Karma Fields

Close your eyes and pay attention to your breath. When you breathe in, notice where you feel it. When you breathe out, notice where you feel it. Wherever it’s clearest to watch, focus your attention right there. Then try to see what kind of breathing feels good right now. You can try long breathing to begin with. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can try shorter, deeper, shallow, heavy, light, fast, slow. There’s lots to experiment with here.

The breath is what the Buddha calls “bodily fabrication.” There’s always an intentional element in the breath. Whether the intention is something you’re alert to or not, it’s always there. What you want to do is take advantage of that fact. You can create a comfortable place to be right here, right now, simply by the way you breathe. But it takes a while to get to know the breath, to know what your body needs at any one time, what the breath can do for you. There are so many good things in life that we have right here, right in front of us, right next to us, that we don’t make the best use of.

That was part of the Buddha’s genius, realizing that true happiness doesn’t have to be found far away: It’s right here, right where the body and the mind meet at the breath. When you get to know the breath, you get to know your body and you get to know your mind as well. The breath is like a mirror for the mind. When the mirror is smooth and undisturbed, then you can see yourself clearly—what intentions you have in the mind. Because your intentions are really important. The Buddha says that’s where your karma is.

A lot of people don’t like the teaching of karma. It sounds heartless. They say somebody whose house burns down, somebody who suffers, suffers because of karma. But then all of us here have bad karma mixed with good karma. That’s how we got in the human realm to begin with. And we don’t see the total sum of a person’s good or bad karma by what’s happening right now.

The Buddha’s image is of a field with lots of different seeds. Some of the seeds are sprouting right now. Some of the seeds are waiting to sprout. You don’t know which seeds are down there, good or bad—or which ones are going to sprout now, which ones are going to sprout later. So you have to prepare yourself so that, whatever happens, you’re not going to suffer from your past karma.

So when we see somebody else suffering, we don’t say, “Well they deserve it.” You just tell yourself, “That could happen to me, too. And if I were in a position like that, how would I like people to behave toward me?” You’d want people to be generous. You’d want people to be kind. So you can exercise some generosity yourself; you can exercise some kindness yourself. In that way, you develop the good karma seeds. Actually, we’re creating these seeds all the time with every intention. It’s when the mind is at ease and at peace like this that it’s a lot easier to create good seeds. It’s when we’re angry, lustful, greedy, fearful—that’s when we tend to create a lot of bad ones.

So put the mind in good shape so that you create a good field of seeds for yourself. At the same time, while you’re creating those good fields of seeds, you’re also doing good for other people as well. As the Buddha said, when you look after yourself, you’re looking after other people. When you look after other people, you’re looking after yourself. In other words, the principles for true happiness don’t start with either “just you” or “just other people.” True happiness has to encompass both. True skill in your actions, thoughts, your words, and your deeds has to encompass both as well.

When you’re mindful, when you’re alert to what’s going on in your mind, you learn how to control your emotions, so that greed, anger, and delusion don’t go prowling around the neighborhood. Other people benefit; you benefit too. When you’re kind, when you have goodwill for others, when you’re patient with them, when you’re equanimous toward their behavior, when you can put up with the difficulties that are thrown at you and respond in a harmless way, you’re good for them and good for yourself as well.

So if you really want to be skillful in your search for happiness, you need to search for happiness where everybody benefits. All too often, we look for happiness in terms of wealth, status, praise, physical pleasures. But with those, you gain; somebody else loses. Or somebody else gains; you lose. This is why we have so many divisions in the world, because people are looking for happiness in the wrong places, in the wrong way.

If we want peace, if we want harmony in the society, we have to look for happiness in ways that are skillful all around. This is what the Buddha teaches us through our generosity, through our virtue, through developing the mind in meditation. We develop a happiness that has no boundaries, that creates no boundaries. In fact, it erases boundaries. That’s when you really can be said to be skillful in the way you look for happiness. And that’s how you succeed in finding a happiness that’s really solid and secure.