Truth and Consequences

A: "Karma" is an ancient Sanskrit word that means "causation, cause and effect, conditioning, or action and reaction." In Tibetan, the word for karma is leh, which literally means action. In ancient Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts, the word for karma is kamma, which means "deeds." I define karma as reaction, or conditioning. The idea is that there are no accidents, that everything happens for a reason, even if that reason is not immediately perceptible. All major spiritual traditions rest on the understanding that the universe has a moral dimension and some sense of virtue and evil. The law of karma teaches us that we create virtue or evil, and that we can and do direct our own lives and outcomes--consciously, unconsciously, or, as is usually the case, semiconsciously.

Karma, in other words, is not mere luck. It is a mistake to imagine that one's karma is somehow fated, scripted, or predestined; that we have a fixed future, or that we should feel helpless in the face of karma, somehow imprisoned or victimized by it. "Buddha's teaching is that you are your own master," the Dalai Lama has said. "Everything depends on yourself. This means that pleasure and pain arise from virtuous and nonvirtuous actions which come not from outside but from within yourself."

What Buddhists call the universal law of karmic causation reveals that the steering wheel of karma--or character or destiny--is in our own hands. And although we cannot control the karmic winds blowing from the past--"winds" such as psychological and biological conditioning--we can learn how to better adjust our sails and direct our course through life rather than being blown before the winds of past karma like a dead leaf in the wind. According to the Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, " Karma provides the situation, not the response to the situation."

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