Karma for Freedom

That passage we chanted just now sounds like bad news all down the line: aging, illness, death, separation. And on top of that, karma.

For most people, karma is a negative thing. It sounds like punishment coming in from your past bad actions. We can all think of bad things we’ve done in the past, and the idea that we’re not done with those things yet, that there may be some bad results lurking around, awaiting us in the present moment or in the future, sounds pretty much like bad news.

But that’s not how the Buddha meant it. After all, remember, he’s teaching suffering and the end of suffering, and karma explains both. The fact that it explains the end of suffering is what makes it positive.

As the Buddha’s very clear, karma doesn’t mean that your present moment is totally shaped by the past. There’s that saying that you hear sometimes: that if you want to see a person’s past actions, look at their present state; if you want to see their future state, look at their present actions. But that’s much too simplistic.

It’s actually opposed to what the Buddha himself said. His explanation was that if everything you experience right now were dependent on your past actions, there’d be no path that you could follow to the end of suffering at all. As he points out, the state of your mind in the present moment has a lot to do with shaping how you experience the results of past actions. Even past bad actions don’t have to make you suffer if your present state of mind is good.

That’s because what you’re experiencing right now is the combination of the results of past actions, your current intentions, and the results of your current intentions.

You can see this in the meditation. You focus on the breath in a certain way, and it doesn’t take that much time to see results, either good or bad. If you have skill in the present moment, you can shape things really nicely. If you lack skill, then the range of what you can do is limited.

This is one of the reasons why we meditate, and why the meditation is focused on what we’re doing right now in the present moment. You make up your mind you’re going to breathe in one way, and you can watch the results. If you don’t like the results, you can breathe in another way. Heavy, light, fast, slow, deep, shallow, short, long—there are lots of variations.

Some people find that the variations in the in-and-out breath aren’t all that captivating. But when you start thinking about the breath energy in the body, then you get a real sense that not just one little area of the body is involved. The whole body is involved.

You can go through and make a survey. Where are the patterns of tension right now? Release those. Relax them. Go through the body systematically. You can change your experience of the body very quickly. You’re taking advantage of the fact that present-moment karma has a huge role to play.

In fact, if it weren’t for your present intentions right now, you wouldn’t be experiencing past karma at all—which is one of the reasons why this is a theory of karma that really is good for putting an end to suffering.

So, it’s not karma to tie you down. It’s karma for freedom.

It’s the understanding of karma that explains how you can develop a skill. You look at the results of what you’ve done, and you can change what you’re going to do. If we didn’t have this freedom, then, to say nothing of meditation, scientists couldn’t do experiments. The experiments wouldn’t have anything of real value to teach us, because the scientists would’ve been determined to design and run the experiment the way they did it. There would be no way that they could play around with the causes.

But when you can see which things you do actually make a difference and which things don’t make a difference, you can get a sense of what causes what. It’s because we can do that—because we have this ability to make choices in the present moment that don’t have to be determined by the past—that we can learn things.

And specifically, we can learn how to put an end to suffering. This is why the Buddha said that the Dhamma is nourished by committing yourself to the path and then reflecting on the results. Then you don’t just stop with the reflection. You commit yourself more. You learn from your reflection, make changes in what you’re doing, and as a result, the results get better and better. This principle follows all the way through the practice.

Meditation is here to teach you about action. It’s amazing that some people think that they can meditate without having any reference to the Buddha’s teachings on karma at all. Karma is what makes meditation worthwhile. It also tells you what you can actually learn from your meditation.

When I was in France recently, I was being interviewed by a person who came from a Tibetan tradition where they talk about how meditation teaches you about the true nature of reality out there.

So, one of his questions was, “How does meditation do that?” I had to tell him, “Meditation is not concerned with the nature of reality. It’s concerned not so much with what things are, but with how things function.”

That’s something you can actually test as you meditate. Breathe in a certain way, and the results will come out a certain way. Breathe in another way and they come out differently. You can hold different perceptions in your mind and see what effect the act of holding those perceptions can have on your experience of the body. Start with the images you have of what’s happening with the breath, where it comes in the body when you breathe in, where it goes out, how it runs through the body as you’re breathing in and out.

Or you can try the perception that it’s not coming in from outside, that the energy, of course, is actually originating inside the body. Where does that start? Can you change your perception? See what that does.

Or just the idea that you’re “watching” the breath: Sometimes that creates an internal image of you like a bird perched on your shoulders, looking through your eyes down at the body. That has one effect. How about thinking the perception of wearing the breath, being bathed in the breath? It’s all around you, in the head, in the body. What does that do?

You’re learning how your present-moment input does make a difference. Which is why when there are disturbances in the meditation, you’re not going to ask yourself, “What did I do in a previous lifetime?” You ask, “What am I doing now? And what can I change in what I’m doing now?” It’s all about action and result, and specifically, which kind of actions lead to suffering, which kind of actions lead away.

So, when you think about karma, don’t think of it tying you down. After all, the Buddha’s teachings are about how to free you from suffering. His teachings on karma are designed to free you from suffering. They explain how and why it can be done.

If you had to suffer from the past, then Buddha wouldn’t be able to help you. It’s because you don’t have to suffer, and the fact that you’re lacking skills in the present moment, that makes it possible for the Buddha to teach you, “These are the skills you want to change,” or, “These are the skills you want to develop.” And they will make a difference. They can form a path to the end of suffering.

So, this is karma for freedom. Try to have that image in mind every time you hear the word “karma,” because in the Buddha’s teaching, that’s what it is.