Introduction to Karma

The Four Noble Truths in Everyday Language

I’m very happy to be here in Xalapa once more, and the topic that I’ve been asked to speak about this evening is karma. Of course when we study some topic in Buddhism it is important to have some idea of why we want to study it, what is its importance, and how it fits in the whole context of Buddhism. Buddha basically was speaking about everybody’s experience, what we experience in life, what’s going on. What is the most fundamental thing that we all experience, everybody? It is that sometimes we are unhappy and sometimes we are happy. This is the way we experience our lives, isn’t it?

When we examine that situation of sometimes being unhappy, sometimes being happy, we discover that there are a lot of problems associated with that. When we are unhappy, obviously, that is suffering. Nobody likes to be unhappy, do they? We can be unhappy in seeing things, like a friend go away, or hearing things, unpleasant words, and we can also be unhappy when thinking various things with various emotions. But sometimes we feel unhappy and it doesn’t seem to have any relation whatsoever with what we’re actually seeing or hearing, or what’s going on around us. This is a problem, isn’t it?

But what about happiness? Sometimes we feel happy, don’t we? We feel happy seeing things, hearing things, hearing a loved one, and also we can feel happy thinking about something, like remembering a wonderful time we had with someone. But when we look more deeply, we find that this happiness that we experience also has some problems associated with it. First of all, it never lasts, and we don’t know how long it is going to last. And it never seems to be enough. We might be happy eating one spoonful of food, but that’s not enough – we want to eat more and more and more. Actually, that’s a very interesting question – how much of something do you have to eat in order to actually enjoy it? Think about that one. Another fault, another shortcoming of this happiness is that we don’t know what’s going to come next. We could continue to be happy in the next minute, or we could be unhappy. It could change, so there’s no security in this happiness.

This type of insight or analysis into happiness and unhappiness is not anything unique, actually, to Buddhism; many great thinkers in the world have observed this and taught this. But what Buddha understood and taught was a deeper type of problem, or suffering. He looked more deeply at this up-and-down situation of everybody’s life, that happiness and unhappiness goes up and down, up and down, and what he understood was that the cause for that happening was actually part of every moment that we experience. In other words, the way in which we experience things with the ups-and-downs of happiness and unhappiness perpetuates that unsatisfactory situation.

So Buddha then looked and saw what that cause was that was there in each moment and which was perpetuating this unsatisfactory situation, and he saw that it was confusion about reality. In other words, confusion about how we exist, how everybody around us exists, about how the world exists.

This is quite different from what many others have said. Some others have said, for instance, that the up-and-down of happiness and unhappiness that we experience is basically because of reward and punishment: from following the laws or not following the laws. The basic issue for feeling happy or unhappy was obedience, according to many teachers. But Buddha said: no, that wasn’t the case. The actual cause was our confusion, not an issue of obeying or disobeying; it’s being confused about life. Then, Buddha went on to say that that confusion was not an integral and necessary part of life, of how we experience things. It didn’t have to be there: it is something that can be removed, and it can be removed completely, so that it never returns. Then he said that the actual way to do that was to change our way of experiencing things.

Getting rid of that confusion was not a matter of asking somebody else to get rid of it for us, but it was basically a matter of changing our own attitudes, our own understanding about reality. If we can replace misunderstanding with understanding, and then have this understanding all the time, then we discover that we don’t have this constant up-and-down of happiness and unhappiness, and we don’t perpetuate that up-and-down of happiness and unhappiness. So that’s a very basic teaching of Buddha, putting it in very everyday language.

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