Karma

Samsara This evening, we’re going to begin a series of talks on how the understanding of voidness (emptiness) helps us to overcome our uncontrollably recurring rebirths, samsara. Samsara is not some place that we want to escape from and go instead to some transcendent realm...

This evening, we shall be beginning a seminar on what does karma actually mean in terms of Vasubandhu and Nagarjuna’s presentations. This is an extremely important topic, since karma is one of the things that we need to overcome. We need to rid ourselves completely of it so...

The Complexity of Karma Karma is a topic that concerns what happens to us and why. It is something that is very relevant to all of us on a personal level, not something outside of the sphere of our lives. If we can start to understand karma and how it works, we can begin to...

Methodology Karma is a prominent topic discussed throughout the history of Indian thought, with several different explanations found in the varied schools of Indian philosophy, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. Even within the Buddhist fold, there are several different...

Brief Review  In the first session, we introduced the topic of Karma: Who’s to Blame? We saw that the approach we need to follow is an analytic one in which we examine each of the three components: karma, self and blame. If we want to get a harmonious picture of how these...

Karma: Neither Deterministic nor Predetermined We’ve been discussing karma, and we saw that there are various systems with which karma is explained. However, what we are speaking about when we talk about karma is our compulsive behavior, what brings on our compulsive behavior,...

Review of Mental Urges in Karmic Actions of the Mind In the previous part of this series, we modified Vasubandhu’s Sautrantika presentation of the division between performer impulses (byed-pa’i las, Skt. kāritrakarma) and exertional impulses (rtsol-ba-can-gyi las, Skt....

Formulation of the Topic for Analysis  In Buddhism, a temporal interval is what we’re speaking about when we talk about time; it’s an interval between the occurrence of a cause and the occurrence of an effect. What is most common in Buddhism (and what all Buddhist tenet...

Let us first examine the main assertions concerning karmic impulses and revealing and nonrevealing forms in the Mahayana Sutra Basket and then, in the next part of this series, in the Sarvastivada Abhidharma Basket. These are the forerunners of some of the main features of the...

The Importance of Analysis We were discussing what Kalachakra adds to our understanding of the four noble truths. And we saw that one of the most distinctive features that it adds is the discussion of the flowing or coursing of the winds of karma in our bodies, our subtle...