Q&A

Q: What is karma?

A: Karma has two meanings. The first and primary meaning is intentional action. The quality of the karma, skillful or unskillful, is determined by the quality of the intention.

The second meaning is the result of an intentional action. For example, when the Buddha talks about old karma, he’s actually talking about the results of karma you did in the past.

 

Q: Today while returning from the dining hall after breakfast, I saw a caterpillar right in the middle of the path. I thought someone might step on it, so I moved it out of the way and placed it somewhere safe. I walked on feeling very happy, but then I thought, was it the caterpillar’s karma to die crushed on the path and did I interfere with that? How can we avoid that our actions, even when motivated by good intentions, interfere with the karma of other beings? Gratitude.

A: Actually, this is an important question. The Buddha doesn’t say that you have one karma result that has to happen at any one time. His image is a field, and in that field, you have many different seeds. The seeds are your past actions. Some of them will sprout right away; some will take a long time to sprout. Some will sprout if they’re watered through attention; others will sprout whether they’re watered or not.

In the case of the caterpillar, it had several different potentials ready to sprout. It might have some seeds to be crushed on the path. Or maybe in a previous lifetime, it saw another caterpillar and it pushed that caterpillar off to the side of the road to safety. In your case, you watered the seed of saving the caterpillar’s life. So what you did was a good thing. However, if it turns out that the caterpillar was going to die today no matter what anybody did—for instance, you placed the caterpillar in the grass and a bird came along and ate it—your intention was still to save the caterpillar’s life. That’s your good karma now. Keep on saving lives.

 

Q: To what extent should I rely on karma when others are misbehaving? For example, on the way to the retreat, a taxi driver tried to overcharge me. I can report him but, one, he was a young man who can fall into a worse path if fired. Two, I tend to be spiteful, so my desires to straighten out the world are often bad karma on their own.

A: This is going to be an individual matter. You don’t know really what the fate of that young man would be if you reported him. But if you’re afraid that reporting him would lead to a bad outcome, don’t report him. Just give him a stern lecture.

 

Q: The Buddha discourages us from asking about the specifics of karmic processes—what particular actions led to our current state. At the same time, teachings in the Thai forest tradition appear to sometimes answer such questions—for example, Ajaan Fuang telling you that you were orphaned due to having killed in previous lifetimes. Another example: You’re attracted to a person because you were related to him or her in the past. Another example is that practicing generosity leads to wealth in coming lifetimes, and another example, lack of anger leads to beauty. So given that those teachings might help, was it not skillful to ask in first place?

A: There’s a difference between asking about general principles and asking about specific instances. Knowing the general principle that generosity leads to wealth is something useful to know. That’s why the Buddha taught it. As for the question of why I was orphaned, I didn’t ask the question. If I had asked the question of Ajaan Fuang, he probably would’ve glared at me. He simply happened to offer that bit of information once. If I quizzed him more about when and where I had done that, he probably, again, would’ve glared at me. The particulars—as in when you were an Egyptian princess—are not really useful to know. Do you have that in Brazil? People claiming to having been Egyptian princesses? That’s not useful to know, but the general principles of how karma works are useful to know and so they’re worth talking about. We’ll talk about them more in detail toward the end of the retreat.

 

Q: I’ve been subjected to discrimination due to my ethnicity, so I feel bad about asking this question, but I will. I’m attracted to someone from a distance and trying to kill the attraction. Some of my committee members don’t like this person’s ethnicity. I don’t like these committee members because of their racism, but should they have their way in this context?

A: When you’re trying to kill your attraction to another person, you want to give good reasons for not having the attraction, reasons that you actually feel good about allowing to have power in your mind. You would feel bad about judging another person because of his or her ethnicity, so push those committee members aside. Focus on the committee members that have better reasons. Number one is, ask yourself: Why do I really want to kill the attraction? Focus on those reasons.

Q: Sometimes when I’m meditating, I get visions of places or people. Should I allow them to flow naturally—I have noticed that sometimes they give me insights—or should I just take my attention back to the breath?

A: Spread goodwill to the people and, if they seem to want some merit from your meditation, dedicate the merit to them. Then go back to your breath. You want to develop this as a strong habit. If you very easily get involved in visions, the same thing will happen when you die: You’ll run off into a vision and be reborn wherever it leads you.

You don’t necessarily want to get involved with everybody in your visions. A film years back, called Ice Age II, had a scene where the characters are floating on a raft through fog in the ocean. A light appears on the horizon, so they go toward the light. There they find a group of very beautiful mermaids and mermen. The characters are very attracted to them. But then when you look carefully at the mermaids and the mermen, there’s static. And in the static, there are piranhas. So watch out for images.

Q: Regarding the precept not to kill, how should we deal with taking care of our own health or that of other beings who depend on us, like family or pets with, for example, intestinal worms, fleas, or small microorganisms?

A: The precept against killing does not apply to the microorganisms. It applies only to things you can see with your naked eye. As for worms and fleas, there are medicines that can get the worms out of your intestines without killing them, and also ways of getting fleas off of an animal without killing the fleas. It’s worth going out of your way to find those remedies.

Q: During the body scan, when discomfort arises in another part of the body from the one that’s being scanned—for example, in the center of the head—what should be done? Should I continue with the progressive scan or should I bring my attention back to the part of the body where the discomfort is and acknowledge it?

A: You can do it either way. If there’s a pain that suddenly appears while you’re doing the scan, the first thing would be to go focus on that, and then to see if the way you breathe or spread breath energy can alleviate it. It’s in this way that you discover how there are many interesting patterns of tension and pain running in unusual ways through the body. However, if you cannot make the pain go away by the way you breathe, then just leave it alone and go back to your original scan.

Q: What is becoming?

A: Becoming is a state of mind that you create. You start with a desire for something and then, around that object, you have a sense of the world in which that object is found. Then you have a sense of yourself going into that world. The question is then: Do you have the ability to get what you want or not? That whole construct—the object you desire, the world in which it’s found, and your sense of your identity in that world: That’s a becoming.

For example, suppose you have the desire for a pizza. There’s no pizza here in the retreat center. But there might be a pizza in Brazlândia. So you think of the pizza in Brazlândia. Then you think about how, after this session is over, you’re going to sneak off to your car and drive out to Brazlândia. All of that is a becoming. We do this many, many times in the course of the day. This is called becoming on the micro level.

But becoming can also happen on what’s called the macro level. As your last lifetime was ending, a desire for something appeared and you saw that you could find it in the human world, so you came into this human world. This is how rebirth happens. It’s the same process that we follow day-to-day as we go from one becoming to the next. As the Buddha said, it’s this desire for becoming that causes us to suffer. But in order to get out of this process of becoming, we have to create the becoming of the path.

As when you’re sitting in meditation: There’s a desire for calm. There’s a desire for peace, a desire for clarity. You realize you’re going to find these things inside you, and you can bring your attention inside your body. In this case, the world of this becoming is your body as you feel it from within. Your identity is as the meditator doing the meditation. That, too, is a type of becoming, but it’s a useful type of becoming for putting an end to suffering because you can see the process of becoming very clearly when you’re doing this.

As for any distracting thought that comes up, realize that it’s an alternative becoming. As you learn more and more quickly how not to go for these alternative distractions, you come to see and understand the steps by which this process happens. You also begin to see that it’s not worth the effort to go into the distraction. So you develop a dispassion for these other forms of becoming, until finally the only becoming that’s left is you as a meditator. And then, because you see that it’s fabricated and subject to change even when your powers of concentration are good, you developed dispassion for this. When you can let all these processes go, that’s when you open up to something much greater, where there’s no becoming, but there is the ultimate happiness.

That’s a short talk on becoming. If you have any questions about the details, we can discuss them later on.

Q: When we practice during the day, you say we should be mindful and that mindfulness means keeping something in mind. For those of us who are not advanced in meditation and , what would be the basic principles to keep in mind to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones? When trying to stay mindful during the day, my mind is mostly thinking random things that are either useless or downright unskillful. How should I approach this so that my mind doesn’t feel repressed from being told to stop all the time?

A: If you take a dog as a pet and you see the dog doesn’t like to be repressed, so you allow it to piss and shit anywhere in the house, you’re going to have trouble living with that dog. You have to teach the dog how to want not to piss and shit in the house. It’s the same way with the mind: You have to make the mind learn to want to think skillful thoughts. For example, you can ask yourself, “What opportunities do I have today to be generous?” Learn how to enjoy planning generosity. If you don’t have material things to give, what other things to can you give? Your time? Your energy? Your knowledge? Your forgiveness?

When you make skillful thoughts interesting and entertaining, then you realize that this is much better than just allowing your mind to think random useless thoughts. For example, generosity is an excellent opportunity to exercise your creativity. At the same time, learn how to enjoy following the precepts and practicing meditation. As the meditation becomes more enjoyable, then the mind will become more and more inclined to want to do it. It’ll stop leaving messes around your house.

Q: Some people with physical or mental fatigue who turn to meditation in order to slow down and regain balance may feel very sleepy during practice. What guidance would you give in such cases?

A: If you find yourself falling asleep during the meditation, you have to give the mindthem work to do. This is one of the reasons why we do the scan of the body. If you find that that’s too slow to keep you awake, you can do the scan more quickly. Focus on the middle of the chest for three breaths. Then move up to the throat for three breaths, to the head for three breaths, then down through the throat to the body and so on. An alternative would be to think of all the different beings in the world to whom you want to spread goodwill. Think of all the people that you’re indebted to, and to whom you would like to think send thoughts of gratitude.

Q: I’ve been feeling anger toward some people. How can I transform this feeling?

A: This is a good opportunity to think about the three fabrications we’ve been talking about. First, start with some verbal fabrication. Remind yourself that when you’re angry with other people, you tend to do stupid things. You don’t want to do those stupid things, so you’d better get the anger under control.

This is where you run into some committee members who actually like the anger: When you’re angry, you get to say and do what you want. You get to show your power. But you have to remind those committee members again about the stupid things you do when you’re angry. If you want to make a good, skillful change in the world, you can’t do it while you’re angry. When you get past the anger, then you can see more clearly what needs to be done.

In other words, you have to see that there’s a part of the mind that’s attracted to anger and another part of the mind that realizes that anger has some very strong drawbacks, and it really is in your best interest to get past the anger. If the unskillful committee members say, “I don’t care,” that’s when you remind them that when you do something stupid under the force of anger, you’re actually going to please your enemy. Do you want to please that person? This is using spite to get past your anger—it may not be the most skillful thing to do, but sometimes it’s all that works.

That’s verbal fabrication.

Once you’ve talked yourself into wanting to get rid of the anger, then you ask yourself, “How am I breathing that’s aggravating the anger? Can I breathe in a way that’s more calming? What perceptions am I holding in mind?” In other words, how do you perceive the situation? Can you perceive it in another way that’s less likely to give rise to anger? Try to look at the good qualities of the person you’re angry at, to remind yourself that you actually do want to behave in a skillful way toward that person.

Finally, what feelings in your own body and mind are you focusing on? Often when we’re angry, we start focusing on the pains, the tightness and tension in our body, which often come from unskillful ways of breathing and which make the situation even more difficult to bear. So ask yourself, are there places in the body where you can create a sense of pleasure? Focus there. When the anger calms down this way, you can promise yourself: “Just because I’ve calmed down doesn’t mean I’m not going to do anything about the situation.” IYou’ll be in a better position to see what the actual skillful thing would be to do or say.

Q: From what you’ve said so far, we shouldn’t think of the actions of the past as deterministic, but that we have a choice. Yet in spite of this, at some level, according to Buddhist philosophy, shouldn’t we simply accept things as they are? Could you comment on that?

A: There are two points to discuss here. One is that you don’t really know what opportunities are available in the present moment until you try changing things. When you realize that no matter what you do, you cannot make a difference, only then should you say, “I’ll have to accept this for the time being.”

When the Buddha talks about accepting things as they are, he’s basically telling you to look at the situation in which you find yourself and then be very honest with yourself about what the situation is. Starting from that position, you develop the path. Remember that if the Buddha had just accepted things as they were, he would have stayed in the palace and nothing would have changed. We wouldn’t have the Dhamma. He had a very strong sense that he wanted something better than what he had.

Second: The phrase that sometimes you hear translated as “knowing things as they are,” actually should be translated as “knowing things as they have come to be.” Which means you’re trying to understand cause and effect, and how causes and effects have arrived at the situation where you are. Then the next question is, how can you use that pattern of cause and effect to take yourself to a place where there’s less suffering?

Q: In some situations we need to develop equanimity for a person, i.e., a person whom we’ve discovered will not change in spite of our efforts to help. Here it will be easy to tell ourselves that their misfortune is their karma. Is that unskillful or is it not necessary to think like that?

A: We have to admit that it is their karma. What’s important is the tone of voice in which you think that thought. If you think, “They deserve it,” that’s not equanimity. That’s spite. You have to remember with karma that sometimes certain seeds for the possibility of change haven’t sprouted yet, but you never know when those seeds might be ready to sprout. So the proper attitude should be that “Right now I cannot help that person, but maybe sometime in the future I will be able to help that person and I’ll be happy to help then.” In some cases, it’s going to be a long time. It’ll be a long time before you can teach that caterpillar to come and meditate, but you can help the caterpillar as best you can, given its situation.

I’ll tell you a story. I have a student in Singapore whose job required that he drive around the city on a scooter. This was long before Uber treats. He had a habit, when he saw an animal that had been run over, to stop, take a piece of newspaper, and pull the animal out of the road, so that its body wouldn’t be mangled by the traffic. It would often happen that these little animals would come into his dreams at night and tell him a lottery number. The numbers won rewards, but because the animals were small, the numbers gave only small rewards.