?
It might be because of it just to scare it away so it doesn’t actually cause you to harm. Okay. Okay. Not intend to Excellent. Dog itself.
Yes. Yes. Okay, if you’re not if the intention is not to harm the dog, then it’s not negative. But if the intention is to harm, then it becomes a negative act, a negative intention. Right?
What about instinctive act? They can be negative, they can be positive. There’s thought there. Even though it appears to be purely instinctive and impulsive, there is an intention there, it’s weighted. The action has a certain weight to it.
It’s almost unconscious, but sorry? Well, it’s yeah. It could. In hindsight we may be able to unravel what actually happened and, you know, say, oh actually it wasn’t negative, Or, in fact, it wasn’t, it was just an accident. There was no intention on my part to harm or whatever.
But sometimes it’s just not clear we’re too close to be able to unravel what’s happening, to see. But the whole idea of intention here is closely related to harming and not harming others. But again, often we’re so close to the situation that it’s very difficult for us to unravel, to look back and say, Oh. Or at the time when it’s happening to say, Oh, thatyou know, I’m being negative. Stop.
What am I doing? Why are we not clear on our intention? It’s because of our ignorance. Also, there’s a certain negligence, certain carelessness we have as well, that we’re not often we don’t really see the importance of understanding what our motivation is, what our intention is. And that can be harmful to us.
Right, so what we’re doing here is looking at action and our intention to act. And what we’re looking at is karma, because karma itself is just the intention to act. In its what? The actual essence of karma is just that. Now, through the course of the day we engage in many actions, from as soon as we get up in the morning, and each of these actions can be motivated by a positive, negative or neutral intention.
Now, intention there, it’s almost as if there is no intention. It’s because often intention for us is, you know, really becomes clearer when it’s either positive or negative. If it’s neutral, it fades into the background. We don’t it’s like with feeling. When the feeling is positive, negative, it becomes apparent to us.
But when our feeling is neutral, it’s in the background and we don’t notice it so much. Really, it’s the positive and negative feeling and intention that is significant for us, is important for us. Each intention is an individual karma. Each strand also, yes. Yep.
I mean, if you can’t have a positive and negative intention occurring at the same time with the same action. Right? Oh, then you might start off with right? You could have them one after the other, but at a time sorry? You’d be up.
You’d yeah, you think, I better go to work today, I’m waking up. Oh, I’ve got go to no, wait a minute, I’ve got a couple of sick days up my sleep. I don’t know if I really should go because, you know, it’s a proper thing to do. Oh, I can’t be bothered. You know, you might swing from positive intention to negative back to positive the more you think about it.
And then, you know, it depends in the end which way you go, you know, like: I’ll stuff it, you know, stay in bed, know, I’m not going worry about it. Actually, that’s probably a negative intention at that stage because it’s a type of laziness then. If Right. Right. We do need to check on what our motivation is.
The implication here is that if it is a negative intention that’s motivating the action, it doesn’t bring a positive result with it. Yeah, we may spend half an hour there and think, Oh, what am I doing? I better get to work and get to work late anyway. Because basically we know that we’re not going to enjoy it anyway if there’s no good reason we’re just lazing about. So actually we have a lot of inborn wisdom.
People have this inborn wisdom about intention and what is positive, what’s negative. But it’s actually applying it that is not necessarily easy. It’s there. Applying the wisdom that we have? Absolutely!
Because we’re subject all the time to negative intention, succumbing to negative states of mind. What the intention is doing also is that it is rallying other mental factors to a particular object. And what intention does is that, you know, an idea will come, a thought comes to mind in relation to a particular thing, and our intention then taking that as a focal object will then rally certain types of mental state to that object. Right? Now those mental states could be either positive, negative or neutral, But what the intention is doing, it’s the ringleader, it’s the one that’s deciding they’re going to either be positive or negative.
You know, like getting up in the morning and if we think, Oh, I shouldn’t be lazy, then the intention there is tending to the positive. It’s like being diligent, being careful, you know, having concern about work and if I don’t do it who’s going to have to do it then, you know, falls to someone else. That intention then rallies various positive attitudes towards that object. So it becomes a positive intention. Intention itself is neither positive nor in and of itself is not positive nor negative, it’s neutral, right?
Intention in it in its core state, but it becomes positive when it associates with other positive mental factors. It is. A little bit like that. There is a Okay. What is virtue?
Is this what is virtue? Basic question here is examining what virtue is, because it’s virtue that makes the intention positive. Right? Yes. What makes an action virtuous is what?
Intention that is rallying virtuous states of mind to do that action. Does that It’s going to start going into my head then. Okay, I’m sorry. Okay. Now what we’re talking about here is just some basic Buddhist psychology, the way that within Buddhism positive and negative is defined and understood.
From a Buddhist perspectiveand we won’t go into depth on this todaybut there are eleven mental factors which are naturally virtuous, intrinsically virtuous. And for the mind to become virtuous, intention has to activate those, and by activating any one or more, and by activating one or more of those positive mental factors, the mind itself becomes virtuous. Like love, right? Now if intention activates love, then love is a positive mental factor. The mind itself is then mixed with that mental state, and the mind itself becomes positive.
Sorry? You do, yes. The intention is coming from within the mind itself. Like for instance, you know, if one has a thought of another person, and then for that other person, directed towards that other person as the object, one the the intention activates love, then the mind becomes mixed with love, right? Love itself is a virtuous mental factor, so the mind becomes virtuous, right?
So that intention then has a positive outcome. Now, when the mind of the mind has become positive in that way, that intention tends to stain the mental awareness supporting that action with an imprint because it’s potent. Because a positive or a negative action is potent, has the ability to affect the mind. Right? Not only affect it in terms of make the mind positive, but it also lays down propensities, imprints, latent predispositions on the mind itself that will potentially awaken again in future.
This also is karma. In other words, the way we think affects our mind, imprints our mind going forward. So this is often this is karma this in fact is the result of karma, the result of the intention remains as an imprint within the mind. Now it’s imprints sorry, go ahead. It’s these imprints that we often experience in the present with the awakening of feeling.
Anyway, we’ll sorry, please. Yep. That’s true, there’s positive and negative but they’re not the same. Are you not still having that same fire? No.
You have the love of your pet that’s positive. And you don’t you have compassion for your pet you don’t want to see your pet suffer positive. Then you have the intention to kill the animal, right? Motivated with the intention of putting them out of their misery, right? Now that intention to kill is negative, Right?
So there’s two motivations there. There’s two intentions. One of them’s positive one’s going to have a positive outcome, and the other one’s going to have a negative outcome. They can. Sorry?
They’re two different thoughts, but they can they can occur but probably not manifestly at the same time. Because when you know you love the animal, but then in order to take it down to the vet, you really have to then manifest, more strongly manifest, the intention to kill the animal, which brings a lot of unhappy, you know, sorrow and so forth. So perhaps there’s a distinction there between, you know, you have two different motivations, they don’t manifest at the same they don’t become manifest at the same time, but they can exist in the mind at the same time. The motivation true, the motivation can be out of love. Motivated out of anger or hate or Right.
Right. But still, when you take it to the vet, your motivation, your intention there is to kill the animal. So that intention to kill is negative, naturally negative. Motivation is out of love? No, there’s an underlying motivation there also to benefit the animal.
But intention is the is the karma. Well, essentially you can say there’s two intentions there, And you put them both together and you take the animal to the vet. And it’s a painful experience because of the intention to kill. And often you feel as if you’re betraying the animal. Because you love the animal, but you’re going to kill it.
Out of the view that this will benefit the animal. Now, here this the idea that it will benefit the animal is uncertain. There’s no guarantee that it will actually benefit. Just ending the life of that animal doesn’t mean to say that the suffering of that animal is going to stop or the suffering of that being. That being, this current life, will stop, but from a Buddhist point of view the mental continuum of that animal does not stop.
The other implication is that if the karma that is giving rise to the negative situation for the animal, the sickness and so forth, is not completed, is not finished, then that may potentially continue into the next life of that being. So it is no certainty. Yeah. Yeah. Often that is the case.
The vet will say, no, this has to be done, and the decision is taken out of our hands. Well, a way, it’s what happens in the aftermath of that, whether the regret is there or not. Because it becomes very clear after, you know, that the action is done and, oh, you know, that there’s an ongoing residue that’s still there, then we realize, oh, yeah, that wasn’t, you know, there’s a consequence for me out of that. I mean, I’m regretting. Now, then it depends sorry?
It is. It is good for one to regret a negative action, that’s very positive. To avoid having to have regret is difficult and that’s where this whole field of action, of karma, is so subtle. And that’s, you know, that’s why when you go into the vows of nuns and monks, there’s so many vows that are written, you know, about actions, about physical and verbal action in order to avoid the regret. Because it’s hard to meditate if you’re sitting there thinking, oh my, I shouldn’t have done that. We can’t meditate.
The purpose of taking on these ethical vows is to keep the mind simple and light. And if we are consumed by our regret, you know, we can’t meditate, we can’t the mind doesn’t become clear. That’s the basic issue in our life, exactly that. That we have to be careful because otherwise we can disturb our peace of mind even with the best of intentions. As I say, you know, road to purgatory is paved with good intentions, because there can be initially a good intention, you know, out of love from my partner, my friend, whoever I did this, still the action that we commit is ours alone.
Resides with us. And it can be very difficult to purify it. Actually, amount of time and effort taken to purify an action can far outweigh, you know, the simple fact of not committing the action to begin with. It’s much more efficient not to, you know, commit a negative action with negative intention. Well, unfortunately just being neutral doesn’t really doesn’t necessarily get us out of our current situation either.
But yeah, neutral is better than negative. And if we can’t get the mind to a positive state, at least if we can get it to a neutral state, then that’s good, because that an action committed with a neutral motivation is not going to have that sort of an outcome. It’s not going to have that I don’t know, unpeaceful or that residue that we don’t want after the action is committed. If you can It’s like not taking any notice of something. Yeah, that’s true.
In fact, Śāntideva says, you know, at times the mind is completely unworkable. You know, we just no matter how we try and do something, we’ve got a negative intention there. So that time he said, Better to treat the mind like a piece of wood, like make it neutral. I can’t work with it. I’m not going to work with it, I’ll just leave it.
I’ll just try and put it in neutral. And the reason for that is that if we act with a negative intention, we’re going to have that residue, we’re going to have that uncomfortable disturbing element within in the center of our mind that’s going to continue for you know, a period of time. This is karma. Now there’s different levels of karma here, because even the karma which is just the negative intention itself or the positive intention is karma. But there is an imprint that that action makes upon the mind that is non mental, in other words.
It’s like a seed that remains within the mind and is carried along by the mental awareness. It just sits there. And that can reawaken, you know, after a long delay. And often that’s what we have to contend with in the present. Actions committed in our past lifetimes that manifest in the present.
And it’s just we can’t understand why that feeling should have arisen. Or if it’s a positive feeling, oh, where did that come from? Why do I suddenly, you know, have a pleasant why am I happy? Can’t understand. I’ll take it, though.
Yeah. Actually, any happiness we experience is coming from hard work in the past. Our hard work is not like a little free gift from who knows where, It’s ourselves in a past life have worked to generate a positive intention, had put hard work into generating a positive intention. That positive intention has remained within the mind for a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years. And just at this point the conditions have come together for that positive intention, that seed, that imprint to awaken.
And we have like: Oh, don’t know why, but just feel happy. Just what might be, you know, really a strong feeling of happiness. So that’s coming from past intention. Sorry. Oh, they are.
Our intentions are completely locked into our thought processes. Our intention is a thought process. It’s a conceptual thought for us. What is it? It’s something, you know, we have various thoughts going on, streams of thought going on within our mind at any one time.
Some are manifest, others are not manifest. They’re there. Like, within within our mind, you know, there’s many types of conception that we can have. Thought. Right?
Like love and hate are types of thoughts, aren’t they? They’re conceptions. Resentment, compassion. I mean, we have them there and they just some are there, some are manifest, others are not manifest, but they’re there and they all have their own objects, you know, like we’ll be thinking of a positive thought to that person and the next moment we’re thinking a negative thought to another person, and then a neutral thought to our situation in the present, or then a negative thought towards that object, then a positive thought to another object. All of these are thoughts, they’re conceptual.
Now, what we need to be aware of is our intention when those thoughts arise, that, you know, we’re not reinforcing the negative. Now we do have a habit of thinking around, you know, negative objects and thinking long and hard about them and justifying them and bringing in reasons to justify thinking in this particular way and so on. Now even on the level of just thinking about something, it does have an effect on our mind. It just it creates this habit, and we’re all so thoroughly aware of this habit, because we know how to think negatively. We don’t need any instruction on it.
From as early as we can remember, we know how to think negatively. We know how to hate, we know how to get angry. And we indulge that, and we it becomes mixed our intention becomes mixed with that thought of hate. And we act on it. And so on.
So in a sense, what we’re talking about here is free will. Complete freedom in a sense with what to affirm and what to not affirm in our mind. And we also have a lot of strong habits that probably constrict us a great deal because we’re habituated to thinking in that way. When that process starts, we’re, you know, we tend to follow it through without really thinking about, is this going to be of any benefit to me? Where’s that leading?
If I generate, if I affirm that intention, if I generate that intention, is it going to be of any benefit to me? At present, our ability to step back from the process and evaluate is very weak. We get caught up with it, and before we know it we’ve laid down a thousand negative intentions in our mind. And maybe beyond that we’ve already acted on, you know, we’ve acted out that negative intention, we’ve acted out this negative intention. And there’s I’m not sure whether you would agree, but there’s a tendency for the negative to dominate over the positive.
And that again is through habit. Right. Now within this, we’ve just covered some of the initial issues with karma. Now what karma also raises in our minds as Westerners is this whole issue of rebirth. Rebirth and karma, they tend to go together.
And karma implies rebirth. And from an Eastern perspective, they’re, you know, they’re just commonplace, they’re just, you know, accepted, you know, as being, you know, like part of the mix. Whereas in the West, we where the whole idea of enlightenment is a little less familiar to us, the whole idea of rebirth is less familiar. The whole idea of saṃsāra is less familiar. Also our idea of karma is narrower.
But really what is being implied with the whole idea of karma is a very broad picture of lifetimes without beginning and intentional action without beginning that can manifest for us, generate feelings for us in the present. So karma is not just something that we’re manufacturing now in the present, but we’re experiencing the results of past karma from, you know, many potential lifetimes ago. I’m not sure how you feel about this, because reincarnation is not not something that is a big issue, should be a big issue. Why? Because if it if it is central to our experience as a human being, if it is, you know, if it is central, if it does have a large impact upon us at present, then we need to understand this.
We need to understand the impact it does have. We need to understand the process. But of course if we only live one life, then it and I think this is one of the things in the West, because in the West we tend think of just a one life scenario. It’s just, what are we doing in this life? You know, from birth till death, taking care of everything, getting a good job, making a good living, having life insurance, having a funeral plan, so on and so forth.
We put a lot of energy into this and we’re quite good at organizing these things. And our thought about the future is, well, you know, hopefully I’ll be reborn in heaven and that’s it, you know, I’ll be heaven from then on. Right? Our view in the West, our worldview, our appreciation of these issues tends to be, you know, have that form. True?
And we talk in the street and that, oh, that’s how it is. Well, really don’t know what happens when I die, but well, you know, hopefully I’ll be looked after somewhere, I’ll just go up there or, you know, I’ll a cloud somewhere, I’ll have a harp or I mean it’s part of our myth, it’s part of our I don’t know, our worldview living in the West. Part of our way of coping, part of our denial. Don’t talk about death. Don’t okay.
Part of the idea that we can’t really work it out, it’s too big, it’s too much of a mystery, it’s in a way it’s not within our culture, it’s not part of our civilization. It is. It is very strong. It’s I mean, that particular worldview has its advantages in some ways. It keeps things quite simple and we don’t have to be too concerned about my word, what happened if I lived before?’ or what happens in the life after heaven?
Or the life after that? Or how does this all come together? How does it work? How can we simply have this one life now? We’re created, we have this one life, and then we’re reborn in heaven and that’s it.
And does that make sense? Does anything in our universe at the present exist in quite that way? Is that a proper causal sequence of events? Does that scenario conform with the law of cause and effect? Is it really viable and so on?
Sorry. So something born as a creature. Know? And at the end of that particular kind of life, there’s a change. So it’s either positive or negative.
And that that’s that it is still a transformation into another kind of life. Right? So it’s a transformation to what we report. Another But there’s still a transformation. So it’s not it’s not positive that life simply disappears.
That that’s that’s the one that’s a problem where I think we’re the we’re the secular viewers. We’re born, we live, and then there’s absolutely nothing. That has I think that has no problems because most of the universe has transformative actions going all the time. Mhmm. Yeah.
But the idea that it just That is. Right. Or that we would now for me also, the idea of just being reborn in heaven without necessarily I mean, okay, like, can take different scenarios there, like if you lead a virtuous life, then you’re rewarded by a rebirth in heaven. And then you continue there, you know, without end. That needs to be investigated.
That needs in Buddhism there are also, you know, perhaps similar assertions, like in a pure realm. You know, an ordinary being can be reborn in a pure realm. And once you’re reborn there, then really there’s no necessary I mean, you can remain there once you attain the Buddha bodies and so forth. Anyway, without going into too much doctrine and so forth, What we need to do is investigate this one life that we’re living now and try and understand it, I think, from a causal, from a functional point of view. These are huge issues though, the whole issue of enlightenment.
Is enlightenment possible? What is karma? What is rebirth? What is the mind? How do these things function?
What are my connections with other beings? What is our common karma? And so on. There are many, many, many, many issues that are brought up. Not to say that we have to deal with them all now by any means.
Not at all, not at all. But I was in Melbourne and the Lama was talking about some of the strengths in Christianity, which was really interesting to hear. Was anyone in Melbourne? Yeah. And the Dalai Lama was talking about how the belief in a creator god and all beings being created by that being, you know, potentially established a bond between beings because they’re all coming from the same source, so really, you know, there’s no reason, you know, to harm other beings.
That being is also created. No reason to generate hatred towards them or and so on. The Dalai Lama was giving he went on at, you know, giving different examples of the what the benefit of following a Christian approach, whereas the Buddhist would say, oh well, you know, everything is karma and it’s the law of cause and effect karma, it’s saṃsāra, it’s nirvana, and looking at the whole process of rebirth and how to get beyond it, and then justifying why we have to practice virtue from more a Buddhist worldview. But the Dalai Lama was also talking about how within a Christian framework that justification for virtue is equally there. And if that suits any individual to look at it from that perspective, there is a creator, we have this one life, and then we, you know, according to our actions we’re reborn in heaven.
If that makes sense, if that impels us to practice virtue, then that’s fine, that’s perfect. It doesn’t need to be another philosophic view there, because the purpose has already been established. The purpose of actually studying karma is to practice virtue. One of the genius of the Buddhist view is that it goes down into what? Looking at the whole process of causation from the nature, from the point of view of the mind itself, and how the causation of karma or how karma and intention actually affect the mind and affect the way we experience things.
How they generate feeling for us in an ongoing stream. You have. Ah, that’s right. There’s a different approach. It has changed, I think, recent years because I think the church has realized that it has a thought.
Yeah. Look, there’s they do have a different approach, but there’s so many common areas between them as well, within Buddhism and Christianity, for instance. I’m not saying that I’m saying that it’s even karma is not far away from the Ten Commandments. Exactly. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and so on. So all the parables that come up and so forth.
In fact, as you go more into Christianity, actually I understand Christianity better having studied a little bit of Buddhism, then it allows me to, you know, understand some of the concepts within Christianity. And actually, and of course, within Christianity there’s so many different views. There’s still a lot of debate going on, you know, between the different sects, as there is in Buddhism. One of the fundamental differences is that Buddhism doesn’t assert a created god, but that’s not necessarily that attractive to many people. Many people want that actually, you know, it can inspire people to practice if there’s a concept of a creator god.
And it can unite people, bring people together, can be very beneficial for a spiritual practice. Buddhism on the other hand doesn’t assert it asserts karma, and in fact, karma really is what God is in many respects, like God being the Creator, everything is created due to a single being. Within Buddhism everything comes about from karma, the actions of beings. In a way, God is the personification of karma, if perhaps from a Buddhist point of view. From a Christian point of view, God is the personification of love.
So, in a way that’s also okay. There are just different views here on these issues. And in a sense, I think this is where the Dalai Lama is his approach is very pertinent because it depends on our particular inclinations and interest, you know, what really suits me at a deep level to believe in? What’s going to affect me? Here meaning what’s going to make me be a better person?
What series or set of beliefs or philosophy is going to make me improve. Because I’ve got a lot of improving to do. In fact, we’ve got a vast amount of work to do on ourselves. Whether it’s from a Buddhist perspective or a Christian perspective, we from Buddhist perspective we’ve become a human being, which means that of the six levels of six types of being, we’re on the fourth. We’ve actually achieved quite a good level of practice to become a human being.
But still, as a human being, we have a long way to go. No, it’s interesting. No, it doesn’t work that way in Buddhism because it’s possible to purify. No matter what we’ve done, we can purify it. But the purification is not external.
It’s up to ourselves. We have to purify. True, true. It is part of the process, but not necessarily part of the process of enlightenment. Actually, just overcoming past negative actions can be done, there’s a process by doing it that one can do it within Buddhism, and it really starts with regret and understanding the fault of the action.
Right? That can increase one’s virtue, but just increasing virtue is not necessarily part of the path of enlightenment. Okay, becoming more realized, yeah. No, that’s true. Purifying our past negative actions is there to make the mind clearer, so we understand.
Everything is for the purpose of wisdom, and this occurs in the Bible itself, doesn’t it? Of all the gettings, get wisdom, because it’s the main one. Within Buddhism it’s the same: everything is there for wisdom. So in order to get wisdom, wisdom only emerges from a clear mind. In order to get a clear mind, we need a clear conscience.
To get a clear conscience, we need to overcome our non virtue, our unethical actions in the past. In order to overcome our non unethical action in the past, we have to be able to understand the fault. That requires a certain amount of wisdom. So understand the fault, and then when we understand the fault, then generate regret for the fault. It should really those two are the main ways of purifying we have in the present.
But difficult to understand the fault One of the reasons it’s so difficult to understand the fault is that we justify the fault so much, so many times, over and over and over again, that in the end it becomes very difficult to penetrate, to get down to the level of really seeing the fault. But actually we’re just absolutely full of fault. And not only, you know, full of fault, but full of fault in relation to every being. But that’s hard for us to understand in the present, because unless we under from Buddhist point of view, we’re full of fault towards every being because of our past lives. Because everyone we meet, we’ve got a store of negative actions, negative intentions towards those beings from the past, unresolved, uneliminated, unpurified.
So whoever we come across Are there positives, unresolved, or not the reduction? Oh, they’re positives, there’s a lot of positives, unresolved, they’re good, not to be purified. That’s right, all of the above, lots of neutral. A lot of positive is there. I finally made it to human.
But as a consequence of that, I must have already done all of the most heinous things forever, thousands of times so that when I kind of think about it, let me acknowledge that perhaps I haven’t done the best thing that I could have done, then it’s all that kind of stuff. You’ve been an animal has killed things. Yeah. The danger for us from the point of view of karma is that we have a lot of negative karmic imprints in our mind, in our mental continuum, unpurified. And they can generate a rebirth in, you know, as an animal, as in the hells, as ghosts and so forth, a hungry ghost.
Still unpurified. So from that point of view, we’re not beyond danger. And that’s what why it’s often recommended that we really have to practice now, because we don’t have any guarantee that we’re going to be human again in future. Because we have this vast storehouse of negative potential. Just an accumulation of negative acts, that are still there, they’re viable.
They don’t go away, they remain in the mind. If they went away from a Buddhist point of view, if they just disappeared, if there was a use by date, you know, at the end of life, you went back to neutral, then it’d be much, you know, we’d be in a better position. But from the point of view of Buddhist philosophy, they don’t disappear without being purified. They’ve got there’s a story at the time of the Buddha that the Buddha had this silk scarf and his attendant Ānanda was there and he took the Buddha took a scarf and he started tying knots in it. And he tied lots of knots and then he said to Ānanda, Ānanda, if I were to untie these knots, where would I start?
And the Buddha said, Oh, you start with the last one that you tied and then you progressively go back and then that way you would untie all the knots. And so and the Buddhist said, well, so too. And the mind is like that. It’s tied, it’s entangled through all these, you know, negative actions or actions coming from intention, and in order to completely purify the mind you have to undo them. You have to be able to undo those actions.
And until you undo the actions, then the mind is not free, the mind is entangled. Interestingly there, the observation is made. You have to undo them, you know, starting from the last one you made. I don’t know, when we talk about this maybe it’s easier if we went to a Christian perspective and just talked about one life because the Buddhists are overcomplicating everything. They’re going back a billion lifetimes into the past and saying, We’ve got a lot to purify.
From that perspective, maybe better to be, you know, we take a Christian perspective on just one life. That’s why from a Buddhist perspective there’s no created god, there’s no being that’s imposed this on us. There’s no all powerful being who created us and then I don’t know, you know, there’s various descriptions of how this process then evolved. The Buddhists avoid that completely and say that there was no beginning to the mental continuum. If we trace back our current mind through this stream of consciousness, then we never come to a first moment that was created by an external being.
It’s just beginningless. If we assert that there was a creative being at some point who started the process, then the question arises, well, who created the creative being? So then you get into this another argument there, because you cannot have a first cause. Now the reasoning behind that is that a cause must necessarily always be impermanent to be a cause. Because in order to cause something it has to be functioning, it has to be impermanent, it has to be changing.
Right? Now if the cause is impermanent it means it always it has prior causes to it and there’s no beginning to them. And for anything to be a cause it must be impermanent so you can never come to a beginning. Does that reasoning sound? So this is an issue in Christianity that has come up: how do you establish the first cause?
In Buddhism it just avoids it and says there’s no first cause, it justyou never come to a beginning. And so that’s the same for the stream of consciousness that we have. It wasn’t that our stream of consciousness began at conception. Our stream of consciousness preceded that. It went back into a previous lifetime.
It went back into a previous stream that was disassociated from this mind and body. It took up this mind and body so many years ago and this stream of consciousness then remains with it, supported by this mind and body, by this physical body, until death, when that stream of consciousness will be released then but that stream of consciousness then continues. It’s a little bit like in the Christian scenario where the soul is released at death and then travels to heaven. And from Buddha’s perspective that also occurred at the beginning of this life. It’s not unique to the beginning of this life that we just started.
Although of course it appears that way, we can’t remember very you know beyond that point. So are there any other issues? Anything? Anyway, the purpose of tonight is really just to bring up some of the ideas of karma. And maybe just to think a little bit about what karma is, karma being our intention, and just thinking about the implications of our actions.
Actually, whether we’re Christian or Buddhist, our ethical actions should be the very central goal, because the wisdom that’s able to differentiate positive from negative, virtue from non virtue, is our immediate, in a sense, source of liberation. Yeah. I’d just like to ask a question. Yes, yes. So is that a bad thing that you actually do feel like this, you allow yourself to feel like this, but then you say that’s wrong and I can’t do it?
Well, really far better to, you know, even though we agonize in the middle period about what to do, in the end if we say, Okay, better not to do that, is good. That is good. It’s procrastination that leads to a positive outcome. That’s good. Not succumbing is good, because not to say it’s should.
That’s real strength, actually, because it leads to strength. Weakness is to succumb to the anger and kind of safe even though you may not see eye to eye. Oh, then great! To be able to express that, oh, I’m uncomfortable with this, you know, and the reason for that is I don’t, you know, my view is this and so forth. Yeah, to talk about those things is really good.
Especially when we realize we’re becoming impatient and we you know, to bring it up in a skillful way and express that is really good for us, because we have to because the intention is good we don’t want to harm the other person. The intention there is not to harm, so good intention. That she has to go through that. Oh, exactly. And this whole idea that we have to harm that person in order to get back or, you know, redress some harm that they’ve given to us, when actually they may not have really intended to harm us at all.
It may have been they were in a shocking state one day and they said something that they didn’t even really intend, and they’ve regretted that ever since. And for us to labor for weeks and months or whatever about this incident and then finally decide we’re going to do something and right the wrong actually the wrong is coming from our own wrong prior to that with that person. Yeah, it’s I haven’t met that person before in a previous life, have I? Oh, you there’s no one we haven’t met before, we’ve met them many, many times. And we’ve done something to her in the past, so it’s just, you Wellbut that’s only a temporary solution of course because that’s Oh, and if she was the mother, you would be yeah, it might be subjective.
It would. Anyway, there’s some good grist for the mill there, just to think about intentions and just observing our intentions and not, you know, just to lightly observe, just check up where the mind is. Good intention? What’s my mind at present, positive or negative? What are my intentions?
Not just to do that, just to observe, because the fact should all we need to do to develop wisdom is understand the fact. We don’t need to make value judgments. For good that we just observe and try and understand things exactly as they are. Anyway, we should finish there. I’ll just good at the end just to dedicate any positive potential to the well-being of others and ourselves, dedicate it to our enlightenment and the enlightenment of all sentient beings.