Lam-rim 32: Second Law of Karma – Increase of Karmic Results

The next law of karma is the law of increase of karmic results – that from a small karmic action, large results can follow. The classic example given is that from a small seed, a large tree can grow. Remember, karma is the mental impulse, the urge that drives us into an action. So, karma, the urge, is not the same thing as the action itself. 

Then the question is, why do karmic results increase? Any ideas? We’re talking here about positive as well as negative potentials. 

Participant: Is it because they’re added to the other potentials?

Dr. Berzin: Right. That’s very, very good. It’s because the potentials are added to the other potentials that we have already built up and to those that we will build up in the future. That’s part of it. 

Building Up Networks of Karmic Force

When we think of a karmic potential or a tendency, it’s important not to think of it as something that exists all by itself, unrelated to anything else, and that, all by itself, it gives a result. It’s not like that. That’s why I refer to what’s sometimes called the “collection of merit,” which refers to positive force (bsod-nams), or positive potentials, as “networks of positive force.” And although there is not a comparable technical term in Tibetan, we also have build-ups or networks of negative force (sdig-pa), or negative potentials as well. I translate the term that is usually translated as “collection” as “network” because all these various forces, or potentials, network together. So, if we have built up a lot of negative potentials, it means that we have added more negative potentials to those that were already there, making the overall strength of those potentials that much greater. 

So how does this work?

There is a list of twelve factors that affect the strength of the ripening of karma. One of those factors is habit. If we have a long-term habit of doing a certain type of destructive action, we build up more and more negative karmic potentials each time we do it. For instance, if we have hunted all our lives, going out and hunting one more time is going to network with all the negative karmic potentials that we’ve built up prior to that, so the negative force built up from doing it this one more time is going to be very strong. But that doesn’t explain why the strength of the negative potential increases after committing the act: it only explains why something small can give a large result. 

So long as we don’t regret our destructive actions, vow not to repeat them and through various additional methods purify away the negative potential from them, the strength of the potential increases whether or not we repeat the action. For instance, if we say something nasty to our partner, the longer we go without apologizing, the worse the potential for a big argument to occur. All our actions that we do during the course of failing to apologize cause the potential for a big argument to increase. In this way, the karmic potential from a small act increases from not only networking with previous and future occurrences of a similar action but also from not applying opponent forces. Note that likewise the positive potential from a small constructive action will also increase the longer we go without regretting doing it and deciding not to do it again. 

Of course, if we directly counteract our destructive action with constructive deeds, we can weaken their negative potential, but the second law of karma refers to situations in which we do nothing to counter the increase of karmic potential. 

Participant: This is a nerdy mathematical question: Is it additive only, or is it exponential – exponential in the sense that the same potentials increase in strength just with the passing of time? 

Dr. Berzin: I think it is exponential because it says that the more frequently we do things, the stronger the effect will become. I don’t think it’s just additive. That doesn’t seem to follow from all the anecdotes that are used to illustrate the increase of karmic results.

Participant: Let’s say one does something a first time, then a second time, then a third, and so on. So, the probability of repeating it yet again increases. So, the next time you are deciding to do it or not, the probability is that you will do it again.

Dr. Berzin: Right. It becomes easier and easier to do it because we’ve become habituated.

Participant: So, it’s exponential.

Participant: My confusion in this discussion about karma is that when we use the word “karma,” I don’t know which point of karma we’re talking about.

Dr. Berzin: “Karma” is used as a very general word to refer to everything in the whole discussion of karma. However, here, we’re talking about karmic tendencies and how the strength of those tendencies and their results increase. 

First of all, we have to understand that tendencies are just an imputation on the mental continuum. There are causes, which are no longer happening, and there are results, which are not yet happening, and in between the two is a period of time, an interval, which is a series of moments on which the tendencies are an imputation. It’s like the first integral in mathematics, the thing that provides the continuity. A tendency is not something material on the mental continuum, and it’s not a way of knowing something. In technical language, it is a noncongruent affecting variable (ldan-min ‘du-byed). However, as long as there is a point earlier in the timeline of an instance of a certain type of action that still can serve as a cause and a point later in the timeline when a recurrence of a similar action can still happen as a result, we can say that there is an imputation of a tendency to repeat the action that provides the continuity between the two points. Do you follow?

Participant: So, a tendency is not the urge.

Dr. Berzin: No. The urge is the karmic drive that generates the action. After the action has ended, there’s a tendency on the mental continuum, which will, in the case of repeating an action, ripen into a feeling of liking to do that action, leading us into actually doing it again. 

Participant: But wanting to repeat the action would have to do with the habit, not the urge.

Dr. Berzin: Wanting to do it has to do with the intention to do it. I’m talking about a different mental factor, the feeling of liking to do something, which is one of the results of karma. Then the urge is what brings you into the action itself. We’ve had this discussion. First, you feel like doing it, and then you have the urge to do it.

Participant: So, the feeling of liking to do it gets stronger. 

Dr. Berzin: Right. But this is not the only thing. The examples that are given have to do with meeting with situations in which we experience something happening to us that is similar to what we’ve experienced in the past but experiencing it as something worse. So, the result could be experiencing an even worse situation, or it could be experiencing a similar situation many times. What are the classic examples? You call a monk a jackass (a donkey), and then you’re reborn five hundred times as a donkey. These are the examples that are given to illustrate the point. 

Tendencies can give one result or many results, and several tendencies together can give one result or many results. It works like that. Things can network together to give a stronger result or to give many results over a longer period of time. Either way, the result will be more drastic. We usually talk in terms of destructive actions, but the increase of karmic results applies to positive actions as well. So, the more you do positive meditations and so on, the stronger the results will be. 

Participant: We talked about the tendency. Now we’re talking about the result, right?

Dr. Berzin: We’re talking about the ability of a tendency to give a stronger or bigger result.

Participant: The tendency’s not feeling like doing an action again. 

Dr. Berzin: No, a tendency is not feeling like doing an action. Well, now we have to clarify further. 

The Difference between Karmic Constant Habits, Karmic Tendencies, and Karmic Potentials

There’s a technical difference between a tendency and a habit. It’s terribly confusing because “habit” (bag-chags) can be used as a general term to refer to both tendencies and habits. However, when I use the words “habit” and “tendency,” I’m making a distinction between the two. In this case, “habit” has the specific meaning of “karmic constant habit,” which is a term for a type of karmic aftermath that ripens into a result every moment until a true stopping of it has been achieved. 

The word that I translate as “tendency” (sa-bon) is the word that’s usually translated as “seed.” A tendency gives rise to its result only some of the time, not all the time, and it can finish giving its result when it is exhausted. Whereas “habit” (bag-chag, karmic constant habit) refers to the habit of grasping for true existence (bden-‘dzin), which is ripening all the time, and the habit of making an appearance of true existence (bden-snang), which, according to Gelugpa, is also happening all the time. Only the Mahayana systems assert karmic constant habits; the Hinayana systems do not. That’s one of the differences between the two. 

As I said, the word that is translated here as “habit” also happens to be used as a general word for both tendencies and habits, so it’s quite confusing. You have to know the context. But let’s not get into that. That’s a very complicated discussion. I have a complicated article on it with charts showing the difference in how the words are used.

[See: Karmic Potentials, Tendencies and Constant Habits]

Why don’t we take some moments to think about all of this. 

Participant: Think about what?

Dr. Berzin: That’s a very good question! 

Do you have any idea what I’ve been speaking about? Probably not, so let me give some points so that you understand what we’re talking about. We haven’t gotten to the stage of being convinced of this yet. For that, we need to understand the topic. 

The topic has to do with karmic tendencies – how they are built up on the mental continuum and how their results increase. First, there is an urge that brings us into the action, followed by an urge to sustain the action and then another to end the action. After the action has ended, there is a tendency, a “seed,” which is an unspecified phenomenon: it is neither constructive nor destructive. But there is also a karmic force, or karmic potential, and this is either constructive or destructive. The action itself, not including the motivating urge, functions as an obvious constructive or destructive karmic force, or potential. After the action has ended, that karmic force continues in the same manner as a tendency does, in other words, it continues as a nonobvious karmic force, which is an imputation on the mental continuum. In technical language, it is a karmic force that has taken on the essential nature of a tendency. Because of that terminology, it becomes confusing because “tendency” can be used for the constructive or destructive karmic potentials in this second phase as well as for unspecified tendencies.

Potentials and tendencies get stronger with the repetition of the actions that led to their having been built up, meaning that the more we repeat the actions and the longer we go with stopping repeating them, the more the strength of the potentials and tendencies as well as their results increase over time. They give more results, more intense results, or they give results more quickly. So, increase can mean increase in size, frequency, duration, intensity (for instance, getting hurt by a falling tree versus getting hurt by a splinter), or quickness (how quickly the result happens). And again, what’s important to understand is the fact that tendencies and potentials aren’t solid things. It’s not as if they were just sitting there, encapsulated in plastic, and unable to network with the tendencies and potentials that we build up in the future. If we understand that, we can understand how they get stronger. 

Let’s just digest that point.  

[meditation]

Positive and Negative Potentials Network Together

Participant: Is it true that negative potentials network only with negative potentials and positive potentials network only with positive ones?

Dr. Berzin: No. For example, if we do a lot of destructive actions but then we have regret or we counter those actions with many positive actions, the strength of the negative potentials will be less. Actually, two things happen: The strength of other positive networks is increased and the strength of the negative ones is lessened. 

There’s the example of Buddha in a previous lifetime, when he killed the oarsman on a ship. When he was the captain of a ship, he killed the oarsman who was going to kill all four hundred ninety-nine merchants on the ship (or all five hundred merchants, depending on the version of the story). Buddha did this as a bodhisattva. He therefore took the negative karma on himself in order to help others. The point is that, because of the strength of his motivation, the strength of the negative karma built up by killing was greatly diminished. So, he got a splinter or a headache or something like that. Also, the positive force from what he had done helped him to complete the first countless eon (or a zillion eons) of positive force on the way to becoming a Buddha. 

So, if we do really strong positive acts, we will build up positive force and counteract the negative force. That’s one of the twelve factors that affect the strength of a karmic result – whether or not there are opponent factors to oppose or weaken the heaviness of a destructive act.

Participant: Would that weaken it a little or weaken it a lot?

Dr. Berzin: Well, it’s the same thing when we do Vajrasattva meditation. Chances are that we are not going to do a hundred thousand of them perfectly. Still, it will weaken the strength of the negative potentials somewhat. It does have some effect.

Participant: So, it’s only relatively effective.

Dr. Berzin: It’s relative to how well we do the practice. If we have lots of mental wandering and so on, the practice is not as effective as when we have single-minded concentration, proper motivation, etc. throughout the whole meditation.

Participant: It’s probably impossible to accumulate positive potentials without weakening the negative ones and the other way around.

Dr. Berzin: Well, again, there are the four possibilities: We can have a negative action with a negative motivation, a negative action with a positive motivation, etc.

Participant: But it would be quite difficult to build up positive force without also destroying some negative force.

Dr. Berzin: Right. We’re doing that all the time. That was the next point that I wanted to make. 

Positive Force (“Merit”) Can Be Devastated but Never Destroyed

The word that is sometimes translated as “destroy” doesn’t actually mean “destroy.” It means to “devastate.” Anger weakens the positive force; it defeats it in a sense. If the anger is directed at a bodhisattva, a huge amount of a positive force – a thousand eons or something like that – is weakened. So, what this means is that the result of the positive force will be much, much weaker, and it will take much, much longer for a result to actually ripen. 

Participant: Is there any reason why the translators translated it as “destroy”?

Dr. Berzin: You find the same word in the term used for arhats, for example. Some translators translate it as “foe-destroyer.” It’s the word chom (bcom). It can mean “destroy,” like in chom-den-day (bcom-ldan-'das), the word for Bhagavan, a Buddha. Buddhas have “destroyed” the negative things and, den (ldan), possess all good qualities and, day ('das), surpass the Hindu gods and so on. The Hindu gods are also called bhagavan, which literally would be chom-den in Tibetan; so, the Tibetans add the syllable day to indicate that Buddha surpasses them.  

Many, many words don’t have just one meaning. If you look in the dictionary, you’ll see that almost every word has a list of various meanings. So, in this case, according to all the commentaries, anger doesn’t destroy the positive force completely. If it were able to destroy it completely, you’d have no chance to become liberated. There’s a big discussion about whether or not you can completely cut, or sever, the so-called “roots of virtue,” the positive force. If you could eliminate all your positive force, you couldn’t become liberated or enlightened. You couldn’t become a Buddha. Although there’s one branch of Chittamatra that says that you can sever these roots, the others Mahayana schools say, no, it’s not possible. 

So, in light of that, anger just weakens the positive force very, very, much; it doesn’t get rid of it completely. Negative potentials can be eliminated completely because they don’t have a sound basis. Positive ones do have a sound basis, so they can’t be eliminated completely.

“Habit” – Reinforcing the Strength of Tendencies through Repetition

Participant: Why does the strength of a potential increase? Let’s say I build up a negative potential and a tendency from yelling in anger at somebody. What caused me to yell at somebody with anger so that I built up that karmic potential? Is it my misunderstanding of reality?

Dr. Berzin: Misunderstanding of reality is the deeper reason. But if we leave it on the level of karma, we would say that there already was a tendency to yell. That tendency ripened into feeling like yelling, which then led to repeating the action. That yelling at somebody was probably not a one-time act, was it? If there was a strong enough tendency to yell at that time, chances are that there are going to be a lot more instances of yelling in the future. 

Of course, there are examples of things that we do very infrequently. I can use an example from my own life: going fishing. When I was a kid, maybe eight years old, my uncle took me deep sea fishing. I went one other time as a child when a friend asked me to go fishing with him. Those were the only times I ever went fishing. I went only because somebody else asked me to go. So, there wasn’t a strong tendency on my part to go fishing. 

However, if we think of the destructive actions that we’ve engaged in, we can see that we’ve done many of them a lot. In other words, there has been a strong tendency to do them, what we would call in colloquial terms a “habit.” We’re in the habit – “habit” in a non-technical sense – of losing our temper and yelling. 

Karma doesn’t ripen instantly. There’s no instant karma. So, it’s not that I yell now and that, tomorrow, when I yell again, that yelling is the ripening of the potential from yesterday’s action. It’s not like that at all. Our yelling now builds up a potential that maybe will ripen next lifetime. But because the habit of yelling is so strong, we’re going to continue to yell. By continuing to yell, we build up a stronger and stronger habit of yelling. So, we reinforce it. That’s something really to think about in terms of our own habits.

Participant: To me it sounds like building neurons in the brain.

Dr. Berzin: I think we could describe it as being similar to that – greasing the neural pathways, as it were. 

All these things that have to do with the mind surely have some kind of physical basis. However, the physical basis is not necessarily what causes the habit. What we would say is that the physiological explanation is just another way of describing the same syndrome. We can describe the syndrome in terms of the behavior, or we can describe it in terms of the physiology. They just describe the same thing from two points of view.

Participant: But the physiological basis is not necessarily the cause.

Dr. Berzin: Right. It’s not that the physiological basis comes first and causes the habit. But there is a physiological way of describing the thing. Why not?

Participant: But that’s what the scientists probably would say. They would say that there’s the physiological basis and that, out of that basis, comes the habit.

Dr. Berzin: Right. Anyway, that’s a whole different topic. 

Let’s try to understand the point that I was talking about and examine what’s going on in ourselves. When we act in some sort of destructive way, is what we’re doing a one-time event, or is it part of a destructive pattern of behavior that we repeat all the time? If it’s part of a pattern, doing it once more is going to reinforce that pattern. So, sure, the potential to do it again is going to get stronger and stronger. 

We can think in terms of addictions. Cigarette smoking, for example – that habit grows exponentially, doesn’t it. I don’t think it’s additive in the sense that every cigarette that you smoke adds up to having a stronger habit, but the habit does get stronger and stronger the more you do it. Think of the example of marijuana: The more you get used to it, the more you need to get high. Or coffee. Coffee’s a perfect example. Your body gets used to it, and you need more. In order to stay awake, you need more and more cups. The number of cups you need doesn’t grow limitlessly, though. There is only a certain amount of coffee that you can drink in a day before you get sick. I’m just using this as an example to illustrate my point.

Participant: What’s important is not so much the amount of coffee but, rather, your relationship to it, no?

Dr. Berzin: Well, with caffeine, there is probably also a physiological component. Anyway, try to think in terms of our behavior. Don’t get caught up with the example of cigarettes and coffee. I’m just trying to illustrate the point.

Participant: Do we start with a tendency?

Dr. Berzin: I think we have various tendencies from birth. These tendencies will ripen into feelings of liking to repeat the actions we have done before and, so, bring on the urges to do those similar actions again. We then act on those urges and build up even more tendencies. But the point is that we reinforce the pattern. So, the tendencies get stronger and stronger.

Participant: From where do these tendencies come?

Dr. Berzin: They come from previous lifetimes. So, there’s no beginning to the tendencies.

Participant: So, that’s karma.

Dr. Berzin: That’s part of the karmic picture, sure. So, there could be a tendency not to have confrontations, not to fight, not to get into arguments. Or it could be the opposite: there could be a tendency to argue all the time. 

[meditation]

Participant: Initially, when we start to become more attentive to what’s going on in our minds and with our behavior, it seems that the negative behavior is increasing.

Dr. Berzin: Right. The example that’s often given is that of meditation – that, at the beginning, when we’re trying to develop absorbed concentration, single-minded concentration, it seems as though our mental wandering increases, but it’s just that we had never paid attention to it before. For example, say we live on a busy street. If we have never paid attention to the number of cars that go by our house, we might not think that many cars go by. However, if we were to stop and count, we would think there were more than usual. That’s just because we hadn’t paid attention to them before. 

Participant: As I understand it, it’s that your karmic seeds are kind of in your mind-stream and that by building up a habit, you increase the strength of the old karmic seeds. You kind of nurture them, give them more strength.

Dr. Berzin: Right. If we think of a tendency as being more like a force or a potential rather than a concrete thing, it’s easier to image it as something that can be strengthened or weakened, depending on what we do. And if we think about our destructive habits, we can see that they’re usually much stronger than our positive ones. That’s what I’m saying: the destructive potentials get stronger and stronger. 

Participant: Let’s say that in a past life, I built up one negative karmic potential from one negative action. So, if I repeat the action in this lifetime, is it that the potentials just add up, or is it that the potential from the original action increases? 

Dr. Berzin: Does doing more of the same kind of action just build up more seeds, or does it strengthen the force of the original seed? My understanding is that it’s both. The original potential increases in strength, and more potentials are also built up. All of them network together to create an increasingly stronger network of negative or positive force. 

Dedication – An Example of How Results Increase

For instance, with dedication, if you add the positive potential that you’ve built up to all the positive potential built up by all the bodhisattvas and you dedicate that combined positive potential toward the enlightenment of all beings, you build up enormous positive potential. The example that’s used is going on a journey: If, when going on a journey, you add one grain of rice to the big sack of rice that’s going to be used for the provisions, you share in the whole thing. So, because your contribution increases the amount of the provisions, the strength of your contribution is increased. Or let’s say a statue is being built and you contribute five euros to the million euros it’s going to take to build the statue. The power of your five euros becomes much greater than just five euros. The treasury is made larger by your five euros, and the power of your five euros to bring about the result is increased because it brings the completion of the statue that much closer.

Participant: So, it would be smarter to make contributions to as many projects as possible.

Dr. Berzin: If you’re thinking in terms of making contributions to many different charities as opposed to giving everything just to one – sure, that’s great. Why not? That’s like helping a large number of beings as opposed to helping only one, or teaching a large group of people as opposed to only one, or killing a large number of people as opposed to only one. That’s another factor. Also, the karma built up by doing things with other people together in a group is stronger than doing it individually. So, doing a puja with a group builds up stronger positive potentials than doing it by yourself – stronger positive potentials for you.

Participant: So, can one say that by cultivating positive actions, you actually activate positive deeds from endless lifetimes ago.

Dr. Berzin: Right. Doing something positive now will add to your network of positive force, your “collection of merit,” which will make the whole network stronger. And each positive thing that you add to that network becomes stronger because it becomes part of what will give a stronger result. 

Another example that I use a lot or used to use a lot is having an argument with your partner. The longer you go without apologizing, the worse it gets. That’s another example of how things increase. Misunderstanding increases; resentment increases. And they keep increasing the longer you wait to apologize. That’s another example that can be used to demonstrate why it’s important, if you do something negative, to apply the opponent forces of regret and so on as soon as possible – and if you hurt somebody, to apologize as soon as possible.

Participant: But if you apologize too quickly – say you have an argument and then five minutes later you say, “Oh, I’m truly sorry” – you could give the impression that you haven’t thought about it properly, that you’re apologizing just to apologize.

Dr. Berzin: In other words, you don’t actually mean it.

Participant: It’s just an apology, and it doesn’t change anything.

Dr. Berzin: I don’t know that that has to be the case. I think a lot depends on the history of the person. If you yell and apologize, and then, ten minutes later, you yell again and apologize again, and then another ten minutes later you yell again, obviously, the apology isn’t sincere.

The Effect Does Not Exist at the Time of the Cause

The other point that I wanted to make goes back to our discussions of the Samkhya position and the refutation of the Samkhya position, which is that the result doesn’t already exist at the time of the cause. It’s not that the result is sitting there in the karmic tendency and that when the time is right, it pops out. The result is not fixed. The result of something is going to be affected by circumstances and everything else that you do after you’ve committed the karmic action. That’s a very, very important point to understand. Otherwise, we think that everything has already been determined. It’s not. It’s also not that the result is sitting there but is not fixed and could be changed. Nor is it like a fertilized egg: the chicken continues developing until it is “ripe,” and then it pops out.

[meditation]

The fear of hell very much involves that type of thinking: “I’ve sinned, and I’m going to hell” – as though that result already existed, fixed, inside the potential, without the possibility of being changed. Then you really, really feel strong guilt.

Participant: But on the other hand, you don’t go to the other extreme and say that destructive behavior doesn’t lead to a result.

Dr. Berzin: Right. That gets us to our third law of karma. But we’ll be discussing that next time.

Let’s take a few minutes because we have not really taken time to think about this. 

[meditation]

Participant: This idea that the tendencies network together makes things very unclear. It seems that everything is mixed together, that everything is karmically interconnected with everything. The positive comes in, mixes with the negative, but then the positive ripens again. So, that also means that the result is not purely positive or negative.

Dr. Berzin: First of all, you have to realize that in every single moment, an enormous amount of things are ripening. One type of ripening has to do with experiencing something similar to what we’ve done in the past, another has to do with feeling a level of happiness, yet another has to do with how we actually behave in that experience. Involved in all that are all the various mental factors and disturbing emotions. Those ripen from different potentials, tendencies, or habits. So, there’s a tremendous combination of things ripening all the time. And all the components are ripening at different rates, changing at different rates. 

Now, do these various potentials, tendencies, and habits maintain their individual identity? Yes. The whole understanding of voidness has to come in here – that things are not like little ping-pong balls or eggs, totally isolated, existing all by themselves. That’s not the way in which they keep their individuality. Nor is it that in interacting with each other, they merge to become a soup. They interact with and affect each other while maintaining their individual identities. Yet, in none of them does the effect already exist. Sure, everything influences everything else, but everything still keeps its own, individual identity. That’s the difficult thing to understand about voidness and dependent arising – one aspect of dependent arising.

Participant: But we can’t test this.

Dr. Berzin: Well, if tendencies and potentials were totally isolated particles or ping-pong balls, they couldn’t interact with each other. 

To begin to understand how they network together, you’re going to have to have some sort of concept of it; otherwise, you won’t be able even to think about it. What helps is to have a mental picture. I’m talking about myself – what helps is a mental picture. A mental picture is not one of concrete things. It’s not even a picture, really; it’s sort of a feeling of amorphous but definite entities interacting with each other. But they’re not solid. So, you have to get a feeling of that. “Feeling” is not the greatest word, but some sort of…

Participant: Intuitive understanding?

Dr. Berzin: “Intuitive” is such a vague word. You have to have some sort of… I can only think of the word “concept.” You have a category, and then you have something that represents the category. So, you have to have something that can represent the category according to your own understanding; otherwise, your concept of it will be too vague. And to say, “Just sit there and become non-conceptual,” is totally unrealistic because that just doesn’t happen.

Participant: Is it part of the path? Or is it just convincing yourself of karma?

Dr. Berzin: Is what part of the path? To be able to meditate on karma and to meditate on voidness?

Participant: Can’t you just have trust in the teacher when the teacher talks about karma stuff?

Dr. Berzin: Well, that will come later, after these four laws of karma. It has to do with the next point that I will be discussing: Why do you believe anything that Buddha said? To say that killing results in a short life – well, how do I know? “Well, Buddha said so.” So why do I believe Buddha? That gets into the whole discussion of how one becomes convinced that Buddha is a valid source of information. But that will come after we finish these four laws. 

It’s the same with the teacher. How do you know your teacher’s a valid source of information? To believe something is so just because your teacher said so is, if you look at the seven ways of knowing, presumption, which is what one goes by in the beginning. In order for that presumption to be reliable, it has to be based on the third type of inference, which is valid inferential understanding based on confidence: You infer that the teacher is a valid source of information. Therefore, because he’s a valid source of information, what he says must be true.

Participant: To a certain extent, you can check karma against reality.

Dr. Berzin: To check it against reality is very difficult. But let’s not jump ahead. That will be in the discussion about whether the Buddha is a valid source of information about karma. Let’s try to deal with these four laws of certainty first.

Participant: When the teacher says or explains something, you have to have some idea that represents your understanding of what the teacher says in order to be convinced of it.

Dr. Berzin: Right. 

Participant: With karma, isn’t it enough to stick by the laws of karma and to leave it at that?

Dr. Berzin: That’s like saying, “Here are the ten commandments. They were given by God. This is it. I believe it, and I don’t question it.” So, likewise, you could say, “This is what the Buddha said. I don’t question it.” For some people that may work very well. However, the approach that I am using with this whole lam-rim topic is to examine very carefully these things that sometimes we don’t examine. What I’m trying to help all of you do is to develop the habit of what’s called “analytical meditation” – to analyze everything, rather than to accept it just because “my teacher said so.” Buddha said, “Don’t accept what I say because I said so. Examine.” 

Participant: It’s not clicking with me.

Dr. Berzin: What’s not clicking with you, karma or the method?

Participant: It’s just not clicking.

Dr. Berzin: That’s an indication that it requires deep thought and contemplation. It is not simple. You could go on the basis of “my teacher told me so, and that’s sufficient.” However, that belief has to be based on some valid reason. Otherwise, why should you believe this person?

Participant: To a certain point, I think, it works to just go by what your teacher says.

Dr. Berzin: I said, I agree: to a certain point it works. But if you reach a point in your development of needing to become more convinced…

Participant: Then one will question why it is so.

Dr. Berzin: And then you question. Then you have what is called a “spiritual crisis,” which most people eventually have if they’ve been practicing for a long time. It’s sort of like a mid-life crisis. Most people who are long-term practitioners have spiritual crises: “I’ve been doing this for fifteen, twenty years. What am I doing?”

Participant: But I think you can check karma against reality. 

Dr. Berzin: But there are people who cheat, lie and so on and get away with it. It’s not so easy to evaluate karma if you’re thinking of it just in terms of what happens in this lifetime.

Anyway, let us not get into the question of whether Buddha is a valid source of information this evening, especially since we are five minutes past our hour. 

I would like to finish the second law of karma with a review of what it is, which is that these karmic potentials and tendencies increase, meaning that they increase in strength and give larger and larger results. That’s because they don’t exist in isolation. The tendencies and potentials that lead to a karmic urge (remember, tendencies and potentials don’t directly ripen into karmic impulses) and subsequent karmic action that build up further karmic tendencies and potentials, are still there on the mental continuum when new karmic tendencies and potentials are built up – unless, of course, they are completely depleted, which is hardly ever the case. They are therefore likely, especially in the case of destructive potentials, to produce more and more tendencies to repeat the same kind of action. So, the newly built up tendencies and potentials network with what we have built up already. They will network with other things that are going on as well, such as the tendencies for various disturbing emotion to repeat. And the result, which does not already exist inside the tendency or potential, will just get stronger and stronger. As we said, it tends to do that exponentially, not additively. 

Meditating on this is not so different from looking at the worst rebirth states. Remember? We examined ourselves by thinking, “What have I mostly done in my life? Have I thought with lots of anger, greed, jealousy, laziness, and so on and therefore built up the causes for a worse rebirth state?” Most of the time, most of us have been quite negative, quite disturbed, and have acted not very nicely. So, what type of rebirth do we think will follow? 

This is the same type of meditation, but here we’re thinking in terms of what’s going to make the karmic potentials and tendencies stronger: “If what I have been doing most of the time has been destructive, I will, if I don’t do anything about it, just continue – out of habit – to do the same destructive things.” We know that, as we get older, we become more and more stuck in our habits and less able to change. We become less flexible, and so we just continue with our same patterns. We’re sort of on automatic pilot. We become more and more stubborn and more and more fixed in those patterns. 

All of this leads to deciding very strongly, “I’m going to make a big effort to stop acting destructively and to begin acting constructively,” which is the whole point of this initial scope. First, we start with the behavior – don’t do it! Then, on the intermediate scope, we deal with the disturbing emotions. Then, on the advanced scope, we deal with the unawareness, or ignorance, that underlies the disturbing emotions. So – step-by-step.