Review
We’ve been going through the graded stages of the path, which are the various levels of realizations that we need to gain to develop ourselves spiritually. First, we strive to ensure that we continue to have better rebirths, specifically precious human rebirths, so that we can continue on our spiritual path. Then we strive to attain liberation from uncontrollably recurring existence, or rebirth (samsara), altogether with all its sufferings, which come about from our karmic behavior, which is behavior motivated and activated by our disturbing emotions, which, in turn, are brought on by our unawareness of behavioral cause and effect and, more deeply, our unawareness or confusion about reality, namely, the reality of how we and everything exist. Then, finally, we strive beyond that to achieve the enlightened state of a Buddha so that we can be of best help to others. Only as Buddhas can we understand fully cause and effect – what the causes of all their problems are and what the result of anything that we teach them will be.
We have been going through these stages in a fairly detailed and analytical way because what’s really important is to clear away doubts about all this material. For those who are going through this for the first time, it might perhaps seem a bit slow and in too much detail. But for the Dharma practitioners who have listened to the lam-rim or studied the lam-rim before, it is very important to go through it again and again, and, each time, to go through it much more deeply and much more critically in order to actually internalize these levels of motivation and the various insights that we gain along the way. That’s not at all easy – to be sincere, to really feel these things sincerely.
The Precious Human Rebirth
We looked at the precious human rebirth and how it will definitely be lost at the time of death. Death will come for sure. Assuming that there is rebirth – which is sort of a given in this entire system – we then looked at the rebirth realms that we could be reborn in if we have not taken any preventive measures – namely, following the Dharma and, building up more and more positive habits. These rebirths could be in any of the three so-called worst rebirth states, sometimes translated as the “lower rebirths,” as: a hell creature – in other words, a trapped being in one of these joyless realms; a wandering, clutching ghost, never able to satisfy any basic needs; or a creeping creature, an animal, that is constantly being hunted, eaten alive by other animals, hunted by humans, exploited, etc. We want to avoid that at all costs and are quite terrified of that happening, but we also seeing that there’s a way out, a way to avoid that, which is to go in the safe direction of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Then we spoke about refuge, this safe direction.
Safe Direction
We saw that the usual description of refuge is of all the qualities of the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, qualities that can give us great inspiration and hope – they can inspire us and teach us. Nevertheless, on the deepest level, what refuge refers to is what can be achieved, what can actually liberate or save us from more and more suffering. And that is to achieve a true stopping of all the causes of suffering on our mental continuums and to gain the true states of mind, the so-called true paths, that can actually bring that stopping about and that result from that stopping. Buddhas are those who have experienced or gained these in full, and the Arya Sangha are those who have experienced or gained these in part. Obviously, if we think of refuge on an even deeper level, we think in terms of our Buddha-nature factors, which are what enable us to actually achieve what the Buddhas and the Arya Sangha have achieved.
If we’re doing this in a Hinayana way, we think just in terms of the factors that allow us to achieve liberation. I don’t know that they’re specifically called Buddha-nature factors, but they’re included among the Buddha-nature aspects – basically, that the mind is free in nature, unstained by unawareness, or ignorance, the disturbing emotions, karma and karmic tendencies. These stains, which constitute the emotional obscurations preventing liberation, are fleeting. Because a true stopping of them is possible to attain, liberation is possible.
If we’re doing this in a Mahayana way, we think not just in terms of the true stoppings and true pathway minds that lead to liberation but in terms of those that can bring us all the way to enlightenment. There, we’re thinking of the Buddha-nature factors in terms of the mind being unstained by the habits of our unawareness and grasping for true existence, which cause our minds to produce all this garbage in terms of making things appear to be truly existent with big boundaries around them and totally unrelated. These stains constitute the cognitive obscurations preventing omniscience and a true stopping of them is also possible. We have to overcome all of that in order to be able to see the interrelatedness of everything – cause and effect – over all of time, which is what’s necessary for becoming a Buddha and for helping everybody.
So, we can think of refuge, this safe direction, on all of these different levels. I think it’s important to have this deeper understanding of it. Refuge is not just, “Buddha, Buddha save me.”
Karma – Behavioral Cause and Effect
Then we saw the way to train in order to keep that safe direction very strong in all our lives. The first thing that we have to do to go in that direction is to overcome our unawareness or confusion about behavioral cause and effect since that’s what causes us to act in a destructive manner. We don’t realize that destructive behavior will lead to more suffering, particularly the suffering of suffering, to the unhappiness and pain of these three lower realms. Either we don’t know that, or we are confused about it and know it in an inverted way and, so, think that certain types of destructive behavior will bring us happiness – for example, acting out all our longing desires and so on, thinking that that will bring us ultimate happiness, which it doesn’t. To clear away that unawareness, that confusion, it’s important to know about karma in great deal detail because there are many questions that come up regarding that.
We have spent quite a lot of time discussing karma, although we haven’t dealt with some of the more basic points that are emphasized in the texts, like the detailed presentations of the ten destructive actions – which we can read about elsewhere – because I wanted to go into more challenging areas, although, certainly, the ten destructive actions are challenging enough.
Certainty and Uncertainty of the Ripening of Karmic Potentials
More recently, we’ve been going through the various teachings concerning the certainty factor, which concerns both whether the karmic potentials and tendencies from various karmic impulses and actions have any certainty of ripening at all and whether those karmic potentials and tendencies have any certainty of beginning to ripen within a specific lifetime – this lifetime, the next lifetime, or some lifetime after that. We’ve gone into quite a bit of detail about that.
Vasubandhu says that none of karmic potentials and tendencies lack certainty of ripening at all. In other words, everything is going to ripen. This is a basic Hinayana feature. Whatever uncertainty there is has to do with when they will ripen.
Asanga, on the other hand, says that some negative karmic potentials can be “devastated” by the force of regret and then prevented from being revitalized by taking and keeping a vow not to repeat the action. Actually, that could work with the positive potentials as well. We could regret doing positive things and take what’s known as an anti-vow: “I’m never going to do this positive action again. I’m always going to kill, or always going to steal” – like when joining a gang or something like that.
We can also weaken the negative potentials by greatly reducing our attachment through the conceptual cognition of voidness. Furthermore, we can totally eliminate experiencing any karmic consequences of the negative karmic potentials by gaining the non-conceptual cognition of voidness, thereby eliminating the factors that would cause the karmic potentials and tendencies to ripen.
Clearing up Doubts about Destructive Actions Brought on by Non-Reinforced Karmic Impulses
Last time, we discussed three of Asanga’s presentations of two variables concerning the certainty or uncertainty of the lifetime in which the karmic potentials from various karmic impulses and actions will begin to ripen. These two variables are whether the karmic impulse for a physical or verbal action has been reinforced or not and whether that karmic impulse has been enacted or not. As we saw, only the karmic potentials from actions brought on by karmic impulses that have been both reinforced and enacted have certainty of beginning to ripen within a specific lifetime.
In all three presentations, Asanga lists certain exceptions. The examples he uses are of destructive actions of body or speech whose karmic impulses are not reinforced, even though they are enacted – in other words, the actions are committed. We went through many examples of killing, the karmic consequences of which we would have no certainty of beginning to experience in a specific lifetime. As we might question whether these actions are destructive at all, I wanted to review them and discuss any doubts that we might have about them as a way to conclude this topic.
Committed in Dreams
As we explained last time, actions committed in dreams are, technically, actions of the mind. But even if we consider the action of killing someone in a dream to be an action of body, the action does not reach its completion since nobody actually dies as a result. So, technically, it’s not an act of killing, and, therefore, we would not experience the suffering that results from taking the life of someone. However, we can clearly experience anger, hostility, and so on when we kill someone in a dream and if we hold on to that anger even after waking up, our act of thinking with malice is complete. So, if the dream killing is motivated by anger, the action is a destructive one of thinking with malice that will ripen into some form of suffering.
OK? This is the type of action that we could have doubts about. “Well, I just dreamed of killing. It’s not going to have any consequences.” However, there are going to be some consequences because even in our dreams, we can experience great anger or great lust, great desire, and so on. Whether the action is deliberated or not doesn’t matter.
Committed Through Some Naturally Unspecified Action
When we inadvertently commit a destructive action such as killing through some naturally unspecified action – like unknowingly stepping on an ant or unknowingly driving over something with our car that we didn’t even know was there – there doesn’t seem to be any of the three disturbing emotions motivating the action. Therefore, we might think it’s not destructive. But this is not the case.
Not Caring
For example, suppose we walk with an attitude of not caring whether or not we step on and kill ants or other small insects. In such a case, stepping on the insects is unintentional and lacks any of the three poisonous attitudes as its motivation, though there could be some naivety. Lacking such motivation, the act would technically not constitute the taking of a life as one of the ten destructive actions. Nevertheless, because the taking of life occurs due to not caring about the consequences of our actions, which is one of the 20 auxiliary disturbing emotions, the act is destructive and will ripen into suffering. So, even if we’re doing it unknowingly, we aren’t taking it very seriously that we could be stepping on insects. And we don’t care. This is one possibility.
The All-Pervasive Problem of Samsara
Suppose, on the other hand, we are a caring person who doesn’t wish to kill anything, but when walking, we unintentionally and unknowingly step on an ant. The act is not destructive by means of its essential nature. It is not motivated by any of the five destructive root disturbing emotions or any of the 20 auxiliary disturbing emotions, so, technically, it could not be considered killing as one of the ten destructive actions. However, since the man-made result of our action is nonetheless the death of the creature, this taking of a life is an example of both an action that is destructive both through inflicting harm and being a deepest destructive action – namely, a phenomenon of samsara. I have a big article on this. Asanga lists 12 types of destructive phenomena, and one of them is just samsara itself. So, as part of the all-pervasive problem of being born with aggregate factors that arise from and are associated with and perpetuate delusion, we cannot help but crush small insects when walking, no matter how careful we might be. The suffering that results from such taking of life, however, will be very weak.
In other words, because we have these types of aggregates, we step on things, even unknowingly, unintentionally, and that just perpetuates the all-pervasive suffering. It won’t directly perpetuate the suffering of pain or unhappiness, but it perpetuates our samsara – continuing to be reborn with these types of aggregates. That’s actually very profound – to think just in terms of having these aggregates. And Buddha rejected the Jain solution of just sitting and doing nothing in order not to unintentionally kill anything – basically starving oneself to death. That’s why Vasubandhu stated that karmic actions have to be intentional. Because he was Hinayana, he did not assert purification of negative karmic potentials. But Asanga, being Mahayana, accepted that it is possible to purify away any negative karmic potentials that would build up from unintentional actions. But it is really a dilemma – having this type of body that will just perpetuate more and more samsara.
Do you want to think about that? That’s a very interesting point. It really helps us, I think, to get motivated to try to gain liberation from having this type of rebirth. Even if we don’t act on our disturbing emotions and are not grossly negative and so on, just the fact that we have this type of body produces more problems. Here, we’re thinking more in terms of gaining liberation from the disturbing emotions and karma, but we don’t take it to the next step of wanting to get rid of rebirth. We think, “Well, it would be lovely to just continue with this type of human body, to be with all our friends and gurus, to enjoy all the pleasures of the human body, and to be free of karma and disturbing emotions.” But it doesn’t work like that.
Of course, if we were truly free of karma and disturbing emotions, we would be free of the causes for perpetuating this type of body. But aside from that, I’m talking about our conception of the goal and what we’re aiming for. Do you follow? That’s something that is really very difficult to really think in terms of. Sure, most of us would like to get rid of anger, lust and desire – although we might think that lust and desire are our friends – and that it would be wonderful if we weren’t subject to karma ripening, like getting sick, getting hit by a car or whatever. But do we really want to stop having precious human rebirths? This is the problem of going from the initial scope to intermediate scope. That’s really not easy.
[meditation]
It’s quite interesting. When we start the intermediate scope teachings, which come next, and we think of the sufferings of samsara in general and why we want to get rid of samsara in terms of rebirth – having the suffering of being born, growing up, getting sick, getting old and dying, having to change bodies all the time, not getting what we want and always getting what we don’t want, etc. – what is not included in the list of meditations, though I think we could include it, is the fact that just having this body means that we will continue to perpetuate samsara. Inevitably, we will step on things when we walk. Inevitably, we will have to kill things in order to eat, even if we are vegetarians.
OK. Any comments? Not an easy one.
This last example of inevitably killing things when we walk is similar to the case in which, in order to prevent further harm, we intentionally take the life of a mass murderer when no other means are available to stop him or her – which is like Buddha killing the oarsman who was going to kill all the merchants on the ship. Our motivation could be free of any hostility, lack of caring, and so on (for instance, Buddha certainly was fully aware of the consequences of what he did) because we don’t wish to harm the mass murder; we simply wish to stop him or her from killing. To accomplish this intention, however, requires an act that is the same as that involved in taking someone’s life, which usually has to be motivated by hostility, the wish to do harm. Therefore, the action has only a seemingly harmful intention. Nevertheless, it is still destructive because it causes harm: it causes the mass murderer to lose his or her life. It’s also a destructive action because, as part of the all-pervasive problem of samsara, we can’t stop the carnage except by killing the perpetuator.
That’s the dilemma of samsara, isn’t it? There’s no way that Buddha could have stopped that murderer except to kill him. Think of a mass murderer or of a war in which one side is completely destroying and killing others. The only way to stop the carnage is by killing the person or persons who are perpetuating it. Even if we were Buddhas and didn’t have any hostility – which would be very difficult to accomplish – the action would still be destructive. I mean, Buddha has certainly purified away all his negative karmic potential, so the Mahayana version is that Buddha was just demonstrating karmic cause and effect when he got a splinter in his foot as a result. So, there was some ripening, though it was very weak.
OK? Next.
Committed without Intensity and Not Repeatedly
Any destructive action done repeatedly with a strong disturbing motivation will obviously result in suffering. But even one that’s done only once and with a weak motivation, such as fishing for fun – like I did when I was eight years old with my uncle – is still negative. It’s brought on by desire and attachment for our own relaxation and by being foolishly confused about cause and effect.
Well, what about that case? I was eight years old and was invited by my uncle to go fishing. Why did I go? Obviously, I thought it was going to be fun. I don’t know that I could have refused. I suppose I could have refused, but the fact that I didn’t refuse meant that I thought it would be fun. So, I went. This is a case of an action brought on by desire for our own fun or relaxation. So, even if we only do it once, it’s still destructive – weak, but destructive – because the motivation is selfish, basically. And certainly, while I was standing on the side of the boat with my fishing line in the water, I wished to catch a fish.
Committed Mistakenly
What about this example: we put poison out for the rats, but we kill the dog instead?
Although our wish to cause harm is not directed at the dog, the act of putting out the poison is motivated by a hostile intention to end a life; therefore, it’s destructive, even though it killed the wrong being.
Committed Out of Forgetfulness
What about forgetfulness? We gave the example of having taken a vow not to kill, but then, when a mosquito lands on our hand, we lose mindfulness of our vow. We smack and kill it, forgetting that we had previously vowed to refrain from killing.
Forgetfulness According to Asanga
According to Asanga, forgetfulness is one of the auxiliary disturbing attitudes. He defines it as “the recollection of something disturbing that causes our attention to wander away from, and thus lose hold of, a constructive state of mind.” Asanga always defines the disturbing emotions in terms of obstructing something constructive, so he always defines them in a bit more limited way than Vasubandhu does. So, forgetfulness here is disturbing in the sense that it disturbs our concentration. We lose mindfulness of our vow and thus “lose hold of a constructive state of mind.”
Therefore, killing a mosquito out of forgetfulness when we’ve previously taken a vow not to kill is destructive.
Forgetfulness According to Vasubandhu
Vasubandhu, on the other hand, does not include forgetfulness in his enumeration of mental factors. In a more general sense, forgetfulness can be simply losing hold of the focal object of our attention for any reason, no matter what the object might be. So, we may not only lose mindfulness of and forget behavioral cause and effect, we may also forget somebody’s name, or we forget to kill all the mosquitoes in our room before going to sleep. But since forgetfulness of cause and effect when swatting the mosquito implies not caring, being bewildered (so, we’re not clear, we’re spaced-out) and also being either flighty-minded or foggy-minded – which are some of the six great disturbing mental factors that Vasubandhu lists – and since these disturbing mental factors are always accompanied by the two destructive mental factors of having no sense of values and having no scruples, any killing out of forgetfulness would have to be destructive according to Vasubandhu’s criteria as well as Asanga’s.
Not caring, and being bewildered and either flighty-minded or foggy-minded are, according to Vasubandhu, states of mind that are always accompanied by no sense of values – in other words, not valuing positive qualities and people who possess them – and having no scruples, which means that we don’t exercise self-control. So, if we don’t take care about what we’re doing and its effects, we’re certainly not exercising self-control. If our minds are confused or like in a fog, or we’re distracted by something, we’re not remembering to value positive qualities and positive people. Therefore, by those criteria, we would have to say that doing something out of forgetfulness is destructive.
OK. “I forgot that I was going to try not to gossip.” I forgot. Why? Because I didn’t care about what I was saying and didn’t take care about it. And I was flighty-minded. My mind went off to some desirous object. I wanted to share some gossip with a friend. I thought it would be really fun and interesting and that they would like to hear about it. I was a little bit bewildered and foggy-minded because I wasn’t really thinking clearly about how gossiping was destructive, so I gossiped.
Participant: Is forgetfulness in this broader sense, as Vasubandhu understands it, necessarily destructive? You could also forget something negative or something neutral, like forgetting to wash the dishes or whatever. You’re tired, so you are foggy-minded. Would that really be destructive?
Participant: Nobody suffers from it. You can do them the next morning.
Dr. Berzin: Well, Vasubandhu’s talking about one’s own state of mind. It doesn’t matter whether anybody else suffers because of it. If you forget to wash the dishes, you could wake up in the morning and find that the dishes are covered with cockroaches, which could make you quite angry. So, there’s no guarantee that your state of mind remains a neutral one… what seems to be a neutral one.
Participant: I understood that forgetting something constructive is not good. Normally, when you do something destructive, your attention goes to something negative instead of something positive. But I didn’t understand the point about forgetting always being destructive.
Dr. Berzin: Right. So, she understood that forgetting to do something positive is destructive when you’re distracted by some disturbing emotion, but she didn’t quite understand the point from the analysis that in Vasubandhu’s system, forgetfulness is, in general, destructive.
I don’t think, however, we can say forgetfulness is always destructive and leads to a problem and suffering. The point is that we are trying to be careful all the time and to have a clear mind – so, not being bewildered, foggy-minded and distracted. Perhaps we could say that forgetfulness is a destructive state of mind when it prevents us from being constructive. So, whether we forget to water the plants, or we forget to wash the dishes, or we forget to visit our grandmother or call our mother on a Sunday, it’s coming from a state of mind that is not conducive to our spiritual growth. Forgetting the dates of the War of Roses is not necessarily destructive unless it is a question on a European history exam, and you fail the exam because you couldn’t remember.
Participant: But that would mean that the suffering of suffering would ripen from forgetfulness always.
Dr. Berzin: I really wonder if forgetfulness would result in the suffering of suffering, like getting a splinter, or if it would just perpetuate the general suffering of samsara.
Participant: But then it would just be an obscured unspecified phenomenon, rather than a destructive one, which would make more sense to me.
Dr. Berzin: It would make more sense, that’s true. Vasubandhu doesn’t have forgetfulness in his list of mental factors. It could be an obscured unspecified phenomena. Obscured unspecified phenomena are things like the disturbing attitude of regarding our aggregates, such as our body, as “me” or “mine.”
Participant: Sleep, actually.
Dr. Berzin: Well, sleepiness is one of these things that goes both ways. Sleep itself is an unobscured unspecified phenomenon. This gets us into more categories. We have unspecified things, which are neither positive nor negative. Some of them obscure the mind and obstruct liberation; some of them don’t.
Participant: Doubt was also an example of an unspecified phenomenon.
Dr. Berzin: According to Asanga, doubt, indecisive wavering (the-tshoms), is one of the six root disturbing emotions and attitudes. That’s because, even though indecisive wavering, can be wavering more toward the correct decision than the incorrect decision or be wavering between the two, it’s a mental factor that basically cripples you. Vasubandhu, however, includes it among the eight uncertain mental factors.
Participant: Is doubt not one of the ten fetters you have to break?
Dr. Berzin: In the Theravada formulation, yes. Anyway, let’s not get caught up in this. What’s another example of doing something destructive out of forgetfulness?
Participant: You’re a doctor, and you forget to do a test. It could be destructive or constructive.
Dr. Berzin: Well, that’s incompetence. That’s something else. Let’s say you’re a doctor, and you forget to look for something, or you just don’t think of it. That could be because of laziness. It could be because of all sorts of things, like being too busy and not having enough time.
You had a question?
Participant: I was just thinking that when you forget something, the action doesn’t really matter – what you did or did not do; it’s more your state of mind. So, you could make a conscious decision not to do something, rather than forget it, and maybe this wouldn’t be destructive. The point is, after you forget something, you shouldn’t necessarily think about what you forgot because maybe that’s also part of why you let yourself go in such a state of mind.
Dr. Berzin: Well, obviously, if I forgot to take my medicine or whatever, I take my medicine when I remember again. But if the main point is to overcome forgetfulness… Look at the teachings on how to gain shamatha, or calm-abiding, the stilled and settled state of mind. When we’re trying to get single-minded concentration, forgetfulness is one of the big obstacles. We forget to bring our attention back; we just lose it. That’s a perfect example of forgetfulness. We forget that we’re supposed to be concentrating on something, and our minds just wander off. It happens all the time in meditation. Will it bring suffering? That was your question. Does it bring the suffering of unhappiness and pain? Well, I think that, in general, the more that we have that type of forgetfulness, the more we forget all sorts of things – to look both ways when we cross the street, for example.
Participant: Forgetfulness is a circumstance, not a cause.
Dr. Berzin: It’s a contributing mental factor. But is it itself destructive? Well, Vasubandhu doesn’t actually list it as a mental factor, which doesn’t mean that it can’t be something destructive for Vasubandhu. He just didn’t include it in his list of destructive things. I don’t know. What do you think?
Participant: But Asanga does.
Dr. Berzin: Asanga lists it as one of the auxiliary disturbing emotions. It’s in his list.
Love isn’t in either of their lists. It doesn’t mean that they don’t accept that there’s a mental factor of love. I’ve said that before. So, whether we have a list of 51, as in Asanga, or 46, as in Vasubandhu, the lists are not exhaustive; there are many other mental factors that are not included. Now, I’ve never heard a good reason why they were left out, but neither of them have love.
Participant: I think that it’s not enough to be mindful of what my body is doing and what is going on in my mind. I have also have to be mindful of what is constructive and what is not.
Dr. Berzin: Right. That’s very good. It’s not sufficient to be mindful simply of what actions we’re doing, what we’re thinking or what we’re saying because what we’re doing, thinking or saying could be destructive. What we really need to be mindful of – and this is absolutely central to this whole discussion of karma – and need to develop is the discriminating awareness of what is helpful and what is harmful and to maintain mindfulness of that. Mindfulness is the mental glue. So, just weakening our mental glue on anything is destructive because it leads to forgetting cause and effect. I mean it’s indirectly destructive because it’s not listed in Vasubandhu’s list.
Anyway, let’s go on.
Committed While Not Wanting to Commit It
The example we used was putting our old dog put to sleep because we saw how much it was suffering, even though we had originally decided to let it die a natural death.
When we’re either asked by somebody terminally ill or mortally wounded to end his or her life or we put a dying and suffering animal to sleep, our motivation is one of compassion involving nothing naturally destructive. If, however, there’s a way to alleviate the pain and suffering of the person or animal short of terminating his or her life, then euthanasia is motivated by naivety about the most harmless cause for bringing about the desired effect. But if, on the other hand, euthanasia is the only alternative, it’s still destructive because it causes harm to the dog: it takes its life. It’s also destructive from the point of view of samsara. Because the suffering person or animal has aggregates associated with delusion, the only way to end their immediate pain is to take away those aggregates through euthanasia. Again, the action could not technically be called killing as one of the ten destructive actions, but mercy killing is a deliberate action done thinkingly, and so it is still destructive and will definitely ripen into at least a small amount of suffering.
Even though we have all the compassion in the world, we’re in a no-win situation because of the samsaric situation of the person or animal having the type of body that they have, which means that the only way that we can eliminate their pain is to take their body away, which is a harmful action.
Last example:
Committed, Not Understanding
So, this one has to do with committing a destructive action, not understanding the difference between good and bad behavior. The example we had used was a very young child taking another child’s toy – so, not an action of killing. However, I remember that when I was very young, I thought a fun thing to do was to go out on the back porch, which was right next to where the garbage was kept in the backyard, and kill flies with a fly swatter. I didn’t have any animosity toward the flies; I just thought it was fun. One could say, “Well, a young child doesn’t know any better.” Well, that’s exactly the point: a young child doesn’t know any better, doesn’t understand that such behavior is not good behavior, that it is bad behavior.
But still, we could say that being destructive is just part of our instinct or habit. Given beginningless time, we’ve probably been destructive much of the time, so we’re born with these sorts of killer instincts. They might not be very strong, but there are going to be some that are there.
Questions
Why Is Euthanasia Not Technically Considered a Destructive Action of Killing?
Participant: You said that euthanasia doesn’t constitute an act of killing. I didn’t really understand why.
Dr. Berzin: Mind you, I wrote this about fifteen years ago, so I haven’t really thought through it that carefully. Well, what’s the reason? The ten destructive actions have to be motivated by anger, longing desire, or naivety. When we euthanized the person, we knew what we were doing; we weren’t naive about it. And we certainly valued good people and good qualities. But the only way that we could help this person out of compassion was to take away their life because there was no other way to end their suffering. We couldn’t liberate them. There wasn’t time to liberate them through the teachings and practice of the Dharma. So, technically, it’s not one of the ten destructive actions because there was no motivating factor that would make it a destructive action according to the definition of the ten destructive actions. So, technically it’s not taking a life. However, it is still destructive according to the criterion of the general situation of samsara – that there’s no way to win in this situation.
Participant: But you don’t actually know whether it’s actually better for the person, even in the immediate situation. And you don’t know what state they’ll die in and where they’re going to end up.
Dr. Berzin: That’s true.
Participant: That’s not naivety. That’s just not knowing.
Dr. Berzin: That’s just not knowing.
Participant: The naivety would be you think you’re helping them.
Dr. Berzin: Right. That’s true. Well, there could be two types of naivety here. There could be the naivety of thinking that you’re helping them when, in fact, you might not be. There could also be the naivety that “I’m not going to commit euthanasia. I’m not going to unplug this machine because the person is going to wake up,” when that would be impossible ever to happen. Somebody told me the example of somebody who was brain-dead, whose kidneys had failed, and so on. They were only kept alive by a breathing machine and a heart-pumping machine. Yet, the relatives didn’t want to pull the plug. They thought, “Maybe they will recover.” I mean, there are examples of people who after being in a coma for twenty years do wake up. Very, very rarely, though.
Participant: Yeah. And some of them even remember the twenty years.
Dr. Berzin: Some of them even remember the twenty years, which is even more horrible. But the issue of euthanasia is very, very difficult. My mother died of a very, very long, protracted Alzheimer’s sickness. It took her about five years to finally die. It was horrible, especially the last stages of it. In the last stages of Alzheimer’s, you forget to swallow. If you have any food in your mouth or anything like that, they have to tickle your throat and stuff like that to get you to swallow, like you do with a dog or a cat when you’re trying to get it to swallow medicine. Awful. But in any case, we certainly didn’t put her to sleep. So, she lived out the whole thing. It took a hell of a long time. But we didn’t even consider putting her to sleep.
I told one of my teachers about my experience, and he said, “By experiencing suffering, she burned off a tremendous amount of negative karma. So, in her next lifetime, she won’t have to experience some leftover of this karmic potential.” Now, whether or not he said that just to make me feel better is something else. But the point is, if we end their life early, they might still have something negative left over that they would then have to experience in their next life. Now, this is a very different situation from do you help somebody who has been in a car accident? Because you could say, “Well, I have prevented their karma from dying or from having really something horrible.”
Participant: But even if you take the life of someone who has some bad karma left over, there’s also the possibility that the person could regret and, in their future life, do good things to counteract their destructive actions.
Dr. Berzin: Right. This is a very good point. Even if the person has some negative karmic potential that they haven’t burned off by the suffering they experience at the end of their life and, so, will have to experience it in some future life, there’s no guarantee that it will ripen in their next lifetime. It could ripen hundreds of lifetimes after that. They could – if they had a precious human rebirth, and if they met with the Dharma, and if they practiced the Dharma, and so on – have the opportunity to purify it. Well, the odds are not very high, but it could happen. The odds are that they would experience the results from the leftover karma in a lifetime in which they wouldn’t have very much ability to purify it. But you never know. There is a distinct possibility that they could purify it. That’s true.
Again, we’re not Buddhas. This is the problem. And I think that in terms of developing our bodhichitta motivation, it’s very important for that point to sink in – that “Unless I’m a Buddha, I really won’t know what to do, what would really be the most help.” This is horrible, isn’t it? A lot of the time, we do things that lead to consequences that we never thought would happen and that bring a lot of suffering. Maybe not immediately, but in the long term. Doesn’t mean that we don’t try. We definitely try our best. However, we have to acknowledge, at least to ourselves, that we could make mistakes.
Participant: And we do make mistakes.
Dr. Berzin: We do. A lot of the time we think, “I know what’s best for you.” We never even have any doubt that maybe we’re wrong. It’s a form of arrogance. Now, whether or not a doctor, for example, tells the patient that he doesn’t know what treatment is best is something else. There, it is not so clear because it’s important that the patient has confidence that the doctor knows what they’re doing. It can have a placebo effect and help the patient heal. Saying, “I don’t really know what’s wrong with you. I don’t really know if this medicine will help or not, but take it,” doesn’t instill much confidence in the doctor. What they should do becomes an ethical issue for doctors, actually.
In any case, that brings us, happily, to the end of that section. So, there’s only one more thing that I’d like to discuss about karma. I’ve put together a list of twelve factors that affect the strength of the ripening. We’ve gone over many of these factors before, so we can go through that list quite quickly. Then we can go on to the intermediate scope next time, unless we get bogged down – which, of course, will never happen because we never get bogged down!