LTF 12: The Four Factors That Make a Pathway of Karma Complete

First of all, for the pathway of karmic impulse to be complete, there has to be a specific basis for the action, a specific object or person toward which the act is directed. In the case of taking the life of someone, it’s specified that it has to be a sentient being, a limited being, since we can’t actually kill Buddhas because Buddhas aren’t actually sentient beings. And it has to be somebody other than ourselves. So, suicide is not actually considered to be one of the ten destructive actions as such. It is certainly destructive; there’s nothing constructive about it, but they say that if we kill ourselves, then the basis for the action is already dead. So, from that point of view, the basis is not complete. 

I always found it a little bit odd that it was formulated this way – that it has to be somebody other than oneself. One then looks at actions such as the monks in Vietnam who set themselves on fire in protest against the Vietnamese war. Was that a constructive action or destructive action? It’s taking a life, but it doesn’t fit within the category of the ten destructive actions because it’s not taking somebody else’s life. Would you say that it’s constructive or destructive? I don’t really know. Does it fall into the same category as sacrificing one’s life in order to help somebody else? Would that be considered suicide? I don’t think so. 

I think that one has to look at the many factors that would make an action destructive. One of the things that make it destructive, of course, is the contemporaneous motivation. So, if the contemporaneous motivation is one of desperation and anger with ourselves or hopelessness and these sorts of very destructive states of mind, then I think we would have to say it’s destructive. What about if someone sacrifices their life in order to save others in whatever situation that might be? I don’t know that we could say that it’s destructive even if the motivation at the time of doing the action was compassion. I don’t know. I think this could be debated. We would have to look into the situation in great detail from the various points of view. Asanga has a huge list of maybe twenty different types of destructive actions and the factors that would make something destructive. So, we would have to see whether it fulfilled any of those criteria. 

In any case, we need an object toward which the act is directed. That object, the basis, could also be an item involved in, for instance, taking what’s not given. What’s not given has to be something that belongs to somebody else. If the basis is not complete, we would still experience some suffering as a result if the action was still a destructive action; but we wouldn’t necessarily experience the complete suffering that would result from committing a complete one of these ten destructive actions. 

One possibility in the case of the basis not being complete is that the action does not necessarily deconstruct into a less destructive action. It could deconstruct into being unspecified. “Unspecified” means that it was not specified by the Buddha as being either constructive or destructive. For example, picking wild flowers in the wilderness that belong to nobody – is that taking what was not given? We would say no – it’s not taking what’s not given because the basis is not something that belongs to somebody else. But there is this question. A lot of people wonder, if we’re walking in the countryside and we come across an apple tree with some apples on it – can we take an apple? Is that stealing? Does the apple actually belong to somebody else or not? Technically, if it does belong to somebody else, then the basis would be complete. If it really doesn’t belong to anybody, if it is just wild – that’s something else. 

Participant: Where I come from, it’s an unspoken custom that you can pick an apple if you are walking in somebody’s field or orchard. And the farmer wouldn’t mind. 

Dr Berzin: I suppose one also has this in India. If we’re in the market place, in the bazaar, and there are vegetables out in the stand, it’s not considered inappropriate if we take a little taste of something. One factor of the heaviness of karma is the amount of suffering that it causes to the other person. So, if it doesn’t cause any suffering to the other person, it’s not heavy. If it’s a custom that is acknowledged – that it’s OK to take the apple without asking – then I don’t think it would be destructive. 

Now, of course, there are other things that could make something destructive. Anything could become destructive from a certain point of view if it’s accompanied by very strong greed. Then even something ordinary, in a sense, could be destructive. The technical question we’d want to ask is which destructive action it is and how heavy it is because the point is what the results will be. And the results will all be different.

Now, if there is no basis present that could be killed, like shooting somebody in a dream or shooting at somebody who we think is behind the curtain but who isn’t there after all, then the action of killing hasn’t occurred at all. Has it? so, then there wouldn’t be the karmic consequences experienced from the action of killing. However, is killing somebody in a dream destructive? Does it have suffering as its consequence? 

Participant: It basically depends on the state of mind that you have. Of course, you don’t produce suffering for somebody else, so it would be very different from actually killing somebody. But also, just trying to kill somebody… It’s interesting, if you are planning to kill somebody in a dream, of course, the basis is very different, so…

Dr Berzin: The basis is not complete.

Participant: It’s probably also lighter. But on the other hand, if you do it with anger or anything, then it’s probably destructive due to that.

Dr Berzin: What would it deconstruct into? Would it deconstruct into one of the other ten destructive actions? 

Participant: I’m not sure.

Dr Berzin: What about thinking with malice?

Participant: Yeah, sure: malice. If it’s accompanied by malice, then…

Dr Berzin: Right. Having hostile thoughts towards somebody and planning to actually do them harm is one of the three destructive actions of mind.

Participant: In a dream you can have very different states of mind. I think it really depends on the state of mind that you have – if there is any malice, for example. It might also be that you don‘t even perceive the dream person in the way you normally perceive the person.

Participant: So, maybe it’s just an aspect of yourself that you’d like to get rid of. There is the symbolic scope of dreams.

Dr Berzin: Ah! Now, that’s an interesting thing – to look at our dreams as just symbolic, in which case, we are killing a certain aspect of our own psyches, something that we don’t like. Let’s say that we are killing some negative aspect of our personality that’s represented by this person in our dream. Is that a destructive action? That’s an interesting question. 

Participant: It certainly seems to be destructive somehow. If you have these kinds of fear dreams, you don’t feel good, at least in that moment. And maybe in your whole life, you have had some kind of mental distress going on. 

Dr Berzin: Right.

Participant: I don’t think you could necessarily get this on a bodily level, but I think maybe on the person’s mind level there is some subtle thing going on.

Dr Berzin: Right, so there is some subtle negative thing going on in our minds if we are being very violent in our dreams. What about these violent tantric visualizations? We have Yamantaka stamping on all sorts of writhing creatures and the flames and so on. 

Participant: The point of that is actually to draw out and dissipate these feelings.

Dr Berzin: Right. This is why we’re investigating the question. Is the action of committing violence itself – just from the point of view of committing violence – destructive? 

Participant: In a dream or in reality?

Dr Berzin: Well, we could be violent when punching the wall.  

Participant: Well, really, the question is how to define “violence.” It’s often mixed. For example, aggression can also have positive aspects that are forceful. So, it’s difficult to say. Even if it might look very wild and aggressive, maybe in the end, it’s a positive action because it brings you to a different level.

Dr Berzin: OK. That is a very good point. Something could be very forceful – aggressive in the sense of forceful. We have forceful deities, for example. This is why I don’t like the translation of “wrathful” deity. It makes it sounds as though they’re really angry or wreaking vengeance and stuff like that. I don’t think that’s what’s meant. There are peaceful deities and there are forceful deities, ones that have to assert a great deal of strength. What’s usually translated as “violence” – the opposite of nonviolence – is associated with hatred, wanting to destroy something with hatred. 

Participant: One of the characteristics of a destructive state of mind is that the mind is, in a sense upset and perturbed. For example, with dreams, I think that’s a good measure. Maybe with some dreams you feel calm, although the symbolism may be violent. With other dreams, maybe you feel aggravated.

Dr Berzin: So, is calmness, or peace of mind, a factor that has to be there? Well, if we look in the Theravada…

Participant: You probably couldn’t kill somebody with a quiet, calm mind.

Dr Berzin: With quiet, calm mind. That’s true. But it’s interesting, in the Theravada formulation by Anuruddha, he says that one mental factor that always has to be there in a destructive action is what I translate as “restlessness.” Udhacca is the Pali term. It means unsettled or uneasy; an over-excited state of mind. It’s the opposite of being happily content and at peace. That’s Anuruddha’s definition. So, this would go along with what you say – that if it’s destructive, you’re really very far from a happy, peaceful state of mind.

Participant: His Holiness also mentions this characteristic often.

Dr Berzin: Well, that’s part of the general definition of a disturbing state of mind – that we lose peace of mind and self-control when it is generated. However, there can certainly be people who are not upset at all when they kill and are very calm about it. Somebody who works in a slaughterhouse, for example, does that all the time. 

Participant: Probably, there is still, on a subtle level, something going on.

Dr Berzin: Maybe. I don’t know. The point is that this is really a very complex issue – what is a destructive action, what is not a destructive action, and if the action is destructive, what type of destructive action it is. 

Unmistaken Distinguishing

The next factor that has to be there for a pathway of karma to be complete is a motivating mental framework, which as we saw, has three parts. The first is an unmistaken distinguishing. Suppose we incorrectly distinguish whom it is that we intend to shoot. We shoot somebody else, but we do so with the same hatred we would have if we were shooting at the intended victim. So, we kill somebody else by mistake. Is that one of the ten destructive actions? 

Participant: It seems likely.

Dr Berzin: Well, the intention was there, the hatred was there, the action was there, but we kill the wrong person. 

Participant: So, the distinguishing was not proper. But I don’t know what proper distinguishing in that case would be – if you are taking it as a person and it’s not  a person, or if you’re taking it as this person and instead it’s that person.

Dr Berzin: Well, I intended to kill Mr. X, and killed Mr. Y instead.

Participant: It’s very hard to say. You can argue which quality of killing they mean. Of course, if you are killing somebody, it’s not a carried-through, plotted murder anymore if you kill the wrong person.

Dr Berzin: Well, but you plotted it.

Participant: Yeah, you plotted. 

Participant: It’s even worse.

Dr Berzin: Is it even worse? This is interesting. Is it worse? I planned to kill the king, for example. There was somebody who was dressed up as the king in order to protect the king – they knew that somebody would try to assassinate him – and I killed that person. Is that more destructive or less destructive? I don’t know.

Participant: Technically, in Buddhist terms, it would be less destructive. 

Dr Berzin: Less destructive, right.

Participant: But what about my intention? I would say that somehow it doesn’t matter who I killed. I read some books where it says that, technically, it’s actually less destructive if you kill the wrong person. But I don’t understand that.

Dr Berzin: Are we perhaps talking about it being – on a scale of 100 points – one or two points less destructive? I think it’s more like that. We are not talking about a huge difference. 

Participant: But, still – why? I don’t understand it.

Dr Berzin: Well, still, you are killing somebody. 

Participant: It’s just by mistake, but your intention was still bad and so was everything else.

Participant: But the fallout, the result of killing the wrong person, might be that you actually cause more suffering. For example, if you were aiming to kill, let’s say, the president of America…

Participant: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth is not the way to go about things. But suppose you killed somebody who’d been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people…

Dr Berzin: Well, you’d execute them because the legal system allows you to execute them.

Participant: The American president is not going to be executed, but somebody could aim to assassinate him. Instead of assassinating him, though, let’s say that this villain kills an innocent bystander. That would be worse because the person who was killed was totally innocent of ever having taken human life. 

Dr Berzin: Oh, but this gets into a whole different question. You’re saying that if we intend to assassinate somebody who has killed many other people…well, it all depends on our motivation – whether it is to stop them from killing more people or if it is to punish them. If it’s to stop them from killing more people, that’s one thing. However, if the motivation is to punish them, that’s a judgment, and that’s a whole different thing. 

Then you were saying that if you had the intention to kill this person because you wanted to stop them from killing more people and. instead, you ended up killing someone who was innocent, someone who hadn’t killed anyone, that that would be quite a drastic mistaken distinguishing and would be worse than killing the intended person. From a social point of view – yes, it seems worse. From a karmic point of view, though, I don’t know.

Participant: Are all killings equal? 

Dr Berzin: Are all killings equal? No. From the point of view of taking a life, they are equal. But is killing insects that fly into your windshield while you are driving your car equal to assassinating Mahatma Gandhi? I don’t think so.

Participant: Well, I’m talking about the killing of human beings. Are they all equal? 

Dr Berzin: This depends very much on many, many factors, and there is a long list of factors. I think there are about thirteen points regarding what makes an action heavy that are mentioned in the various texts by Asanga and Vasubandhu. One of the factors is the amount of positive or negative things that the basis does and can do. Killing Mahatma Gandhi is heavier than stepping on an ant because Mahatma Gandhi helped many people and was capable of helping many more people. So, that’s actually there. Similarly, one could speak in terms of the destructive things that the basis does. But to kill somebody…

Participant: But there you have to be really, really careful.

Dr Berzin: Well, we have to be very careful. In the example in the Jataka Tales of Buddha taking the life of the oarsman of a ship who was planning to kill 499 merchants, it differentiates the motivation from the action. The motivation to save the other 499 merchants on the ship – that built up the positive force to complete the first countless eon of positive force that the Buddha had to build up to become enlightened. However, the action itself was negative; it was destructive. Later, it ripened into Buddha getting a splinter in his foot. So, the action of killing was still destructive and ripened into suffering, but because the motivation was so positive, it lessened the destructiveness. I think this is a very good example – that still the action is destructive. 

I don’t think we could say that Buddha, when he actually killed that oarsman, had a contemporaneous motivation of anger toward him. I think that from the point of view of the Buddha as a bodhisattva, he undoubtedly had compassion throughout the entire act. So, everything could be argued here in terms of what is actually constructive or destructive and the amount of suffering that would come from it. It gets very technical and very difficult. 

Buddha also didn’t want to go to the extreme of the Jains – just sitting and doing nothing in order not to kill anything, even unintentionally. Things get very technical and difficult because one of the things that makes something destructive, which is in Asanga’s list, is just being part of samsara itself. So, we would have to say that when we walk on the ground and step on things unintentionally, the action is destructive just by being a phenomenon of samsara. That’s part of the all-pervasive problem of being born with these samsaric aggregate factors – that if we walk on the ground, we can’t avoid stepping on something, that if we eat or drink, we can’t avoid killing something. And the result of that is that it perpetuates samsara. 

So, we have this all-pervasive suffering, the third type of suffering. Then the question is: in order to gain liberation, do we need to stop these types of actions? The Jains went to the extreme of saying yes. So, the final step of liberation, basically, is starving oneself to death. Buddha wanted to avoid that extreme. The Buddha’s approach was to get rid of the states of mind that cause us to act destructively because so long as we have these so-called contaminated aggregates, these tainted aggregates, there is no way of avoiding doing destructive actions – taking lives. What we want to get rid of, then, is the unawareness, or ignorance, that produces more karmic actions and that causes the aftermath of karma to ripen. I think this is more the type of middle path that the Buddha was indicating. So, we would have to say that even stepping on an ant or killing insects…

Participant: Even breathing…

Participant: Digesting.

Participant: Everything.

Dr Berzin: Right. This would all be taking life. It’s a difficult point. 

So, this is the factor of unmistaken distinguishing. 

Motivating Intention 

Then we can speak about the motivating intention. If we kill somebody unintentionally when we are trying, because of hostility, just to wound them with a gun… let’s say that you’re a policeman, and you want to shoot the robber who’s running away in the leg, but by mistake you kill them. This could occur for one of two reasons: One reason could be that the person who shoots either had bad aim or was distracted, in which case it’s the fault of the perpetrator, the person who shoots. The other is that it could have been the victim’s fault – they moved. It could also be a combination of both. In either case, though, we’d still have to say that the action was destructive because it was contemporaneously motivated by hostility. It’s also an action of killing because the shooter took a life.

Participant: On the other hand, nowadays – at least in Western Europe – the police are trained to shoot to kill because they are afraid that if they shoot the person in the legs and that person has a weapon, they might kill lots of other people. Anyway, the whole issue of shooting in the leg or arm or whatever – that seems so logical. Why kill somebody if you don’t have to? But the rationale now is that if you don’t kill the person, they might kill a whole lot more people.

Participant: But the motivation of the policeman who shoots the thief or terrorist or whatever, in a way, is to protect the general public. The motivation seems extremely confused. Not confused, but very mixed. 

Dr Berzin: Right. So, the example of the policeman was perhaps a bad example because, nowadays, police are trained to shoot to kill because if they only wound somebody and that person has a weapon, that person could still use the weapon to hurt others. Then it gets into the motivation of the policeman. Is the policeman motivated just by compassion to protect the public? Maybe that’s the initial motivation. Certainly, in most cases, however, compassion wouldn’t be their contemporaneous motivation. Usually, they have unbelievable anger and fear at the time of actually shooting. They are very agitated in most cases. 

But here, if we use just any example… “I wanted to catch the mosquito in my hand…” That’s a good example. I wanted to catch the mosquito in my hand and take it out of the room. I had no intention of killing it, but unintentionally, I squeezed too hard. 

Participant: This happens quite regularly, actually.

Dr Berzin: This happens very regularly. So, is that killing? Well, we’d have to say that, yes, it’s killing, but the pathway is not complete because we didn’t actually intend to kill. This is the whole point. The consequences will be less here than if we actually intended to kill it. So, this is what I’m saying: one has to analyze. What does it deconstruct into if one of the factors is missing? I intended to actually kill you, but I just got you in the arm and didn’t kill you. Well, that’s not an action of killing; it’s an action of injuring somebody. However, if I intended to just injure you, but I accidentally killed you – that’s an action of killing. 

Participant: I have a very practical question because in our kitchen there are these food moths that eat flour and so on. When I check our kitchen, I always find places where these moths are living. So, now the question. What I wish to do is just to put them in the garbage bin because if I put them in the garden, they just die. I think that maybe in the bin they have some kind of survival chance. But it’s very, very difficult to know what to do with this kind of animal. I have really no clue. You can’t just leave them there. You can’t put them in the bin. And you can’t put them outside.

Dr Berzin: Well, eventually, they are going to die anyway. So, are you going to take an action that will purposely kill them, like flushing them down the toilet? Or will you put them in a place that is not specifically going to kill them? I don’t know. That’s hard to say. Certainly, if we look at the extreme example… Who was it? It was Asanga who had compassion for the dog that was being eaten by worms, so he cut off a piece of his own flesh in order to take the worms off of the dog and not have them starve to death. I don’t know. All sorts of interesting questions come up. 

Participant: Maybe you can build a house in the garden and put some food there…

Dr Berzin: Yeah, keep them as pets. 

Participant: You could put them in the hallway.

Dr Berzin: Well, if you throw them in the hallway and there’s nothing to eat in the hallway – then what? 

Participant: They come back.

Dr Berzin: They come back underneath the door. But what about when you catch some sort of insect in your house and you throw it out the window? 

Participant: Maybe they won’t survive.

Dr Berzin: Maybe they won’t survive if it’s not a flying insect. It’s always very… what shall we say? Somehow, we think that if we throw an ant out a three-story building, it’s going to survive hitting the ground, which, probably, it doesn’t. 

Participant: I think an ant would survive.

Dr Berzin: An ant would survive? 

Participant: They survive. They fall very, very slowly. 

Dr Berzin: I see. They fall very slowly.

But it is a difficult question: what do we do with these insects? I think that we have to accept the negative consequences if we are going to kill them. This was the whole point with Buddha in the previous life when he took the life of that oarsman. As a bodhisattva, he was willing to take on the consequences himself in order to prevent others from being killed. A bodhisattva is willing to be reborn in hell in order to save others. 

Participant: And also to prevent the oarsman from killing.

Dr Berzin: Yes, preventing the oarsman from building up more negative karma. So, if we do a destructive action, which we sometimes do… For example, I had parasites when I was in Mexico, and I had to take some medicine. I didn’t have to take the medicine, but I certainly didn’t want to have the parasites. I had to teach every day, so I didn’t mess around. I just took some medicine and got rid of them. Now, is this a destructive action of taking life? I suppose it is. But I think the question here is whether or not our action is accompanied by naivety. If we think that there’s nothing wrong and that the action is not destructive – that’s a problem. If we realize that it is destructive and think, “Whatever the consequences are, I accept them because I want to be able to go on with my life and not be eaten up by a worm” – that, I think, is very different. 

Participant: If you want to do agriculture or if you want to build a building, you would necessarily kill things. 

Dr Berzin: So, doesn’t that mean that if we want to be really proper, we would have to go to the extreme of the Jains? Well, look at the full monks’ vows. Monks are not supposed to dig the earth because it kills things. That’s actually one of their vows – not to do that. They are not even supposed to light a fire for cooking purposes because it will kill things. That, then, gets into the whole issue of whether or not to accept things from others, things that have been grown, because it will have entailed the taking of life. It also gets into the discussion that we had last week about vegetarianism vs. non-vegetarianism. It’s just a matter of degree whether we eat meat or we eat only vegetables: things are killed in the production of both. 

Participant: You let other people do the dirty work.

Dr. Berzin: Well, that’s a very difficult issue. That’s the question of agriculture. Again, it’s not just about meat. This, I think, is an important point. One shouldn’t be so holy-holy about being vegetarian – that “Ah! Now nothing is killed.” That’s being naive as well. If we look, for instance, in Theravadan countries, at least in Thailand, the monks accept meat when they are being given meat if it’s put in their begging bowls. 

Participant: If they refuse it, they’re denying the donor merits. 

Dr. Berzin: Then why is the donor giving meat? Probably because they know that the monks like it. 

Participant: For Thai people, meat is considered the best food.

Dr. Berzin: So, they’re practicing generosity by offering what is considered the best. It becomes a very complex issue – not so simple.

As Krishnamurti says, we’re going to have to take the life of something when we eat, so we should try to take the life of a more primitive life form, such as the worms that die during the agricultural process as opposed to a taking the life of a cow. However, the thing that I am reminded of with that is what His Holiness always says, which is that if we are going to eat meat, it’s better to eat the meat of a large animal that will feed many people rather than just one person eating 20 shrimp – taking the life of 20 animals in order to eat. This is another way of looking at it. Then you had brought up the example that scientists have found: that if someone has great hatred and hostility toward a cabbage, the cabbage will react as well. This gets into the whole discussion of whether or not vegetables have minds. Let’s not go there. That’s a terrible discussion. 

Participant: I think one just tries to reduce the killing, then.

Dr Berzin: One tries to reduce the killing. That’s exactly the point. That goes back to what I was saying about avoiding the extreme of the Jains. If we want to go to the extreme, then we don’t move, we don’t eat, and we starve ourselves to death, because anything we do is going to kill. So, we try to minimize. This is the point. However, if we order somebody to kill – that’s just as heavy a karmic action as doing the killing ourselves. That’s very clear in the abhidharma text.  

Participant: If an assembly of monks commission somebody to build a building… I mean, it’s easy for them to be just “holy-holy.”

Dr Berzin: If we go by the abhidharma itself, we would not be commissioning people to kill, we would be commissioning them to build a temple. Now, in the process of building a temple, something inevitably will get killed, but I think that’s different. That’s just part of samsara, the general suffering of samsara. The abhidharma is not saying that there is a prohibition against building; it’s saying that there’s a prohibition for fully ordained monks to dig the earth. 

This gets into the whole issue of monastic vows. There are certain destructive actions that are naturally destructive and those that were prohibited by Buddha for certain people at a certain time, in certain situation. Like eating after noon – we can’t say that is destructive for everybody. Buddha prohibited it for monastics for a certain purpose – that they would have clearer minds for meditating at night and in the morning. It’s the same thing with celibacy. If we engage in any sexual behavior, is that destructive for the reasons that Buddha gave to the monastics for refraining from all sexual behavior? I don’t think that there’s a valid argument there. 

Naturally Destructive Actions versus Culturally Specific Ones

Now, what becomes very difficult to determine is what makes something a naturally destructive action. That’s a difficult one – that in any circumstance, an action is destructive. This was what I tried to do some research on with regard to inappropriate sexual behavior because there are certain behaviors that were added later on that one would really have to question in terms of masturbation, homosexuality, sex in any manner other than straight–forward missionary position,  having sex during the day-time and these sorts of things. So, then one has to ask: are these things naturally destructive, or were they specified for a specific reason in a specific context? The texts only specify not having sex with another man’s female partner. So, does that mean that heterosexual women can have sex with somebody else’s male partner and that there’s no problem with that? That’s not destructive? One gets into a whole argument about whether it means that, just because it’s not said, it’s OK, or whether it was not said because it wasn’t a problem in those days? 

The analysis becomes very interesting because Buddha did not make monastic vows from the beginning. Each of the monastic vows was formulated because something, some problem, came up in the monastic community. Then, because of that problem, Buddha made the specific vow. In the Vinaya, it lists that “this and that happened, so Buddha said, ‘Don’t do it.’" It becomes a very big problem, then, to know what a destructive action prohibited for a certain group is and what a naturally destructive is. Not easy. Of course, there are some people who are incredibly conservative and fundamentalist about these things. 

Participant: What conclusions did you come to?

Dr Berzin: The conclusion that I came to was that things have to be relative. Basically, I think that the list was intended for heterosexual men who got married at the age of ten, before puberty. I think we would have to have a different formulation – although, perhaps, with some similarities – for men who get married way after puberty, a different formulation for women, and also different formulations for heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals. What about somebody who is paralyzed from the waist down? Does that mean they are not allowed to have any type of sex? Would any type of sex – oral sex, for example, be destructive for them? What about somebody who works all night? I think that one has to make all of the guidelines relative. 

Also, there are an awful lot of things that seem very weird from our point of view. For example, it’s perfectly okay to go to a prostitute, even if the person is married, so long as they pay for the prostitute and don’t take somebody else’s prostitute without paying for them. That’s the only thing that’s mentioned as being inappropriate regarding prostitutes. From our Western point of view, how can we say that going to a prostitute as a married person is perfectly OK – that that’s not inappropriate sexual behavior? So, one has to really investigate. It’s not a simple issue – what’s behind it all. 

Participant: I think, also, in some tribes, you have to go and kill someone… 

Dr Berzin: Well, this is why it’s a very difficult issue. Like in New Guinea, they felt that in order to become a full member of the tribe, the person had to go out and kill somebody. We also find that in many other countries where there are many incidents of vengeance killing, and this type of thing. Somebody insulted our clan, so we have go out and kill somebody from the other clan. This would be called, from the Buddhist point of view, naivety – thinking that there is nothing inappropriate or destructive with that. 

So, what is naive and what is not naive? They say that vengeance killing and so on is naive because it’s a naturally destructive action. But is masturbation naturally destructive? And for somebody who never gets married or who doesn’t get married until late in life, it’s perfectly OK for them to go to a prostitute, but if they masturbate – that’s naturally destructive? And if they think it’s not destructive – that’s naivety? How are these things different from vengeance killing or killing to prove that one is a man? It’s not an easy issue. 

Participant: It always depends on the cultural context.

Dr Berzin: Well, this is the whole question. If it is only dependent on the culture, does that mean there is nothing that’s naturally destructive? Then all of ethics is relative. 

Participant: It is, yes.

Dr Berzin: Well, that’s the question. Is all of ethics relative? 

Participant: You can get a lot of people to agree upon anything in strange situations. That’s the problem.

Dr Berzin: Ethnic cleansing – you know, Hitler’s policies. We could justify anything and say that it’s relative to our society. The society thinks that this is perfectly good – are protecting the purity of the race.

Let me just repeat for the tape. The example you were using was from the DDR, of the policeman who shot some people who were trying to escape and killed them. He was tried in Germany afterwards. The man’s defense was that he was just following the law of the DDR; he wasn’t doing anything wrong. But the judge decided that there was a higher natural law that he was violating and, therefore, he needed to be punished for that. He was found guilty. 

Then the question, the issue that comes up is, if one kills, let’s say, by executing somebody in the United States with the death penalty and everybody thinks it’s perfectly OK, is the action still destructive? It is still destructive: there’s naivety there. To kill out of naivety, thinking there’s nothing wrong with it, that it’s OK, is less destructive than killing with hatred and anger because  the strength of the karmic results of an action are also affected by the motivating emotion. All of these factors have to be brought in. 

However, this doesn’t answer the question about how we determine what’s naturally destructive and what’s culturally specific. That’s a tough one. To use the criterion that it causes harm to others – that doesn’t go in Buddhism because there is no certainty about the effect our behavior has on others. The only criterion that we could use from a Buddhist point of view is that it causes suffering to ourselves. It ripens into suffering. And how do we know that it will ripen into suffering? The only way we would know that is if we were Buddhas. So, if Buddha said so – that a certain action will ripen into suffering regardless – then it’s naturally destructive. However, then we get into the whole problem of: how do we know that the Buddha actually said this? 

Participant: Aren’t there these five heinous deeds, like killing a Buddha? Isn’t that a naturally bad action?

Dr Berzin: Right, the five heinous deeds. It’s not killing a Buddha; it’s drawing blood from a Buddha with bad intentions, killing an arhat, killing one’s mother, killing one’s father, and causing a split in the monastic community. One of the things that Dharmakirti talked about was how one knows that Buddha actually intended what he said and whether or not it was intended only for a specific person. Buddha delivered a sutra to this person or that person, in which case it was specifically for that person and not generally applicable to everybody. Dharmakirti said that the criterion is that if Buddha repeats it over and over again in so many different sutras, it’s an indication that he really meant it for everybody. Otherwise, it’s very difficult. How do we know? It gets into the whole discussion of interpretable and definitive meaning, which is a horribly complex issue, and we don’t really want to go there. 

So, what about these things concerning inappropriate sexual behavior? In the earliest literature, all that is stated is having an inappropriate partner. And there is a list of twenty types of inappropriate partners. In each of the different versions of the vinaya that are preserved that I’ve had a chance to look at, the lists are slightly different. From the different eighteen Hinayana schools, there are quite a few of these vinaya texts that are preserved, at least in Chinese. There is only one list that mentions both women and men; all of the other lists have just twenty different types of women that it’s inappropriate to have sex with. And that’s all! It’s in the later abhidharmas where this elaboration starts to take place, and that only starts in the very early Sarvastivadan literature. So, we are talking about the first century BC or something like that – a little bit earlier than when Vaibhashika started to appear and we get Vasubhandu’s formulation of inappropriate sexual behavior. Vasubandhu’s formulation was not the first, actually, that started to elaborate what is inappropriate. It started a little bit before that. 

So, then we have to ask, “Was this implicit in what the Buddha taught before – it just wasn’t necessary to mention it because nothing came up that challenged it? Or was it added? Was it added because of exposure to the Iranian culture?” This is one theory. It’s very interesting because most of the early literature of the Sarvastivadans was formulated in northern India, in the area of Punjab and Kashmir and into Pakistan. This was under the rule of the Kushan Dynasty. The Kushan Dynasty was a central Asian people that came in, ruled that area, and also ruled over an Iranian area as well. It was a big empire. It was a period of time in which there was great deal of cross-cultural influence. There was a lot of scholarly discussion of the influence of the bodhisattva ideal and pure lands and the “Land of Light” and all this stuff coming in from Zoroastrianism, which came into Buddhism because of this Iranian influence.

Now, in the discussion of destructive behavior, quite a few Iranian customs are mentioned, very specifically Iranian customs – for instance, when a husband dies, his brother can take the woman as a wife, and this type of thing. It’s also the first time that incest is mentioned. Incest was never mentioned in the earlier lists. Also discussed are certain types of animal sacrifice and other weird things, like when the parents become very old, abandoning them on the mountains so that they die. All these were Persian customs. 

Then one has to ask whether inappropriate sexual behavior also came from the Persian customs. – so, no Indian ever masturbated before the Persians came? Well, that’s absurd. So, why are these things specified only then, at that later period of history? One has to ask this question. And only much later, much, much later, toward the end of the first millennium, do we get commentaries that throw in things like it being inappropriate to have sex during the day. It’s very difficult to come to conclusive decisions. As His Holiness always says, just because something isn’t mentioned doesn’t mean that it’s OK or not OK. The absence of something doesn’t prove anything one way or the other; that’s an invalid way of knowing.

Karma is very, very difficult. Very, very difficult, I must say – particularly difficult regarding these issues that are so difficult for us, in the West. I think that the two main issues that are the most difficult for Westerners are the sexual issue and alcohol. With alcohol, it’s very clear from the scriptures. Buddha said, “Not even a drop on a tip of a blade of grass.” He didn’t even allow alcohol as a medicine for the monks. So, then what? Forget about homeopathic medicine? That all has alcohol in it. Where does one draw the line? A glass of wine or beer is no good, but shooting up heroin is perfectly fine because the Buddha didn’t mention heroin? 

Participant: It’s the same with the Muslims. Wine is completely forbidden, but then…

Dr Berzin: Hashish is fairly common. Recreational and hard drugs aside, what about people who are addicted to amphetamine or to tranquilizers?

Participant: Coffee.

Dr Berzin: Coffee, cigarettes. Where do you draw the line? 

Then we get some very liberal, loose interpretations of the precepts, like by Thich Nhat Hanh. What is he basing it on? I don’t know. I don’t know if he has any scriptural basis. He says that it is inappropriate sexual behavior to have sex with somebody that we would not want to spend the rest of our lives with if we had to. In other words, if we have sex with somebody, we should be willing to accept this person as our partner for the rest of our lives, which implies that if we get them pregnant, we are going to stay with them. But where does that come from scripturally? I don’t know. 

Participant: It’s an interesting approach, anyway.

Participant: You could be a tantric.

Dr Berzin: “You could be a tantric.” Meaning what? 

Participant: Then you could drink and have sex. 

Dr Berzin: Then we could drink, have sex and do all sorts of things. Not really. In one of these teacher conferences, it was Bob Thurman who proposed applying the “taste test” as a means of determining whether or not we have the power to transform ordinary substances into nectar. So, if we can eat the five meats and the five liquids – which include every form of excrement imaginable – and are perfectly able to enjoy them, then we can drink alcohol as well. He suggested this test for these great, so-called tantric practitioners who go around seducing various students, who drink alcohol and so on, to see if they have actually reached that point. Also, the tantric sexual thing was never, ever in terms of orgasm and release like in ordinary sex. Not in the slightest. It’s very, very different. 

Participant: But, Alex, if you drink a little alcohol and you really don’t harm anybody… 

Dr Berzin: So, if you drink alcohol and it doesn’t harm anybody and so on, is that OK? This depends on what one’s spiritual goal is. This is an argument that is used very, very well. People think that if they don’t take every set of vows, they are not being a full Buddhist. Geshe Dhargey always used to say that it was a good thing that there was not another set of vows because then people would take them and not keep those either. 

The question is whether or not we are aiming for liberation. Aiming for liberation is what the monk’s vows are intended for. Celibacy and so on, is for the purpose of overcoming, being liberated from, biology. Biology is samsara. So, if we are not intending to attain liberation, which is actually very difficult to seriously intend, then it doesn’t matter. His Holiness always says in regards to these various precepts, that if we are not a Buddhist, what’s the point? If we want to reach a certain spiritual goal within the Buddhist sphere, then there are certain things that we want to avoid. This gets into the big discussion of whether these things are naturally destructive or not. Is alcohol naturally destructive, or is it only prohibited for Buddhists who want to attain the specific goal of liberation? 

Participant: So many French people drink alcohol daily, but they…

Dr Berzin: Gain liberation?

Participant: No! They don’t do any harm.

Dr Berzin: It’s quite clear that the criterion of a destructive action is not based on whether or not the action causes harm to others, although that is one of the criteria that Asanga includes in his list of twenty types of destructive actions. But there is no guarantee that it’s going to cause harm to others. The point is whether or not it is self-destructive and brings harm to oneself as its result, so whether or not it ripens into suffering. That is the definition. 

Participant: France has the highest level of alcoholism of any nation in the world.

Participant: So they’re harming themselves.

Dr Berzin: They are harming themselves. That’s not even from a karmic point of view. 

Participant: I don’t need to defend alcohol, but I see that…

Dr Berzin: Well, then this comes down to the question, do we have a pick-and-choose attitude toward Buddhism and toward the precepts – that we’ll only take the things that we like, and we’ll reject the things that we don’t like? That’s quite clearly stated as very inappropriate attitude. Which one is that? That is belittling any of the teachings of the Buddha (I think that’s one of the tantric vows) – saying, “This one I don’t like because I want to keep doing this. Buddha said not to do it, but I can forget about that one.” 

Participant: Maybe nowadays, because we are in the Kali Yuga, very few people even imagine for one minute that they can attain enlightenment, but they do want to have a better rebirth. 

Dr Berzin: I would say that in this Kali Yuga, hardly anybody even believes in rebirth; they just want to improve this lifetime. How many people do you know who actually believe in rebirth? 

Participant: An awful lot of people in Asia.

Dr Berzin: In Asia, yes. In the West, no. 

Anyhow, let’s get back to our discussion. 

Motivating Emotion  

A motivating emotion is one of the factors that needs to be there for the pathway of karma to be complete. When the action is destructive, the motivating emotion is specified as one of the three poisonous disturbing emotions or attitudes: longing desire, attachment, greed, anger, hostility, or naivety about karma – about cause and effect. The motivating emotion is part of the contemporaneous motivation, part of the state of mind that we have at the time of the actual action.

Now, what happens when one of these three disturbing emotions isn’t there? A destructive action could still occur with other motivating emotions. Vasubandhu says that there are certain mental factors that are naturally destructive and that are present in any destructive action. From his point of view, it doesn’t have to be one of these three poisonous attitudes. It could also be what he calls “no sense of values” (ngo-tsha med-pa, Skt. ahrikya) and “no scruples”  (khrel med-pa, Skt. anapatrapya). This is the way I translate them. His definition for “no sense of values” is “a lack of respect for positive qualities or persons possessing them.” And “no scruples” is defined as “a lack of restraint from being brazenly negative”– in other words, not caring. But he also says that naivety is present with every destructive action. 

Anuruddha, in his presentation of Theravada abhidharma, defines these differently, but he also says that these attitudes are present. For him, the first one, “having no sense of values,” is shamelessness.  His definition is that “It comes from within and causes us not to refrain from acting inappropriately, like touching filth.” The other is “having no scruples.” The definition of that is “having no fear of the consequences of acting inappropriately, like grabbing a hot poker.” Basically, we don’t care. 

Let’s think of an example. We could kill because of a lack of values and having no scruples, like when burning leaves and not caring if any insects are killed. Is that a destructive action? We are not naïve – we know that it’s going to kill insects, but we don’t care. We don’t value the lives of the insects, basically – “What does it matter?” Here, the pathway of karma is not complete, but the action is certainly destructive, isn’t it? However, it’s less destructive than thinking, "Ah, ha! I am going to burn these insects alive with the leaves." 

Then another possibility is that the destructive action occurs because of the shortcomings of samsara, like when we have to choose between letting our children starve to death and slaughtering a sheep to feed them when there is no other means of food available. What do you do? The abhidharma texts would say to let yourself starve to death. But what about letting your children starve to death? 

Participant: Obviously, in the Jataka story of the bodhisattva who gave his body to the tigress so that she wouldn’t eat the cubs.

Dr Berzin: I know he fed himself to the tigress, but I forget why he fed himself to the tigress. 

Participant: The tigress was weak and starving to death and on the verge of eating her own newly-born cubs, so the bodhisattva, who was then a young prince, compassionately cut his own neck with a sharp stick, as she was too weak to attack him, and offered himself to the tigress to eat. 

Dr Berzin: Right. But this is quite a different example. The example I gave would be killing the tiger in order to feed our children. This is killing himself in order to feed the tiger – I think that’s different.

Participant: If you can’t take care of your children, you still can’t feed yourself to them…

Dr Berzin: Also, remember: we were talking about killing and that the basis has to be somebody other than ourselves. I think that killing a sheep in order to feed our children when there’s no other possibility is still technically an act of killing, but it wouldn’t constitute one of the ten destructive actions. Maybe we can call it a “seemingly” killing – something like that. I think it would have to fall into Asanga’s category of “a phenomenon that is destructive through inflicting harm,” because killing a sheep in order to feed our children is certainly inflicting harm on the sheep. Again, one has to analyze. No matter how good our intention is, it still isn’t very nice for the sheep, is it? 

Participant: But, surely, it’s always a calculation. On the one hand, by killing the sheep you’re causing harm but you’re doing something else in the meantime which will compensate for the sin and totally, not just reduce it, but…

Dr Berzin: OK. So, what about when we compensate for the destructive action that we do? Yes, that’s another criterion for the heaviness – whether or not our negative actions are counter-balanced with positive actions. If they are not counter-balanced at all, the negative action becomes much heavier in terms of its consequence. If it is counter-balanced with positive things, then it’s less heavy. So, yes, there’s a big calculation that happens with karma, and there are many different factors that affect it. 

Let’s try to finish the discussion that we’re having here. 

The next factor needed for a pathway of karma to be complete is the implementation of a method that causes the action to occur. If we don’t implement a method, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to cause the action to occur, the action will not take place under our karmic responsibility. We have to actually do something. For instance, for the action of killing somebody with our car to occur, we have to actually run the person over. Whether we do it on purpose or by accident doesn’t matter: we’ve still killed someone. 

If we plan to kill somebody but we don’t actually put the plan into action, we haven’t committed the destructive physical action of killing; we’ve only committed the destructive mental action of thinking with malice. So, the action has to actually be done. That’s one of the reasons why killing in a dream is not complete: we haven’t done anything to actually kill anyone… aside from the fact that, in a dream, there is no basis, no actual being that could be killed.  

The last factor here is the finale, the completion of the act. Something has to occur at the conclusion of the act for the pathway of karma to be complete. For example, in killing somebody, the person or being has to actually die. If they don’t die, we haven’t succeeded in killing them – even if we fully intended to kill them. So, the karmic pathway of killing is not complete.

In taking what is not given, what’s interesting is that the finale is reached only when we develop the attitude that what we have taken is now ours. If that finale is not reached, the action becomes a different act, though it’s still destructive. So, for instance, if we take somebody’s pen and hide it, and we don’t actually think, “It’s mine” – that’s not stealing; it’s just playing a malicious prank. With the action of lying, for that to be complete, the other person has to believe our lie. If they don’t believe our lie, it just becomes idle chatter, like just saying something stupid. It could also be that they don’t hear us. Also, in terms of other things, if we try to destroy somebody’s camera but it turns out that it can be repaired, then we haven’t actually destroyed it. We’ve damaged somebody’s property; but we haven’t actually destroyed it. 

One has to analyze all of these possible factors to see whether a karmic action – a karmic pathway – is actually complete and whether it is one of the ten destructive actions or whether it is some other destructive action. On the basis of that analysis, we would be able to predict what the karmic consequence will be. OK?

This is one discussion. If you like, we can go on and get into the specifics of each of the ten destructive actions. They’re much more complex than they appear to be on the surface. For example, the three destructive actions of thinking – there’s a list of five attitudes that have to be present with each of the three for the action to be complete. If these attitudes are not present, then, again, the destructive action is not complete. I have that material so we can do that next time.