November 20, 2024 • 23 mins
The fruit of our actions – our karma – is said to be unavoidable. Sooner or later, every action comes back to us. But that does not mean that everything that happens to us is predetermined.
Bonus speculation on the fundamental nature of reality!
Words or phrases you might want to look up:
Karma
Jewel Ornament of Liberation
Words of my Perfect Teacher
A Lamp Illuminating the Path to Liberation / Khenpo Gyaltsen
Kepler
Newton
“The Sage, the Lady and the Fish”
The Wheel of Becoming, driven by karma
The book!
#Buddhism #Vajrayana #Tibet #DoubleDorje #Karma
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:11):
Hello listeners, all you wanderers who, like me, are trying to find the path. Welcome to the Double Dorje podcast.
The title has already said the most important point that I hope to make today, which is that the Buddhist theory of karma is not fatalistic.
Not everything is predetermined.
(00:32):
Now there are some fields where we might look at the general principles and only then look at the details, but today I'm going the other way round. First of all, let's look at a few details and then let's think about whether it makes sense to imagine that everything is predetermined.
And before those details, once more, the two usual things. The first of all, please, please, it will be very helpful if you would press the like, follow, or subscribe button. And the second is that because this episode is first being hosted at Podbean, if you're listening somewhere else, you might need to go there to see the transcript, the word list and
(01:11):
the few bits of other stuff.
Right.
I hope you do already know that I'm not trying to become your Buddhist teacher, let alone your guru. At the same time, I think it will help if we take a quick tour through the ideas surrounding karma in Tibetan style Buddhism. And what better place to start than the four revolting thoughts.
(01:38):
As a reminder, these four thoughts begin with the precious human birth, and here we must quickly remember that that doesn't just mean any human birth, precious as that might be. It means one that has all the conditions that are needed for the proper practise of Buddhism on the path to enlightenment.
The second revolting thought is that everything is impermanent. The third is karma, which is what we're talking about today, and the fourth is suffering, from which there is no getting away.
(02:13):
If nothing else, this tells us that an appreciation of the teachings of karma is one of the most fundamental and indeed indispensable foundations of a Buddhist life.
A verse or two revealing or at least mentioning these four revolting thoughts is very commonly found at or near the start of the kind of what we call the preliminary practises that a practitioner might typically recite every morning.
(02:43):
Quite often this mention is very brief, but of course there is only any point in such a quick recitation if the practitioner does know what the teaching is in fact about.
In a traditional society, perhaps in the mountains of Nepal or Tibet, this kind of thing would be learnt at whatever the equivalent of primary school is. People like you and me, on the other hand, may very well have to study it much later in life.
(03:16):
At its most basic, karma means action, and in this context it is usually paired with the word result.
The phrase action and fruit or cause and result turns up again and again and again in the literature.
I'll take some kind of a look at the basic principle a little bit later, but when studying at the simplest level, we would learn about the classification into ten good or bad actions. Three of these relate to the body, four to speech and the final three to mind.
(03:49):
There is an ancient and often-quoted motto used to summarise the whole teaching of Buddhism, and it goes something like this:
Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Purify your own mind. That is the teaching of the Buddha.
In line with this, the ten rules generally have two sides. We should cease to do evil and therefore understand what actions to avoid. We should learn to do good and therefore learn what actions to cultivate.
(04:23):
So taking them one by one, for the body, we should avoid killing and we should show mercy. We should avoid stealing and should give things away to others.
We should avoid harmful sex and should - well, the the good side of that rather depends on the culture that we're living in.
For speech, we should avoid lying and should tell the truth, avoid slander, and speak kindly. We should avoid harsh speech and cultivate gentle speech, and we should avoid idle, pointless chatter and cultivate speech that actually helps.
(05:02):
For the mind, we should avoid covetousness and cultivate generous thoughts. We should avoid thoughts of malice and cultivate helpfulness, and the final pair is made-up by wrong views and correct views. Once again, something that has to be looked in in far more detail to be any use.
Just to avoid one possible source of confusion, you'll see that these are very similar to - and they in fact overlap with - what are known as the ten precepts, but they're not quite the same thing. So if you think there's a bit of a clash, don't worry about it.
(05:35):
They aren't quite the same thing.
Now that really all might sound like the material for some kind of sermon. Eevery one of the ten points needs to be thought about.
Much more explanation may be needed before you see the point of, for example, wrong views versus correct views.
(06:02):
But I hope it does establish a little bit of perspective. And of course, if you're interested, you can look this stuff up easily enough on the Internet or in works such as the Jewel Ornament of Liberation or the Words of my Perfect Teacher, to take just two very well known examples.
(06:23):
There is perhaps a temptation for people like myself, and perhaps you too - who knows? - to get very interested in finer points of Buddhist philosophy, in the subtle teachings of tantric practice, visualisation and yoga, in the Buddhist arts, and so on.
Now, that's great in my opinion, but it means so much more if it is grounded in the little nitty-gritty details of daily life as a Buddhist.
(06:53):
Just what are the basic ethical rules? Which way should I turn my prayer wheel?
How do I put offerings on the shrine? How do we prostrate? Is it necessary to make smoke offerings or water offerings? How do I offer a mandala with just a few grains of rice? Am I supposed to burn incense? How am I supposed to behave in a temple or in front of an image of the Buddha?
(07:17):
I mention these things because I actually want to recommend a book. Its title is A Lamp Illuminating the Path to Liberation, written by a Khenpo Gyaltsen.
You can find it as a free download from several places on the net, as a PDF file. This is not just legal, but it is perfectly fair and in line with the intention. The book was never written to make a profit.
(07:43):
The target audience may originally have been people living in remote valleys in Nepal, but although our standards of physical comfort are far, far higher, we have a similar problem in that many of us live remote from communities of practising Buddhists, where we might learn these things by example,
just absorbing them, like a sponge.
(08:06):
It's a nuts and bolts book, simple and easy to understand, and I would encourage anyone in a modern society who wants to start taking their Buddhism seriously to get hold of a copy, read it and see what you can learn from it.
(08:29):
It is relatively easy to say that every action produces a corresponding result sooner or later, perhaps in another life.
But why should that be so? After all, if you were to step out onto the streets of Birmingham or Warsaw or New York and persuade passing strangers to give you their opinion on this, I have a strong suspicion that a great number of them would say that it's just nonsense.
(08:54):
I must warn you that the explanation that I have, and that I'm going to try and explain, is by no means a universally accepted Buddhist view. It's personal, though I don't think I'm the only or first person to have this kind of idea. But it's something you can take or leave.
I can see no way that the doctrine of karma can be harmonised with the commonly held views that we call physicalist.
(09:23):
I think materialism used to be a word for this kind of philosophy,
but the way we use the word materialism now has rather moved over to its ethical and moral senses, where physicalist simply remains a title for those views that propose that physical things have a purely physical explanation,
and that our inner life is an essentially illusory byproduct of massively complex electrical and chemical processes occurring in our nervous systems.
(09:57):
Those processes, and they obviously do occur, are held in this view to proceed entirely in accordance with the laws of physics. There's a lot to be said for that view, of course.
But there is a catch.
I like to compare this with the historical development of our understanding of astronomy.
(10:20):
At first sight, it seems obvious that the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets revolve around the solid earth on which we stand.
Observations and measurements led to an understanding of the cycles in which these heavenly bodies move.
But as the accuracy and sophistication of those observations grew, it became clear that just constructing circles or ellipses around the Earth to describe the paths of these objects was not good enough.
(10:51):
Finer and finer additional and more complicated cycles, known as epicycles, had to be added to the movement of these objects to explain the observations, and the picture was getting more and more complicated without still managing to quite do its job.
Eventually, and of course, famously, the whole picture had to be stood on its head.
(11:13):
Most of these things, the moon aside, did not go round the earth. The moon? Yes, but the planets and the earth itself, as a planet, moved around the sun.
Of course, we know this now.
Moving on from that, Kepler's observations and mathematics, which gave us the rules of planetary motion, and Newton's laws of motion and gravity, came together with tremendous elegance to provide an explanation of what was going on up in the sky and not just an explanation, but an ability to predict
(11:45):
future movements of these bodies with great accuracy.
But there was an anomaly, a little piece of grit in these beautiful astronomical shoes.
Please don't take this personally, but I'm going to assume that not every listener is familiar with the word precession. Not procession - precession.
(12:06):
All the same it’s very likely that you played with a spinning top when you were a child, so you'll know that as the top spins, if it has a slight tilt, the direction of that tilt will itself rotate, much more slowly than the spin of the top itself, but rotate it certainly does. This is precession.
And it's something that is perfectly well understood.
(12:31):
It's true that it's complicated. When I was at school, I was in fact extremely good, if I may say so, at both maths and physics, but even then I never got to the stage of understanding gyroscopes or this kind of precession.
Nevertheless, there's no doubt that the equations that describe it are properly understood. There's no controversy about them, and they are perfectly accurate.
(12:55):
The planets also spin. That's what gives us night and day, and the illusion that the sun and moon rotate around the earth.
And like a spinning top, the spinning planets also are subject to this phenomenon of precession.
As very large amounts of time go by, the axis of the earth, which we think of usually as pointing approximately to the North Star, moves around the sky against the background of stars.
(13:25):
Now again, with the maths being beyond me and probably beyond most of us, this is nevertheless all understood, and the planets follow these laws with great accuracy.
Except for that little piece of grit in the astronomical boot.
The rotation of the planet Mercury precesses.
(13:46):
But it turns out that it doesn't do so at the rate that the laws of mechanics said that it should.
Something wasn't quite right.
And what was the fix? Turning everything on to its head again. Thank you, Einstein!
We thought we were living in space that was the same whoever we were.
(14:09):
Somebody standing on the platform of the train station at Nutwood might measure the length of the platform, if they were bored enough or nerdy enough.
We would have thought that someone on the express train that now thunders through the station, who had equipment that could operate quickly enough and was sophisticated enough to do the job, would get the same result for their measurement of the length of the platform. But this is not so.
(14:36):
In fact, the speed of an express train is very low compared to the crucial speed that's involved in this, which is the speed of light, and the equipment that both of these observers would need would have to be capable of extraordinary accuracy to detect any difference between the two measurements.
But we now know, and I stress, that we know beyond any doubt whatsoever,
(14:59):
that it is not the length of the platform that the two observers would see as the same, nor is it the time that it takes the train to pass through the station. Both of these things are liable to vary,
and the thing that would be constant would be the speed of light.
(15:20):
When the person on the platform shines a torch after the train, the light leaves the torch at this speed, to which we give the letter “c” as a symbol. It's a very big number, by the way. It's about 300 million metres a second. It's the number that occurs in the famous e=mc^2.
(15:41):
So that light passes the train at the same speed, c. That speed is not reduced because the train is chasing after it.
If we can stretch our imaginations to imagine a car that could chase and pass the express train, someone on the train might see it only just creeping past. But light is different. The speed with which light passes the train is the same speed with which it leaves the torch on the platform.
(16:09):
This can only be possible because, for example, the two observers do not find the Nutwood platform to have the same length. Space and time stretch or are squeezed in ways that are really rather difficult to visualise.
Now, I'm sorry this has been a long way round, but the point I'm trying to make is that it can be one small, irritating bit of grit that doesn't fit the picture that on occasion tells us that the whole way of thinking may have to be turned on its head.
(16:42):
Something that we thought was a minor detail that we'd soon be able to explain, actually causes our whole system of thought to collapse.
The bit of grit that I'm referring to here is nothing more complicated than the fact that we are aware. I’m talking of what has, since the mid 90s, been given the name of the hard problem of consciousness.
(17:16):
I am suggesting that awareness is not a mysterious and perhaps not very important kind of glow that somehow appears on the surface of a system as phenomenally complex as the human brain.
I'm instead suggesting that the only too solid and often only too painful physical world emerges from the mind, and that the mind emerges from a pure awareness, a potential for consciousness.
(17:45):
With that as a possible background, it makes it much easier to say that every action we take leaves a trace or plants a seed in the mind, and that is why and how it will eventually produce its reaction.
We don't need to add any extra forces, karmic laws or whatever on top of the world that we see in front of us.
(18:09):
The mind is itself the ground where those seeds fall and from which they will spread.
And now, what about whether the inevitability of karma means that everything that happens is fated to happen?
There are two things that give the lie to that idea.
Firstly, and this is of course only relevant to committed Buddhists,
(18:34):
it is simply not scriptural. Take, for example theories of sickness.
The details vary a little from one location in scripture to another, but you will find it said that there are six possible causes of illness.
These include imbalances of the humours.
(18:56):
I'm not suggesting that there is any deep medical understanding here that our modern medicine doesn't have, and can't do far better than. We might think of imbalances in the humours as perhaps something like a hormone imbalance, overactive or underactive thyroid, for example.
Bad nutrition is another possible cause of illness. This hardly needs explanation.
(19:20):
Attacks by demonic forces are a third possible factor, and you can make of that what you will.
But amongst the six we find the ripening of past karma as one possible cause.
And the interesting point here is that it means that while karma is a possible cause, it is by no means enough to explain everything that happens. We can also make a large hole in this fatalistic interpretation of karma with a little logic. I'm going to take another detour again and invite you into a thought experiment.
(19:58):
You and I are sat somewhere having a chat.
Perhaps we're in the Double Dorje restaurant. We have been getting along fine, but suddenly I jump up and punch you in the face, giving you a bloody nose and
a loose tooth.
Now, on the fate theory, this must be your fault.
You must have caused some similar injury in the past to deserve this.
(20:21):
That means, of course, this is not my fault. I was merely compelled by your bad karma to do this, possibly criminal, thing. I would have had no option for making the morally correct decision not to bash you in the face.
Perhaps I didn't even earn any bad karma for doing this.
And by the same token, every poverty stricken, starving, injured or sick, sentient being would deserve no sympathy at all. It's just their karma.
(20:51):
I could think of more examples, but I think the point is plain that karma is not fate.
Now these thoughts do matter. Some really objectionable attitudes can develop if we let ourselves slip into this lazy understanding. That person, the one who is poor or weak, or ugly, or ill, or has the wrong ancestry, must, if we don't bother to think about it, deserve everything they get.
(21:17):
Because of karma.
The tradition, however, explains that to unravel the complexity of karma, the beginningless threads that bring us to where we are today is hopelessly difficult.
It is said that only a fully enlightened Buddha can see far enough back into the mists of time to understand why a specific event happens. People who appeared to be our friends may recently have been deadly enemies.
(21:46):
Now to stop this episode getting too long, I won't recount the story here, but if you do an Internet search for the Sage, the Lady and the Fish, you will easily find one of the many places where this popular story is told to illustrate exactly this point.
It's not as simple as saying that if when you do your prostrations, you go down on your knuckles instead of your palms, this action will result in being born as a hoofed animal. That might be a suitable explanation for a child, but it can't really be something that most of us would take seriously.
(22:22):
These rather literal interpretations, I might even dare to say childish interpretations, can however, have some value if we apply them to ourselves without expecting to find too much detail.
There is a saying that if you want to know about your past lives, look at your present circumstances and if you want to know about your future, look at your present actions.
(22:46):
This means that when something good happens to us out of the blue, perhaps we can think that maybe we did something good in the distant past and we should keep doing that - in particular because this karma has already now been spent.
Of course, in the same way, when something bad happens to us, we can use that to encourage ourselves not to repeat the sort of actions that might have given us that bad karma.
(23:13):
So I think that's more than enough theorising and sermonising for this week. Please remember to like subscribe and so on. Take care of yourselves and take care of others. You know it's good for you!
Bye.
Hello listeners, all you wanderers who, like me, are trying to find the path. Welcome to the Double Dorje podcast.
The title has already said the most important point that I hope to make today, which is that the Buddhist theory of karma is not fatalistic.
Not everything is predetermined.
(00:32):
Now there are some fields where we might look at the general principles and only then look at the details, but today I'm going the other way round. First of all, let's look at a few details and then let's think about whether it makes sense to imagine that everything is predetermined.
And before those details, once more, the two usual things. The first of all, please, please, it will be very helpful if you would press the like, follow, or subscribe button. And the second is that because this episode is first being hosted at Podbean, if you're listening somewhere else, you might need to go there to see the transcript, the word list and
(01:11):
the few bits of other stuff.
Right.
I hope you do already know that I'm not trying to become your Buddhist teacher, let alone your guru. At the same time, I think it will help if we take a quick tour through the ideas surrounding karma in Tibetan style Buddhism. And what better place to start than the four revolting thoughts.
(01:38):
As a reminder, these four thoughts begin with the precious human birth, and here we must quickly remember that that doesn't just mean any human birth, precious as that might be. It means one that has all the conditions that are needed for the proper practise of Buddhism on the path to enlightenment.
The second revolting thought is that everything is impermanent. The third is karma, which is what we're talking about today, and the fourth is suffering, from which there is no getting away.
(02:13):
If nothing else, this tells us that an appreciation of the teachings of karma is one of the most fundamental and indeed indispensable foundations of a Buddhist life.
A verse or two revealing or at least mentioning these four revolting thoughts is very commonly found at or near the start of the kind of what we call the preliminary practises that a practitioner might typically recite every morning.
(02:43):
Quite often this mention is very brief, but of course there is only any point in such a quick recitation if the practitioner does know what the teaching is in fact about.
In a traditional society, perhaps in the mountains of Nepal or Tibet, this kind of thing would be learnt at whatever the equivalent of primary school is. People like you and me, on the other hand, may very well have to study it much later in life.
(03:16):
At its most basic, karma means action, and in this context it is usually paired with the word result.
The phrase action and fruit or cause and result turns up again and again and again in the literature.
I'll take some kind of a look at the basic principle a little bit later, but when studying at the simplest level, we would learn about the classification into ten good or bad actions. Three of these relate to the body, four to speech and the final three to mind.
(03:49):
There is an ancient and often-quoted motto used to summarise the whole teaching of Buddhism, and it goes something like this:
Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Purify your own mind. That is the teaching of the Buddha.
In line with this, the ten rules generally have two sides. We should cease to do evil and therefore understand what actions to avoid. We should learn to do good and therefore learn what actions to cultivate.
(04:23):
So taking them one by one, for the body, we should avoid killing and we should show mercy. We should avoid stealing and should give things away to others.
We should avoid harmful sex and should - well, the the good side of that rather depends on the culture that we're living in.
For speech, we should avoid lying and should tell the truth, avoid slander, and speak kindly. We should avoid harsh speech and cultivate gentle speech, and we should avoid idle, pointless chatter and cultivate speech that actually helps.
(05:02):
For the mind, we should avoid covetousness and cultivate generous thoughts. We should avoid thoughts of malice and cultivate helpfulness, and the final pair is made-up by wrong views and correct views. Once again, something that has to be looked in in far more detail to be any use.
Just to avoid one possible source of confusion, you'll see that these are very similar to - and they in fact overlap with - what are known as the ten precepts, but they're not quite the same thing. So if you think there's a bit of a clash, don't worry about it.
(05:35):
They aren't quite the same thing.
Now that really all might sound like the material for some kind of sermon. Eevery one of the ten points needs to be thought about.
Much more explanation may be needed before you see the point of, for example, wrong views versus correct views.
(06:02):
But I hope it does establish a little bit of perspective. And of course, if you're interested, you can look this stuff up easily enough on the Internet or in works such as the Jewel Ornament of Liberation or the Words of my Perfect Teacher, to take just two very well known examples.
(06:23):
There is perhaps a temptation for people like myself, and perhaps you too - who knows? - to get very interested in finer points of Buddhist philosophy, in the subtle teachings of tantric practice, visualisation and yoga, in the Buddhist arts, and so on.
Now, that's great in my opinion, but it means so much more if it is grounded in the little nitty-gritty details of daily life as a Buddhist.
(06:53):
Just what are the basic ethical rules? Which way should I turn my prayer wheel?
How do I put offerings on the shrine? How do we prostrate? Is it necessary to make smoke offerings or water offerings? How do I offer a mandala with just a few grains of rice? Am I supposed to burn incense? How am I supposed to behave in a temple or in front of an image of the Buddha?
(07:17):
I mention these things because I actually want to recommend a book. Its title is A Lamp Illuminating the Path to Liberation, written by a Khenpo Gyaltsen.
You can find it as a free download from several places on the net, as a PDF file. This is not just legal, but it is perfectly fair and in line with the intention. The book was never written to make a profit.
(07:43):
The target audience may originally have been people living in remote valleys in Nepal, but although our standards of physical comfort are far, far higher, we have a similar problem in that many of us live remote from communities of practising Buddhists, where we might learn these things by example,
just absorbing them, like a sponge.
(08:06):
It's a nuts and bolts book, simple and easy to understand, and I would encourage anyone in a modern society who wants to start taking their Buddhism seriously to get hold of a copy, read it and see what you can learn from it.
(08:29):
It is relatively easy to say that every action produces a corresponding result sooner or later, perhaps in another life.
But why should that be so? After all, if you were to step out onto the streets of Birmingham or Warsaw or New York and persuade passing strangers to give you their opinion on this, I have a strong suspicion that a great number of them would say that it's just nonsense.
(08:54):
I must warn you that the explanation that I have, and that I'm going to try and explain, is by no means a universally accepted Buddhist view. It's personal, though I don't think I'm the only or first person to have this kind of idea. But it's something you can take or leave.
I can see no way that the doctrine of karma can be harmonised with the commonly held views that we call physicalist.
(09:23):
I think materialism used to be a word for this kind of philosophy,
but the way we use the word materialism now has rather moved over to its ethical and moral senses, where physicalist simply remains a title for those views that propose that physical things have a purely physical explanation,
and that our inner life is an essentially illusory byproduct of massively complex electrical and chemical processes occurring in our nervous systems.
(09:57):
Those processes, and they obviously do occur, are held in this view to proceed entirely in accordance with the laws of physics. There's a lot to be said for that view, of course.
But there is a catch.
I like to compare this with the historical development of our understanding of astronomy.
(10:20):
At first sight, it seems obvious that the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets revolve around the solid earth on which we stand.
Observations and measurements led to an understanding of the cycles in which these heavenly bodies move.
But as the accuracy and sophistication of those observations grew, it became clear that just constructing circles or ellipses around the Earth to describe the paths of these objects was not good enough.
(10:51):
Finer and finer additional and more complicated cycles, known as epicycles, had to be added to the movement of these objects to explain the observations, and the picture was getting more and more complicated without still managing to quite do its job.
Eventually, and of course, famously, the whole picture had to be stood on its head.
(11:13):
Most of these things, the moon aside, did not go round the earth. The moon? Yes, but the planets and the earth itself, as a planet, moved around the sun.
Of course, we know this now.
Moving on from that, Kepler's observations and mathematics, which gave us the rules of planetary motion, and Newton's laws of motion and gravity, came together with tremendous elegance to provide an explanation of what was going on up in the sky and not just an explanation, but an ability to predict
(11:45):
future movements of these bodies with great accuracy.
But there was an anomaly, a little piece of grit in these beautiful astronomical shoes.
Please don't take this personally, but I'm going to assume that not every listener is familiar with the word precession. Not procession - precession.
(12:06):
All the same it’s very likely that you played with a spinning top when you were a child, so you'll know that as the top spins, if it has a slight tilt, the direction of that tilt will itself rotate, much more slowly than the spin of the top itself, but rotate it certainly does. This is precession.
And it's something that is perfectly well understood.
(12:31):
It's true that it's complicated. When I was at school, I was in fact extremely good, if I may say so, at both maths and physics, but even then I never got to the stage of understanding gyroscopes or this kind of precession.
Nevertheless, there's no doubt that the equations that describe it are properly understood. There's no controversy about them, and they are perfectly accurate.
(12:55):
The planets also spin. That's what gives us night and day, and the illusion that the sun and moon rotate around the earth.
And like a spinning top, the spinning planets also are subject to this phenomenon of precession.
As very large amounts of time go by, the axis of the earth, which we think of usually as pointing approximately to the North Star, moves around the sky against the background of stars.
(13:25):
Now again, with the maths being beyond me and probably beyond most of us, this is nevertheless all understood, and the planets follow these laws with great accuracy.
Except for that little piece of grit in the astronomical boot.
The rotation of the planet Mercury precesses.
(13:46):
But it turns out that it doesn't do so at the rate that the laws of mechanics said that it should.
Something wasn't quite right.
And what was the fix? Turning everything on to its head again. Thank you, Einstein!
We thought we were living in space that was the same whoever we were.
(14:09):
Somebody standing on the platform of the train station at Nutwood might measure the length of the platform, if they were bored enough or nerdy enough.
We would have thought that someone on the express train that now thunders through the station, who had equipment that could operate quickly enough and was sophisticated enough to do the job, would get the same result for their measurement of the length of the platform. But this is not so.
(14:36):
In fact, the speed of an express train is very low compared to the crucial speed that's involved in this, which is the speed of light, and the equipment that both of these observers would need would have to be capable of extraordinary accuracy to detect any difference between the two measurements.
But we now know, and I stress, that we know beyond any doubt whatsoever,
(14:59):
that it is not the length of the platform that the two observers would see as the same, nor is it the time that it takes the train to pass through the station. Both of these things are liable to vary,
and the thing that would be constant would be the speed of light.
(15:20):
When the person on the platform shines a torch after the train, the light leaves the torch at this speed, to which we give the letter “c” as a symbol. It's a very big number, by the way. It's about 300 million metres a second. It's the number that occurs in the famous e=mc^2.
(15:41):
So that light passes the train at the same speed, c. That speed is not reduced because the train is chasing after it.
If we can stretch our imaginations to imagine a car that could chase and pass the express train, someone on the train might see it only just creeping past. But light is different. The speed with which light passes the train is the same speed with which it leaves the torch on the platform.
(16:09):
This can only be possible because, for example, the two observers do not find the Nutwood platform to have the same length. Space and time stretch or are squeezed in ways that are really rather difficult to visualise.
Now, I'm sorry this has been a long way round, but the point I'm trying to make is that it can be one small, irritating bit of grit that doesn't fit the picture that on occasion tells us that the whole way of thinking may have to be turned on its head.
(16:42):
Something that we thought was a minor detail that we'd soon be able to explain, actually causes our whole system of thought to collapse.
The bit of grit that I'm referring to here is nothing more complicated than the fact that we are aware. I’m talking of what has, since the mid 90s, been given the name of the hard problem of consciousness.
(17:16):
I am suggesting that awareness is not a mysterious and perhaps not very important kind of glow that somehow appears on the surface of a system as phenomenally complex as the human brain.
I'm instead suggesting that the only too solid and often only too painful physical world emerges from the mind, and that the mind emerges from a pure awareness, a potential for consciousness.
(17:45):
With that as a possible background, it makes it much easier to say that every action we take leaves a trace or plants a seed in the mind, and that is why and how it will eventually produce its reaction.
We don't need to add any extra forces, karmic laws or whatever on top of the world that we see in front of us.
(18:09):
The mind is itself the ground where those seeds fall and from which they will spread.
And now, what about whether the inevitability of karma means that everything that happens is fated to happen?
There are two things that give the lie to that idea.
Firstly, and this is of course only relevant to committed Buddhists,
(18:34):
it is simply not scriptural. Take, for example theories of sickness.
The details vary a little from one location in scripture to another, but you will find it said that there are six possible causes of illness.
These include imbalances of the humours.
(18:56):
I'm not suggesting that there is any deep medical understanding here that our modern medicine doesn't have, and can't do far better than. We might think of imbalances in the humours as perhaps something like a hormone imbalance, overactive or underactive thyroid, for example.
Bad nutrition is another possible cause of illness. This hardly needs explanation.
(19:20):
Attacks by demonic forces are a third possible factor, and you can make of that what you will.
But amongst the six we find the ripening of past karma as one possible cause.
And the interesting point here is that it means that while karma is a possible cause, it is by no means enough to explain everything that happens. We can also make a large hole in this fatalistic interpretation of karma with a little logic. I'm going to take another detour again and invite you into a thought experiment.
(19:58):
You and I are sat somewhere having a chat.
Perhaps we're in the Double Dorje restaurant. We have been getting along fine, but suddenly I jump up and punch you in the face, giving you a bloody nose and
a loose tooth.
Now, on the fate theory, this must be your fault.
You must have caused some similar injury in the past to deserve this.
(20:21):
That means, of course, this is not my fault. I was merely compelled by your bad karma to do this, possibly criminal, thing. I would have had no option for making the morally correct decision not to bash you in the face.
Perhaps I didn't even earn any bad karma for doing this.
And by the same token, every poverty stricken, starving, injured or sick, sentient being would deserve no sympathy at all. It's just their karma.
(20:51):
I could think of more examples, but I think the point is plain that karma is not fate.
Now these thoughts do matter. Some really objectionable attitudes can develop if we let ourselves slip into this lazy understanding. That person, the one who is poor or weak, or ugly, or ill, or has the wrong ancestry, must, if we don't bother to think about it, deserve everything they get.
(21:17):
Because of karma.
The tradition, however, explains that to unravel the complexity of karma, the beginningless threads that bring us to where we are today is hopelessly difficult.
It is said that only a fully enlightened Buddha can see far enough back into the mists of time to understand why a specific event happens. People who appeared to be our friends may recently have been deadly enemies.
(21:46):
Now to stop this episode getting too long, I won't recount the story here, but if you do an Internet search for the Sage, the Lady and the Fish, you will easily find one of the many places where this popular story is told to illustrate exactly this point.
It's not as simple as saying that if when you do your prostrations, you go down on your knuckles instead of your palms, this action will result in being born as a hoofed animal. That might be a suitable explanation for a child, but it can't really be something that most of us would take seriously.
(22:22):
These rather literal interpretations, I might even dare to say childish interpretations, can however, have some value if we apply them to ourselves without expecting to find too much detail.
There is a saying that if you want to know about your past lives, look at your present circumstances and if you want to know about your future, look at your present actions.
(22:46):
This means that when something good happens to us out of the blue, perhaps we can think that maybe we did something good in the distant past and we should keep doing that - in particular because this karma has already now been spent.
Of course, in the same way, when something bad happens to us, we can use that to encourage ourselves not to repeat the sort of actions that might have given us that bad karma.
(23:13):
So I think that's more than enough theorising and sermonising for this week. Please remember to like subscribe and so on. Take care of yourselves and take care of others. You know it's good for you!
Bye.
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