Good morning. Children of all ages. Yes, you're one. But then, so is that guy sitting next to you. And that woman sitting back there. Today, I'd like to talk to you about, it seems a hair loud. What? You like it? OK. All right. I'd like to talk to you about cause and effect. Is it loud enough now? I'd like to talk to you guys about cause and effect. Do you know about the law of cause and effect? What happens when you throw a baseball into the air? Did you ever throw a baseball into the air and it didn't come down? No. Do you think that that's possible?

[01:01]

Yes. No. Yes, of course you think it's possible. Okay, David, tell me how it's possible. If it goes into orbit? Yeah. Right. In the future, they could maybe make a machine out of which space was. That would be... There'd probably be a lot of demand for a machine like that. But generally, almost always, if you throw a baseball up in the air, it comes down, right? So that's cause and effect. If you hit your head, if you run full steam head first into a wall, what happens? Your head hurts. Of course, not always. The wall might break. It could be made of paper. But generally, your head's going to hurt, right? Yeah. Do you understand that as cause and effect? Yes.

[02:02]

Yes? You get that, right? So we have this idea in Buddhism, it may be a word that you might have heard or you might not have heard. Have you ever heard of the word karma? Yeah. I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is. I hate karma. Who said that? Okay, so tell me why. I don't know, I just hate it. Why? Because I don't know why. What do you think karma is? When you do bad things, bad things happen to you, and When you do good things, good things happen. Oh, that's very good. You live in a good Buddhist household. So I would guess that you hate it because it means you can't get away with anything. Is that right? Yeah.

[03:04]

That's good. Now, so that is what I was talking about as cause and effect. Does that make some sense to you guys? Yeah. When you do something, there's another level on which this happens. Say you get angry at Leo, which I'm sure it never happens, right? Yeah, it never happens. I wasn't talking to you. If you get angry at Leo, then later how do you feel? Not Yesbeam David. Yesbeam Mira. She's the sister. How do you feel? Bad. Bad? Guilty. Guilty. Now you have injected a whole other theological issue here. You feel bad, right? So the other day, I'll just tell a short story.

[04:09]

I just want you to think about this, and we're not going to go into it in great detail with you, but I want you to think about how you feel when you do something. As Dave was saying, when you do something good, you know, that it makes you feel warm and good, if you do something harsh or angry or maybe even a little violent, then the question is how do you feel later? Yeah, right. So the other day, I got really angry at somebody, which doesn't happen that often, but because I'm human, I have a temper. Ignore that man over there. No, but I got really angry at a person and was yelling at him really loudly at, I would say, about 5.45 in the morning, who was at my door. Not somebody in this room.

[05:09]

not a friend, but somebody that I knew. And what was interesting was, I understood later, when I thought about it, I understood why I was angry. And sometimes you're angry, right? Sometimes things make you angry, and sometimes that's not the wrong response. Sometimes anger is okay, sometimes it's called for but the way I expressed it the whole day I felt really bad and I didn't feel bad because of what he had done to make me angry supposedly I felt bad because of how I actually felt in my body from having yelled from having let myself go in that direction.

[06:32]

And it took... I'm a kind of sensitive person, so it took me a whole day. And I regretted it. I wished I had done something different. I couldn't say there was anything wrong with me being upset that somebody woke me up at 5.30 in the morning pounding on my door. But how I handled it was making a cause that then had an effect on me for the rest of the day. So I'm just suggesting that you think about cause and effect that way and think that's the meaning of the word karma. And I'm sure you're going to have opportunity to think about this and talk about this idea. more as you grow up. So I'd just like to leave you with that today. So thank you very much. Bye, guys.

[08:01]

I was thinking you were going to leave with them, Nancy. I thought you were maybe going to walk out with them. I should have. But I thought I'd come up and get a photo of Sarah. Other people can too. Yeah, people can move if they want a closer scene. You can also stay where you are. Well I did want to talk about karma and there's a couple of reasons why and obviously it's a big subject. The Buddha said at one point to talk about the results of karma because we're always trying to figure out what it is and what led to this point in our life or this particular event. He advised that to try to figure out and untangle the fruits of karma in some rational way.

[09:03]

It leads to vexation and madness. So you should be warned. And yet you just had the bodhisattva ceremony where we begin. That ceremony is about acknowledging all my ancient tangled karma from beginningless greed, hate and delusion. It means you can't find the beginning of it. I now fully avow to avow it, and then in the process of this ceremony that we do monthly to avow it, to renew our vows, to cleanse ourselves, and to go out in the world, and then we make mistakes all over again. And that's why we have to do this every month. We have to do it all the time. So, what the Buddha said in one of the early sutras, a very succinct statement of this is, I declare that volition is karma.

[10:11]

Having willed, one acts by body, speech and thought. So, karma literally means volitional action. Actually, literally means action by implication, volitional action or choice. means intentional action. Our thoughts create karma, or our words do, and our actions do. And I will say that the Buddha also taught, and we're going to get to what is not karma, because that's sort of, I wanted to try to clarify or begin to clarify the distinction between karma and other kinds of causation. The Buddha said there are other forms of causation. There are what he called the niyamas that are not karmic.

[11:17]

And sometimes we make this mistake when the cyclone, when the earthquake and the tsunami hit South Asia a couple of years ago, there are all these statements and things in the newspapers. There was something, a picture editor for the New York Times described a terrible scene the babies in their silent rows were as real and as specific as the insane act of nature that murdered them. I mean, insane? There was no consciousness or volition involved in that. And we have this misunderstanding. Even a well-known American Buddhist scholar

[12:17]

and spokesperson, was quoted on Beliefnet about this time saying, abstractly speaking, which should be a clue right off the bat, abstractly speaking, karma is not really a theory of fate, it's a causal theory, and then he says, It's not really a theory of fate, it's a causal theory, and it says that anything bad that happens to you is a resonance of something bad that you perpetrated in a previous life. Gee, if that doesn't sound like fate, then what is? I think that is a really misguided notion of what karma is. So I want to say there are these other forms of causation. To mention them, they're called the Niyamas. Uttu Niyama includes phenomena in the physical and inorganic, supposedly inorganic world, if Ross will forgive me, seasons, winds, rains, earthquakes, etc.

[13:29]

Bija-niyama. Bija is a word, we studied it a bit at our study session. Bija just means seed. Bija-niyama is the order of the organic world. Germs, seeds, cells, genes, these are actually forms of causation quite apart from intention or volition. And there's dhamma Niyama, which is kind of the law of, it's like the law of gravity, the law of thermodynamics, the physical manifestations of the world. These are other forms of causation that are not about something good or bad that you may have done in your past life. So why am I talking about this? It comes up because tomorrow evening I'm going to India for several weeks.

[14:35]

I've been invited, I've been working there for, I've been not working there, I've been working with friends and talking to them for a few years who live in the state of Maharashtra. Most of them live around the cities of Pune and Nagpur. And their background is what what they refer to as Dali or untouchables. They are also, they have quite an amazing community. They have renounced their untouchable status in the Hindu world and they have taken on Buddhism. they've been bringing Buddhism back to India, where it was born. And this is a hard job, because there aren't a lot of teachers, because in a certain way it's tangled up with identity politics.

[15:47]

But the question is, why do they feel the need to do this? And it has a lot to do with the notion of karma and a confusion that's embedded in that word. I'd like to read you, this is, there's an awful lot to say and I don't know how far I'm going to get, but what happened in the 30s, 40s and 50s, there was a remarkable man named Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who was quite a brilliant young man from the untouchable community in Maharashtra, who by a series of circumstances, perhaps his good karma, if you will, he received scholarships to study at university, he then received a scholarship to study law at Columbia University in New York, and then also in England and Germany.

[16:56]

and so he was one of the most highly educated people in the western system in India and he came back as a lawyer and when he came back to work in one of the state offices where he was given a job by his sponsor even though he was so clearly brilliant and so qualified because he was an untouchable background The law clerks, none of the other lawyers would talk to him and the law clerks would throw files on his desk from across the room. He couldn't find any place to live in the town that he was working. And he had so much drive that he gradually built up a movement or he he worked with a movement that was already emerging, a movement of liberation, a movement that was linked to the movement for Indian, the anti-colonial movement in India, but that was also wanted to really see the deconstruction of this untouchable status and of the caste system as part of this anti-colonial movement or alongside it, parallel.

[18:22]

just to say a little about who these people are and I know that there are people in this room who probably know a lot more about this in a technical way than I do, so please forgive my oversimplification. According to fairly old and well-established literature and scriptures in what we call the Hindu tradition there are four castes four broad, broadly four castes. The Brahmins, who were the priests and scholars and teachers. The Kṣatriyas, which was what Buddha, it was Buddha's caste, I believe, who were warriors and kings. The Vaiśyas, who I think were mostly farmers, merchants. And then the Śūdras, the bottom of that particular totem pole artisans and service providers and manual laborers and then there's everybody else who didn't fit within this kind of framework who just became generally known as untouchables.

[19:47]

and it was thought that untouchability was in a sense contagious, where you had a religious system defined by brahmanic practices that was based on purity. If an untouchable were to drink from the same water source as you, they would have to go through a large purification process to make it okay again. They weren't allowed to touch people of a higher caste. They weren't allowed to look at them, much less any kind of marriage or social intercourse. And they were given the lowest jobs in society, you know, the jobs that you know, jobs like cleaning the toilets, taking out the trash, various kinds of jobs that were looked on as actually dealing with having to be up close and personal to what was considered impure.

[20:59]

Now, the question is, how do you get to be in one of these castes? And that's where the Brahmanic Hindu notion of karma. That's where the Buddhist notion of karma veers from the Hindu notion of karma. So these castes were, in a general sense, in place before the Buddha's time, and in the Buddha's writings you read very clear statements in opposition to what he felt had nothing to do with the reality of human life. So the Buddha, he relates karma directly to, as I said, to intention, to the motives behind your action. And he wrote about people of high caste.

[22:01]

He said, neither matted hair nor so-called high family nor states of birth make one a Brahmin. By one's own actions in the practice of truth does one become a brahmana. I do not call a person a brahmana merely by reason of birth, or if they were born of a noble mother. Only if free of all attachments from worldly grasping, then do I call them a brahmana. Whoever is not afraid of breaking their chains, whoever has escaped from the ties of attachment, that person I call a brahmana. That's from the Dhammapada, an early text. It's pretty radical. Whoever is not afraid of breaking the chains, then do I call that person a brahmana. So, Dr. Ambedkar, to continue the story a little, at a certain point

[23:08]

And he really, he had enough. He said, well, I was born Hindu, but I will not die Hindu. And he set out in a really very wide ranging exploration, scholarly, experiential, meeting with different groups who were, you know, really the Jains were courting him, the Muslims were courting him, the Christians were courting him, they all wanted him as a leader of tens of millions of people to convert to their religion because it would certainly increase their political clout and after a lot of examination he decided and he had an affinity from early from his early years, when somebody had given him a book of the Buddhist teachings, he decided that Buddhism was the most equitable, the most logical, the most open, the most non-discriminatory path that he could take.

[24:19]

The one that had the most clear and distinct notion of karma, apart from this Brahmanic sense of karma. And I would say, step back a second, karma Caste and karma in that context are linked. And when you are born into a caste, then you are obligated to perform in accordance with that caste, what they called Dharma or Dhamma. The same word, again, these are words that the Buddha folded into his teachings, but used them quite differently. in the sense of the Brahmanic religions, dhamma means duty. So if you're born according to the caste that you were born in or the no-caste that you were born in, that is a result of the karma of your past lives. That's exactly what this scholar

[25:22]

this supposedly Buddhist scholar was saying that the present that you have is determined by your actions in past lives. And so the argument proceeds then that in order to fulfill and transform that karma and maybe have a better luck next time around in life you have to fully perform your duty in an uncomplaining, humble way, in complete accordance with the rules of that caste. So there's no wiggle room there. Does that make sense? It doesn't make sense, but you understand what I'm saying. So Dhaka and Bhedkara pursued this further and further, and in 1956, I should say he was very well known. He was not an easy guy to get along with. He was very fiery and contentious, but he was also very smart.

[26:33]

You couldn't win arguments with him very easily. His logic was really, really straightforward. He decided to convert to Buddhism, and in 1956, in Nagpur, in front of 400,000 people he received actually this is again what we did in the Bodhisattva ceremony he received the three refuges and he received the five basic precepts and from the highest monk in India at that time and then in a radical mode radical because he was a layperson turned around and he gave the refuges and the precepts to all 400,000 people who were present. And for the next two weeks he and others went around India converting people from untouchability to this new Buddhist identity.

[27:44]

Now quite understandably they didn't know a lot about Buddhism But that was part of the plan, that was the next stage. And then three weeks later, he died. He knew he was dying, he had a very serious heart condition. He built a movement, he converted all these people, he died. And then gradually, there have been teachers coming and building a movement of Buddhists there. I met with one of them for lunch the other day and we were talking about what I should expect there and what to talk about. I've been asked to talk about right speech by one of the key teachers there, and I think that's because, if you think I like to argue, it's nothing compared to these Indian guys.

[28:50]

They're really good at it. And they need to know how to talk to each other when they disagree. So Loka Mitra asked me to teach about that. And my friend Hiradama, who lives in San Francisco but spends a lot of time in India, he said, well, they're landmines. And I said, in terms of what to talk about? And he said, well, I said, what are some of them? He said, well, karma. And I said, oh, well, I understand why that would be a landmine, but I think we have to talk about that. I mean I think it's part of the Buddhist education that is necessary to and part of the disidentification with a Hindu or Brahmanic education to understand that karma in a Buddhist sense means what's quite wonderful about karma in the sense that we learn it is it actually means you can change it means the opposite

[29:56]

of being locked into a position in life. You see it. The story I was telling about getting angry, I regret that. When I see this person, I will probably apologize to him. And the chain, and I do regret it, because I saw I think as you practice it, what's said is that the result of karma tends to come faster and faster. And it came pretty fast for me, you know, it's like just a bad day, not in a material sense, but just in what feeling tone was hanging over my body. And, you know, it's going to be a long time before I do that again. And this is the beginning. of turning karma.

[30:57]

This is what Ajahn Tannisa wrote, a western monk from Thailand says, the previous notion of karma was completely linear. It moved from one life to the other, to another, and it was seen as hereditary. Whereas the Buddhist notion of karma is actually a feedback loop, that you get to see, if you can see internally, with oneself and with what happens in one's life, the effects of one's thoughts, words and actions, then one has an ability to turn that karma. One has the ability to turn towards what's wholesome. One has the ability to turn to what's free. We see this in our interactions with people. We see this even in zazen which is really a non-karmic activity.

[32:04]

I suppose there's some karma involved in the volitional action of actually sitting down. But we see where our mind gets caught and where ideas and opinions form in zazen. And because it happens, if we're actually mindful, we let go of it in that moment and so it has no lasting effect but we're performing in a very subtle way sometimes not even quite consciously we're allowing this feedback mechanism we're training ourselves in this feedback mechanism so that we become a very finely tuned instrument and so that we can fulfill this bodhisattva vow to awaken together with all beings When we awaken together with all beings, there are no untouchables, there are no Brahmans, there are just sentient beings living and working together and co-operating, making this world go together instead of working at cross-purposes which it seems like so much of the time.

[33:23]

in our personal lives, in our political lives, it seems like that's what's happening. And when we fail to cooperate, then the feedback that we create is more blocking and more suffering. So I think that, to me, the great teaching of the Buddha in the realm of karma is that one can change and that the difficulties that one experiences whether they're emotional difficulties, physical difficulties all kinds of shortcomings are actually the stuff that we can work with not so that we can have some auspicious future rebirth but so that we can be reborn right now right in this next moment and renew ourselves and re-harmonize ourselves with each other instead of oppressing and exploiting ourselves and others.

[34:40]

I'd like to take a few questions. I'm aware of the time. This is a highly simplified and perhaps somewhat rambling presentation of karma. I look forward to coming back and reporting back on what my experience is there. If you have some comments or questions, the floor is open. So given that we have some choice in our karma and our karmic actions, and given that we're not completely locked in to our karma, do you think there's still a sense in which we inherit karma from our family or our society or our community? Well, first of all, if I was going to go into depth, there's a pronoun that you used that's problematic, which is alak.

[35:46]

Part of the difficulty is that we have such a strong sense of individualism that's within our culture, right? And we personalize things, we tend to personalize things. If I were going further to deconstruct this kind of Brahmanic, fatalistic notion, we'd have to explore, which is experimental, explore, well what does it mean if there's no, if myself is not a fixed thing, then whose karma is it? I think we have to put that aside for the moment. It's a longer discussion, but there are things that you inherit, and again, that's bija karma, bija niyama, you know, they're genetic things that you inherit, but there are also karmic things that one inherits from your parents.

[36:56]

If you were traumatized, if there was addiction, if there was abuse of various kinds, and the flip side, if there was wholesomeness, wholeness, good values communicated, that's transmitted to you. And each of us makes that our own in one way or another. But it's not something that is inherited to my mind. This then gets to the nature-nurture divide, right? So, we'll have to continue on that. Linda. Yeah, thanks, Alan. I wanted to just refine some of the contrast that you made between Hinduism and Buddhism because, though I'm sure you would agree that that oversimplified, it ended up sounding like, well, the Hindus really got it wrong and they thought it was great, and the Buddhists got it right.

[37:59]

Actually, there are a number of theories of karma in both traditions, and then Hindus also understood Like before Buddhism came along, that subtleties of karma and the feedback loop and that you can change. And some streams said, if you're born low and have a bad life, it's your fault. And it's your karma. But others understood much more subtly than that. So there's actually a lot of deep understanding of karma and ability to change karma and what feedback loops are about in Hindu tradition, pre and post And the Buddhists also got a little confused, too, like when they were debating about women, right? Can she be liberated in this lifetime? Or does she have to be reborn as a man, you know? And many of them came down on the wrong side of that. Well, thank you. As I said, this is oversimplification. And really, and I'm oversimplifying what

[39:03]

what we find in the Buddhist tradition. The Buddhist tradition is not all good or clear. If you look at the sutras, irrespective of who may have written the sutras, they're purported to be the words of the Buddha, but here in the Diamond Sutra, for example, it flat out says The happiness and suffering of all beings are due to karma, the sage taught, sage being Buddha. Karma arises from diverse acts which in turn create the diverse classes of beings. And elsewhere we mentioned Diamond Sutra the other last week. It's like everything that happens to you is because of something you thought, said or done. This becomes impossibly complex. Nonetheless, the socialized ramifications of, you know, well, this is really something that I think very deeply.

[40:12]

Whenever religion and government become tangled, watch out. You're going to get the worst of both ends. And that's what happened, I think, in terms of the kind of state systemization of perhaps Brahmanic beliefs. But you can see it in Christianity, you can see it in Judaism, you can see it in Islam. So be careful. One more. Denise. I am so delighted that you're going to India. I'm really touched by what you shared, and I'm happy for all of us that you're going. Thank you. Well, that wasn't a question, so maybe one more question. Or another honorific, I'll take that. Chin. I got into a karma, I made a wish, I wanted this, I envisioned a job that I really wanted. And I got the job, and it manifested, and I got so karmically bound up in the whole situation that I lost the job.

[41:19]

And so then I went back to the Vyajna, Perfectional Wisdom Sutra, and it said, practice wishlessness, don't wish for anything. So I've been realizing every time I wish for something, I get it. So I've been trying to really not push that karma thing, but don't wish for anything. And then maybe I can escape karma. Is that possible? No. What I might say is what my experience in life is literally watch out for what you wish for, because you'll get it, but it's not going to be in the form that you thought. But you also, I think there's a difference between wish and aspiration. What is your aspiration? How do you want to, not so much wishing, wishing has an implication of what you want for yourself.

[42:29]

But what is it that you want for everyone and how your aspiration is, how can I make that happen? How can I align myself with that in such a way that I can help that to happen? And I think that's a legitimate part of practice. Wishlessness, all of these teachings are medicine. That's the antidote for somebody who's so caught in the desire of their wishes. But wishing is not so good. But aspiring, having a way-seeking mind, asking, what is helpful here for me and all sentient beings? I think that's a really important thing to do. That's a good place to end. Thank you.

[43:24]

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