Sankhāra is one of the more versatile and challenging words found in Buddhist teachings. It is based on a root meaning “to do” or “to make” (√kr), and is therefore related to the word karma. Karma has both an active sense, referring to the actions we perform in the moment, and a more passive sense, pointing to the past and future consequences of those actions.

The word sankhāra refines this further by being used in three ways: 1) the intentions or qualities of mind that shape an action; 2) the activities of body, speech, and mind that execute the actions; and 3) the karmic residue that results from the actions, which then serves as an underlying field from which new intentions and actions emerge. For example, the emotion of anger gives rise to an angry word or deed or thought, which then makes one more inclined to anger in the future. Because of this inclination, a person who has practiced being angry for a long time has shaped their personality such that we might say they are disposed to anger.

Of course this all works for positive mental and emotional states as well. When a person feels compassion, acts it out by deed or word or thought, and thereby generates underlying habitual tendencies toward compassion, these render them disposed to compassion. Another way to say this is that states of mind induce behaviors that result in corresponding personality traits.

The concept of sankhāra thus lies at the heart of a process of fabrication by which we shape ourselves through our ongoing responses to the world. In a psychological model lacking a fixed self, the self is formed and re-formed every moment by the nature of our intentions, actions, and ensuing dispositions. We are continually “forming formations,” as one text puts it (sankhāram abhisankharoti—using the word as both a noun and a verb), thereby constantly shaping and reshaping both ourselves and our world by the quality of our responses.

Sankhāra is also the name of one of the five aggregates, the five functions of mind and body that regularly interact with one another to shape our experience. While material form, feeling tone, perceptual interpretation, and consciousness help us understand what is going on each moment, the aggregate of formations (sankhāra) guides what we do about it.

The challenge is to respond skillfully rather than unskillfully, and sankhāra is a tool that can be wielded with delusion or with wisdom.  

The post What’s in a Word: Sankhāra appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

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Another driver cuts you off, and you feel a surge of rage. A coworker gets the promotion you think you deserve, and waves of jealousy wash over you. The pastry display in the grocery store beckons, and you sense your willpower dissolving. Anger. Impatience. Shock. Desire. Frustration. You spend your days bombarded by emotions.

These emotions are often negative—and if you act on them, they can derail you. You know: That email you shouldn’t have sent. The snappy retort you shouldn’t have verbalized. The black funk that permeates every experience and keeps you from feeling joy. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can learn to recognize harmful emotions in the moment—and let them go.

Choosing the karma you create

Past karma shapes your experience of the world. It exists; there is not much you can do about it. Yet you are also constantly creating new karma, and that gives you a golden opportunity. With your reaction to each experience, you create the karma that will color your future. It is up to you whether this new karma is positive or negative. You simply have to pay attention at the right moment. Think of how karma operates as if it were a key ring. It seems solid; you can move your key seamlessly around the circle. Yet there is actually a start and an end to the key ring—and a gap. If you know the gap is there, and you have the skill, you can extricate your key from the ring. Similarly, earlier karma creates your experience of events. Your reaction, based on your experience, triggers new karma and a new cycle of creation and experience. You can allow that cycle to continue in an endless sequence. Or you can find the gap, gain the skill, and extricate yourself from the cycle, simultaneously building your compassion and enhancing your sense of inner ease.

The Buddhist tradition is rife with teachings: on compassion, on why we should avoid hatred and jealousy, and on the power of a positive outlook. These teachings are extraordinarily valuable. They clarify and deepen our understanding—and they inspire us. But teachings and their explanations require logic to parse. In the heat of an emotional exchange, you may not have the luxury of logic, because logic requires time and an unbiased mind. Pressure creates a crisis. You don’t have time to think, only to react. So you need a well-honed, quickly deployed skill, something that is short, easy to use, and effective. This is the Third Moment Method, a practical tool that in many ways embodies the core of Buddhist practice.

Understanding the three moments

Life is composed of a series of experiences, and each of these experiences can be broken into three moments.

The First Moment
SENSING
In the first moment, your sensory organs—your eyes, ears, nose—perceive some sort of input. This moment between, for instance, a sound reaching your ear and your ear perceiving it, is instantaneous. It is also effortless, because it is hardwired into your system. In this moment, if someone says “lemon,” you have heard the sound, but you haven’t yet recognized what that sound means.

The Second Moment
ARISING
In the second moment, you recognize the sound—or other sensation—and you have an instant, subconscious reaction, classifying it as good, bad, or neutral. This, too, is automatic, based on prior experience: memories and understanding stemming from your ingrained cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, and linguistic perceptions. It happens so quickly that you may even think it is part of the first moment. You have a physical manifestation of your thought as your body responds to positive, negative, or neutral input—although a “neutral” reaction usually leans slightly toward positive or negative.

Maybe someone is describing a juicy lemon they’ve just sliced. You connect the sound “lemon” to an idea stored in your memory. It evokes a shape, a color, a scent, a taste. Your memory invites an emotional reaction. You love lemons and your mouth salivates; you find lemons sour and you cringe.

The Third Moment
REACTING
In the third moment, you have the choice of accepting your memory’s emotion-tinged invitation or not.

Your reaction may be mental, verbal, or physical. If you have classified something as good, you are drawn to it, even though it may not be beneficial. If you have classified something as bad, you push it away, sometimes with more force than is appropriate or necessary. In either case, you may do a lot of damage that you will later need to try to undo.

Let’s think of “lemon” in a different context. What if your mechanic says that your brand-new car is a lemon? How would you feel? Furious? Foolish? Frustrated? What might you say to the person who advised you to buy it? The third moment provides you with the space to determine your response.

You have a choice about the kind of life you lead. You can let your environment dictate your experience, in which case, unless you solve all the problems of every person with whom you interact, you will always face some unhappiness. Or you can take control over your own experience of life. To me, this seems like a better path.

Practicing the Third Moment Method

The Third Moment Method helps you take this path. In it, you use the Third Moment not to react but to watch—in a very specific way.

At the very instant an emotion arises, pause. Notice the emotion you are experiencing. The timing is very important. You need to be focused and aware before your emotion connects with a thought and becomes solidified. You want to simply see the emotion for what it is.

By widening the gap between action and reaction, you can gain some distance from your automatic responses and also gain an opportunity to know your emotions.

You may be tempted to trace the source of your emotion; that is logical, but in this instance it is not helpful. Instead of focusing on who did what to whom, simply look into your emotion. Don’t do this as an observer, with duality between yourself and the emotion, as though it were external to you. Instead, watch your actual experience; try to feel it directly. Feel your emotion as if it were an inflated balloon, filling your insides. Don’t pay attention to the balloon itself; pay attention to what’s inside it. What does it feel like? No rationalizing. No reasoning. What is at the very core of the balloon? Just space. This is not relabeling your emotion as space. It is simply awareness that the emotion itself does not exist in the way we believe it does, as something fixed and solid. Over time, as that awareness grows, you will begin to feel ease, and maybe even joy.

By widening the gap between action and reaction, you can gain some distance from your automatic responses and also gain an opportunity to know your emotions. You can stop being ruled by these emotions and instead begin to rule your experience of life.

To really enjoy this freedom, though, you need to practice. If you can practice the Third Moment Method frequently and deeply enough, you can experience the unconditional joy that breeds lovingkindness and compassion.

Of course, in the heat of the moment, it can be difficult to remember a practice that is not yet ingrained. You can try practice drills—mentally creating scenarios that evoke strong emotions, then using the Third Moment Method to diffuse them. This will begin to create a mental muscle memory. However, in your mind you still know the experience isn’t real, so in many ways the effect is not real either. The best practice is real life.

Benefiting from the results

Remember: The Third Moment passes very quickly, and it is easy to miss. You find it in the instant between seeing a nasty email and ringing off a reply, hearing a criticism and retorting, seeing a gooey dessert and reaching for it. This is the time to stop and practice the Third Moment Method.

If you truly experience this once—if you really catch the moment—you will find that the Third Moment Method is not only easy but also something you will want to do often. So try to be conscious of your emotions, and seize every opportunity to practice.

If you do this, you will find that your mind is cooler, clearer, and less biased. You are more connected to the present moment. You are aware that your emotions are not reality. That, in turn, affects how you interpret your experiences. You may also find not only that you interact with the world more easily but also that your relationships are better—starting with your relationship with yourself.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Tricycle magazine. 

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Kyogen Carlson often spoke of the arising of Way-Seeking Mind, and he saw this reflected in the simple calendar of practice in ancient Buddhist India: monks wandering alone during the dry seasons, then gathering together for periods of intensive practice in the rainy seasons. In China, this became more structured: monks traveled alone or visited monasteries and teachers during open seasons of practice, then returned to their own monasteries for cloistered periods of intensive practice. These periods became known in Japan as ango: rigorous seasons of formal practice undertaken by everyone in the monastery. An ango traditionally lasts 90 days, and in Zen monasteries today many vows and terms of office are defined by 90-day periods.

In the Pacific Northwest, we have four distinct seasons. As autumn slowly takes hold—a subtle shift in September, a distinct change in October—our temple sees a marked increase in inquiries. We’ve learned to be ready for newcomers all year round, but especially in the fall. To Kyogen, it was natural that this is when “people begin things, they start things, people get serious, the mind starts to turn inward, they start practice.” It was obvious to him that autumn would be the beginning of our liturgical year.

Our fall ango term now includes several retreats, including the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. (Kyogen knew this celebration as Segaki and refers to it by this name; we recently changed the name to reflect current usage.) This season is also when we hold memorials for Kyogen himself.

—Sallie Tisdale

The word segaki means “feeding the hungry ghosts,” and the rituals and practices done for this festival contain a great deal of teaching about training in Buddhism. (Hungry ghosts are called gaki in Japanese and preta in Sanskrit.) Segaki is a time for remembering the dead and resolving our karmic connections with those who have died. It is also a time for resolving our own internal karmic difficulties and for letting go of the obstacles and blockages we carry around with us. During Segaki, we call to all karma—our own and that of others—throughout the universe. Segaki is not about making karma go away. When we talk about “cleansing karma,” we sometimes have this illusion that we’re going to wash it all off and it’s going to go away. But what we really do is cleanse our relationship with it. We come to not being deceived by karma. We drop our old ways of responding and our old traps of habit energy. All these things that happened in the past are still with us in some respects. We acknowledge that; we call to them and find a way to respond to them.

The tradition is continued every year in Buddhist temples by making an offering on a table far away from any statue or picture of the Buddha or bodhisattva. For those who reject religious teaching, kindness is offered without doctrine—the truest form of generosity. During Segaki, we put doughnuts on the altar. The hungry ghosts can’t accept the dharma. They choke on it. A lot of people are that way. You try to give them religion and their throat just constricts. So you give them a doughnut. The profundity of that dharma is amazing: just give something. For an offering to be genuinely one of dharma, it must be given in forms that can be accepted. This principle applies to so many situations we encounter in everyday life. Such an action naturally expresses all-acceptance in a way that touches and deeply affects all concerned.

Segaki is a time of deep, personal spiritual renewal. Here, the main Segaki ceremony features an altar laden with food. The ceremony involves an invitation to all ghosts of every stripe anywhere to come join us—in effect, asking all the unhappy, unresolved karma in the universe to come to the altar to receive the dharma in the form of food. During the chanting and procession we offer incense, and the names of people who have died in the past year are read aloud. After the ceremony, we help the gakis by eating the food on the altar ourselves! Next, a couple of teenagers dress up as hungry ghosts and visit the Dharma School children, grabbing food and walking around with their shoes on. This annual visit always brings joy (and a bit of apprehension) to the little ones, who must teach the ill-mannered gakis the way to behave in a temple—and a little of the dharma, if possible. The closing ceremony, Segaki Toro, is done in the evening. It is an intense, symbolic ritual of cleansing. During the ceremony, a fire is lit in the fireplace. Slips of paper with the names of people who have died in the past year, along with the year’s transfer-of-merit cards, are fed to the fire. Anyone who wishes to can write down some karma or problem that they wish to let go of or cleanse, and one by one they put the slips of paper on the fire themselves.

The festival is said to have begun when Moggallana, a disciple of the Buddha, was plagued by dreams of his recently departed mother suffering in a world in which she could neither eat nor drink. Food would turn to fire and water would turn to blood or pus whenever it touched her mouth. Moggallana went to the Buddha and told him of his dreams, which tormented him every night. The Buddha explained that Moggallana was seeing the suffering of his mother in the world of the gakis. Gakis are usually depicted as having long skinny necks, with throats much too small for swallowing; and the bloated, bulging stomachs common with severe malnutrition. This imagery is a fantastic description of a spiritual state that can be seen every day, right here in the world of living women and men. It is a condition that everyone suffers from, to one degree or another, at some point in life. On the most spiritual level, it is the state of someone who desperately wants to know the truth but who cannot accept the teaching. He knows he is suffering and that religious practice can be of help, but he just can-not stop resisting and holding on to his personal opinions. Wanting the dharma, he goes to drink, but his throat will not open to accept it. Each time he tastes the teaching, it turns to fire in his mouth.

Moggallana’s dreams were due to his deep connection with his mother, and the Buddha’s advice to him was that he should make an offering to her of whatever food she could most easily accept and digest. This was to be done in a ceremony, dedicated in her name, at the time when the monks conducted their regular gathering to confess their transgressions. This part of the story shows profound wisdom and upaya—“skillful means.” Linking the offering for the deceased mother to the time of confession, the Buddha built a bridge for Moggallana to the mind of repentance and forgiveness, helping him let go of his own entanglements.

According to Chinese legend, Moggallana was accomplished in supernatural arts, and he traveled down to hell to try to rescue her personally. He broke the lock on the gate to hell, and because of this all the hungry ghosts in the realm of the gakis got loose and wandered about in the human world. The festival was then done to satisfy the ghosts and to convince them to return to where they needed to be.

After giving aid to his mother, Moggallana made a vow to once again enter hell. He vowed to do his own practice there for the sake of those suffering in that realm. “If I do not do so, who else will?” he said. He became a bodhisattva, an enlightened being dedicated to helping others, offering dharma to all those suffering in the netherworlds, before enjoying final enlightenment himself. To this day, he is venerated for this act of great compassion.

If you apply this process to yourself, looking at your own past actions as that which must be released, it is easy to see the connection between Segaki and personal karmic cleansing. The self of the past can become a ghost in the present. The concept of past lives is not just fanciful, and it is much more than a metaphor. We don’t need to go back years and into previous existences to do this. Just looking carefully at each day brings up all kinds of past karma and previous lives, because the past is, indeed, held in the present.

Looked at this way, what do we mean by past lives? I often use a simple example of a man having an argument with a coworker late on a Friday afternoon. After a pleasant weekend with friends, our worker returns to work on Monday in a good mood, feeling at peace with the world. Then he sees his adversary, they lock eyes, and in an instant the “self” from Friday is reborn on Monday. The “seed of predisposition” left over from Friday sprouts on Monday. This is the first of the twelve steps of dependent origination leading to rebirth on the wheel of samsara. The rebirth of former “selves” happens all the time, moment by moment, day by day, year by year, and these rebirths become quite obvious when we pay attention to them.

Gakis, hungry ghosts, are not the only ones to be remembered at Segaki. It is also a time to remember all those who have died, to be thankful for their having lived, and to give thanks for the teaching their lives give to us. It is also a time to let go of those who have died, to realize that their practice goes on in whatever form it now takes and that they do not need us pulling them back to this world through our attachments. By letting go of those who are now gone, we can also resolve the painful memories that sometimes linger to become the nuclei for a multitude of other problems. All-acceptance is really the key, for if we completely accept those who have died as they were, we can understand them better and offer them what they need to go on, which is quite often our forgiveness and blessing.

Remember that the good acts of today do not undo the karma of the past. We all have to face up to it at some point without excuses—just accept the consequences. At the same time, our right actions in the present moment also affect things. Know that old karma, such as years of hard living and bad habits, will have its effect. Still, you can turn yourself around and get your act together and live in a clean and healthy way. That has an effect, but the old debts will need to be paid. One thing does not undo the other. I’ve learned that compassion and caring about people is one thing, but releasing them from karmic consequences is quite another. You know that sometimes it’s necessary for people to go through what they have to go through. Be kind to the person and don’t step in the way of their karmic consequences. It’s really important to remember this.

When we think of forgiving, we use the word in a few ways. There’s a kind of forgiving of consequence. You forgive the loan, treat it like an old debt or something, wipe it off the books. There are times when you can do that. There are times when you can’t. If someone does not recognize how they have harmed you, there’s no point in forgiving them, but you can let go of your own bitterness about it. You don’t have to pretend like it never happened. You learn from it. You figure out how to hold your boundaries. You know you can let go of your half and still be smart enough not to allow future harm.

My teacher Roshi Kennett used to say, “No matter how badly people screw up, they’re doing the best they can. No matter what types of mistakes they make, they’re doing the best they can.” I said, “Wait, how can you say that? People know perfectly well that they can do better.” She said, “That’s the point. If they really understood, they would do better.”

♦

The post When Ghosts Come Back to Haunt Us appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In his article “The Best Possible Life,” Seth Zuiho Segall argues that Western Buddhism will become more relevant if it can emulate a modern cultural adaptation of Aristotelian virtue ethics and ancient Greek Stoicism. The goal and aim of Western Buddhism, he argues, should be the cultivation of eudaimonia—or what is known in positive psychology as “human flourishing.”

As a Buddhist modernist, Segall resorts to the typical colonialist denigration of traditional Buddhism as being quaint and outmoded, full of otherworldly notions such as nirvana. Although Segall is quite correct in noting that Buddhist teachings have been modified by existing norms as they have met different cultures, his suggestion so distorts the dharma as to render it not Buddhist at all.

While Segall’s depiction of traditional Buddhism is itself problematic, our real issue with his article comes down to this: the difference between the mundane and the supramundane in understanding the Buddha’s message.

Does Buddhism have the mundane goals of happiness and well-being? Segall’s answer is clearly yes. Eudaimonia is essentially a compromise that makes the best of an otherwise difficult situation; it accepts stoically that suffering can never be escaped totally.

But the Buddhist Middle Way teachings should not be confused with the Aristotelian golden mean or the Stoic ethic of “moderation in all things.” The Middle Way teachings offer a radical third option that is truly supramundane. They are aimed not merely at improving and enhancing our mundane happiness but at so thoroughly understanding the operations of mind and the processes of world construction that suffering can be totally uprooted. This difference is crucial. By knowing dukkha [suffering], we open the door to understanding its causes; rather than making a stoic compromise with it, we can go beyond it.

The buddhadharma from its very beginning is a supramundane teaching that does not have happiness as its primary goal. Along with its result may come happiness or human flourishing. But that is not its primary aim, nor can any reading of the four noble truths support such a position.
–Ron Purser and Richard Dixey, Dharma College, Berkeley, California

Seth Segall responds:

I want to thank Ron Purser and Richard Dixey for their comments and the editor for providing me an opportunity to respond. Let me begin by saying that nowhere in my article do I address the question of which forms of Buddhism are either truer or better. Instead, I consider how modern Westerners might deal with aspects of the tradition they cannot give their whole-hearted assent to, considering their other vital philosophical commitments.

If the tradition asks us to admire and emulate the nonattachment displayed by Vessantara when he gave his children away—an action we are thoroughly repulsed by—how ought we to negotiate this tension? If the Lotus Sutra says that the Buddha spoke before an assembly of gandharvas, nagas, asuras, garudas, and devas, how ought we to handle our modern belief that these are fictional beings? Are we being condescending and disrespectful toward a tradition if we do not take everything it says at face value? Not necessarily.

We all understand things as we can. Do we lose something in doing this? Yes, of course, but we have no other choice. As much as we may wish to, we can never fully understand the ancients the way they understood themselves. I similarly reject Aristotle’s views on women and slaves. I don’t think this is being disrespectful to Aristotle—he’s my favorite Western philosopher—but the only way I can read him is as a person with modern beliefs and attitudes.

“As much as we may wish to, we can never fully understand the ancients the way they understood themselves.”

Regarding Purser and Dixey’s central assertion that the supramundane goal is essential to Buddhism: What can one do if, no matter how much one tries, one simply cannot believe in those aspects, and yet one still finds Buddhist practice to be of inestimable value? Despite a quarter century of practice, I still cannot believe in some final apotheosis in which we permanently transcend the human condition. In fact, my own practice experience points in a different direction—that a nirvanic endpoint is not only implausible but inconsistent with what I believe the best possible life ought to be like. We should aspire to be more fully human, not transhuman. Our time might be better spent doing something less grandiose, working at becoming more mindful, more compassionate, more skillful, and less self-obsessed.

I regard the Buddhist tradition as a means of cultivating one’s heart and mind, developing practical wisdom, and enacting one’s best possible version of oneself for the benefit of all beings. Gradual improvement seems like a very good deal to me, but I will never begrudge others if their experience tells them more is possible. I only ask that their belief in this “more” be grounded in their lived experience.

In his article “Karma is Individual,” the monk and scholar Thanissaro Bhikkhu argues that recent references to collective karma are not grounded in traditional texts. That may be how some Buddhist schools interpret the Buddha’s words, but certainly not all of them.

The Mahayana, which arose about half a millennium after the Buddha’s death, has emphasized since its earliest days that the Buddha’s enlightenment entailed not just the cessation of his own suffering but also the responsibility to teach the path to cessation to others. (That’s why to aspire to full buddhahood—to be a bodhisattva—is tied to the vow to help all beings achieve liberation from suffering.) For these schools, karma, as the Buddha taught it, must be understood as both individual and collective.

The Yogacara school, an early Mahayana school that began in the first centuries of the common era, was very influential in the development of Tibetan and East Asian Buddhist traditions, producing numerous commentaries on this subject. Yogacara authors took special interest in the fact that different classes of beings experience distinct forms of suffering. Drawing on the Buddhist teaching that beings are born into different realms (human, animal, god, hell, and hungry ghost) based on their karma, the Yogacara authors asked not just why an individual was born into a certain realm but how those realms come into being at all. They followed the Buddha in the view that different worlds of experience are the result of different kinds of past actions. And they took seriously one crucial implication of this idea: that because similar kinds of beings share so many aspects of experience, worlds of experience themselves must be collectively constructed. This means that the specific features of a realm are the result of the past karma shared by all the beings born into it. The great 4th-century Yogacara thinker Vasubandhu gives an extended example of this idea in “Thirty Verses,” where he writes about the “shared karmic ripening” that leads to all hungry ghosts experiencing their objective world in the same way.

A further implication of this is that individual beings are, at least in good part, intersubjectively constituted. Yogacara focused on how our shared concepts and language shape our experiences of the world and the world itself.

In presenting these ideas, Yogacara thinkers, like Vasubandhu, were very attentive to hermeneutics and understood themselves to be offering faithful accounts of the Buddha’s own teachings. So when we look to the history of Buddhist thought, we cannot ignore or overlook such major, well-established, and influential schools as the Yogacara.

If the Yogacara school is right, if karma is both individual and collective, then we are obligated to turn our attention toward the other beings in our shared world. But it is not easy to parse which aspects of our own experiences are individual and which are collective, and it is, likewise, challenging to find the right balance between individual and collective responsibilities. This is one reason that, as Buddhist texts often remind us, the bodhisattva path is a difficult one to walk.
–Joy Brennan is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College and a Soto Zen priest at the Mount Vernon Zen Community in Ohio. @joycbrennan

Thanissaro Bhikkhu responds:

The idea of collective karma I was addressing is the one that holds you responsible for actions you didn’t do but were done by other members of your collective, however that collective may be defined. When the Buddha, in the Pali canon, describes karma, he leaves no room for such an idea.

Evil is done by oneself,
by oneself is one defiled.
Evil is left undone by oneself,
by oneself is one cleansed.
Purity & impurity are one’s own doing.
No one purifies another.
No other purifies one.
— Dhammapada 165

Also, the Buddha never claimed that he could save all sentient beings. After his awakening, he didn’t even feel obligated to teach. Only when he saw that teaching others would yield results did he freely choose to do so, as a gift. When asked why not all his listeners attained awakening, he answered with the simile of giving directions to travelers: It was up to the travelers to follow the directions. If they didn’t choose to—that choice was their karma—what could he do? He was simply the one who pointed out the way.

We have every right to judge whether Vasubandhu was right or wrong in inferring such a thing as collective karma from what the Buddha taught. Shortly before his total unbinding, the Buddha said to judge any version of the dhamma, no matter how great the authority of the person advocating it, against the suttas (discourses) and the vinaya (disciplinary rules). Only if it is consistent with those sources should it be accepted as genuine dhamma. Not everything included in Buddhist traditions passes this test.

As I said in my article, the fact that we share some experiences in the same world can be adequately explained without recourse to the idea of collective karma. We simply bring similar individual karma, past and present, with us to each interaction with one another. As I also stated, we don’t need to believe in collective karma to be kind to others.

As Professor Brennan points out, the idea of collective karma makes it harder to follow the path to awakening. So if the idea is unnecessary, is inconsistent with the dhamma, and places needless obstacles along the path, why adopt it?

THE QUESTION

What’s your favorite line from a Buddhist poem?

Within
A light snow
Three Thousand Realms
Within those realms
Light snow falls
(Ryokan [1758–1831], trans. John Stevens)
—Ayya Dhammadipa (Rev. Konin Cardenas)

Without resistance in all four directions,
content with whatever you get,
enduring troubles with no dismay,
wander alone
like a rhinoceros.
(Khaggavisana Sutta, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)
—Davey Daverino

The subtle source is clear and bright; the tributary streams flow through the darkness.
(Shitou Xiqian [700–790], trans. ZCLA)
—Marisa Cespedes

Oh the morning glory,
it has taken the well bucket,
I must ask elsewhere for water.
(Chiyo-ni [1703–1775], trans. Robert Aitken)
—Alicia Kittelson

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.
(Kobayashi Issa [1763–1828], trans. Robert Hass)
—Natasha Moore

For the next issue:

How has your practice changed since COVID-19 began?

Email your brief responses to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or tweet us at @tricyclemag.

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When we hear the word karma, we sometimes feel uneasy. The temptation is to believe it means that every outcome is predetermined. We may feel trapped—by what we’ve done, by whom we’ve been with, or by our present circumstances. It seems impossible that things could be otherwise. But what karma really means for us is the ability to proactively shape our future.

The Karmashataka Sutra, known in English as The Hundred Deeds Sutra, tells the story of one woman’s extraordinary encounter with the Buddha. Her narrative teaches us the importance of aspiration in shifting our personal trajectories, and how responsive relationships can turn our lives around even as past karma lingers. It’s called “The Story of Kachangkala.”

One day the Buddha was visiting a village in Otala, where he and other monks were making their daily alms round. A woman named Kachangkala had gone out for water when she glimpsed the Buddha from a distance. His every movement conveyed that his senses, body, and heart were at peace. Kachangkala also found something about him remarkably familiar—so familiar, in fact, that she mistook him to be her own son.

She hurried to place her pot on the ground and ran toward him with her arms flung open wide, crying out, “My son! My son!”

The monks, alarmed, instinctively closed ranks around the Buddha, blocking her attempt to embrace him. The Buddha shared none of the monks’ repulsion at her desperation and impulsivity. He responded with compassion for Kachangkala and gently corrected them.

“Monks, do not hinder her,” he said. “If you don’t let this woman take the Tathagata in her arms, she will spew warm blood from her mouth and die”—a physical expression of the brokenheartedness she would feel. He was calling her to him.

Reassured by his instruction, the monks relented, and Kachangkala drew the Buddha into her embrace.

This moment must have been mind-blowing—the vinaya, the monastic code, expressly forbade a monk to have physical contact with a woman, yet here the Buddha was in Kachangkala’s arms. The greatness of the Buddha’s compassion and his complete lack of self-interest stilled the torment in her heart. It must have felt like utter serenity to her.

The story does not tell us at what point Kachangkala realized that the man she held was not her son but the Buddha himself. We are told that she held him in her arms for a little while and that when she let go, she sat down calmly before him to listen to a teaching.

The monastic code expressly forbade a monk to have physical contact with a woman, yet here the Buddha was in Kachangkala’s arms.

The Buddha looked deeply into Kachangkala’s heart, and he taught her the dharma in a way particularly suited to her. The truth of what the Buddha spoke shot through her, dissolving her misconceptions about reality. Assuming a traditional posture of humility, she made a formal request to take ordination as a nun. As the story describes it:

Having seen the truth, she rose from her seat, drew down the right shoulder of her upper garment [to show respect], bowed toward the Blessed One with palms together, and implored him, “Blessed One, if permitted I wish to go forth in the dharma and Vinaya so well spoken, complete my novitiate, and achieve full ordination. In the presence of the Blessed One, I too wish to practice the holy life.”

The Buddha accepted her plea and later introduced her to Mahaprajapati Gautami, his aunt, who had raised him after his mother’s death. Mahaprajapati was the head of the nuns’ order, and it was under her instruction that Kachangkala took all the different levels of nuns’ vows.

After her ordination, Kachangkala devoted herself single-mindedly to spiritual practice and eventually became an arhat, a being of tremendous realization. At this level of insight she experienced total freedom and was no longer subject to afflictive emotions:

Her mind regarded gold no differently than filth and saw the palms of her hands as like space itself. She became cool like wet sandalwood. Her insight crushed ignorance like an eggshell. . . . She had no regard for worldly profit, passion, or acclaim.

So great were her accomplishments that the Buddha proclaimed her to be among nuns “foremost of those who interpret the sutras.”

The monks, astounded at this course of events, asked the Buddha what had led Kachangkala to be the only woman to ever rush toward him in such desperation. “Lord,” they said, “tell us why thousands of women have seen the Blessed One, but never has anyone run to him from a distance like that.”

The Buddha explained to them that Kachangkala had been his mother in five hundred previous lifetimes, and the impressions left by this experience had formed a deep tendency for her to see him as her son again in this lifetime.This explanation piqued the monks’ interest, and they asked, “Why is she not your mother now?”

Here as in other stories from the Karmashataka, the Buddha’s answer emphasized the power of intention in shaping one’s trajectory from life to life. “Monks,” he said, “there are two causes and two conditions for her not being my mother now.”

The Buddha explained first that Mayadevi, his late mother, had in the past offered strong aspirational prayers to one day become the Buddha’s mother. This virtuous act finally bore fruit, and it was for this reason that Mayadevi and not Kachangkala had given birth to him.

The second part of his answer revealed a long-standing dynamic between Kachangkala and himself that had been detrimental to both of them across multiple lifetimes. In life after life, the future Buddha was impelled by compassion to go forth from home and engage in extraordinary acts of generosity. Although Kachangkala’s love for him was deep and abiding, her compassion was not yet so expansive. She desired intensely to keep him close to her, and over and over again she kept him from leaving home, hindering his efforts. The future Buddha recognized that a different mother-child relationship was needed for him to achieve what lay in his heart since, as he explained, “bodhisattvas delight in renunciation and love to give.” In that past life he prayed, entirely without ill will, “May she who is my mother not be my mother in the future.”

We may find it tempting to read this as a criticism of Kachangkala’s character, but the story does not vilify her. It does quite the opposite. The Buddha went on to explain that Kachangkala had strong aspirations of her own. In one of her former lives, she had been a nun in the monastic order of the ancient Buddha Kashyapa. There she practiced purely her entire life. Before she died, she expressed three aspirations: to become ordained one day under Buddha Shakyamuni; to achieve the realization of an arhat; and to be commended by the Buddha as the best among nuns in interpreting the sutras. The story of her encounter with the Buddha in Otala was the culmination of all three.

Like Kachangkala, we get caught up in interpersonal dynamics that imperil our personal progress, such as holding on to others too tightly or pushing them away. Any moment in which we reenact past experiences is an opportunity for growth. To free ourselves from these repetitive patterns requires a vision of how we want to evolve. We have to articulate that vision as clearly as Kachangkala did; a vague sense of hoping for spiritual progress will not be enough.

Having sown our aspirations, we need help from others to get unstuck. The deep memory of motherhood sent Kachangkala running, but it was through the Buddha’s compassion that she finally leapt forward. It’s worthwhile to ask ourselves the following questions: Is there someone we can call on who accepts us fully, with all of our strengths and shadows? Do we know who they are? Are they here already, or are these future connections that we need to cultivate? What is certain is that we can find a loving figure who understands our pain, where it comes f rom, and what we need to alleviate it.

Past karma is not necessarily a weight that holds us back. It is also the ground where seeds of realization were planted a long time ago. Looking at our lives in this way, we can harness the past and transform the future. Slowly the dreams inside our hearts will become conscious aspiration, until one day we create the loving dynamic that converts our aspirations into reality.

♦

This is the final installment in a four-part series on the Karmashataka (“Hundred Deeds”) Sutra, a collection of ancient teaching stories about karma that has recently been translated from Tibetan into English. 

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Crawling through a dystopian Seattle street, a battle-scarred young woman pauses when she spots a passing enemy. She equips her bow, aims in his direction, then lowers it. Any sign of disturbance would just draw more guards. But more importantly, she knows that this guard has a name. She understands that he has motivations as complex as hers and moves on, realizing that she had almost succumbed to the mindless habit of dehumanizing the Other. One might say that she—or the player controlling her—is thinking about karma.

A zombie-slaying video game like this year’s blockbuster The Last of Us Part II might not be the most expected source of karmic insight. It could even exemplify the negative side of karma—what American mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn described as an “accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns.” In the popular conception, at least, video games may turn us into hungry ghosts, driven by the habitual impulse for another trophy earned, another quest completed, another enemy vanquished.

It’s remarkable, then, that over the course of The Last of Us Part II ’s roughly twenty-hour campaign, developer Naughty Dog uses exactly this facet of video games in a deeply purposeful way. Introduced as a simple tale of revenge, the game takes an abrupt turn in its middle third, when we are unexpectedly removed from the perspective of the series protagonist, Ellie, and instead dropped into the shoes of a member of the Washington Liberation Front militia group, the same enemy we have spent the past four hours tracking, bludgeoning, and brutally killing. During this unexpected arc, we meet the same cast of enemies seen in earlier hours, but now we come to understand their motivations. We pet their dogs. We share meals with them. We fall in love. We see past our habit of labeling them as the enemy.

Then we are abruptly shepherded back into Ellie’s perspective to continue her revenge against these now humanized enemies.

Many reviewers bemoaned the strange dissonance produced by this stretch of the game. It’s a reasonable criticism. The game offers no real option in its closing act to get around killing these suddenly sympathetic enemies. Look, I get it, you may think. Killing these people is wrong. But you designed this game so that I had to do it! Again and again! So why do this? Why would writer and director Neil Druckmann—who has said the game was partially inspired by his childhood in the West Bank—want to force players to experience the discomfort of knowing an act of violence is wrong yet repeatedly perpetrating it?

I would argue that the game is showing us the habits of our own minds.

The game forces us to ask: How often do we truly exercise agency in our own lives?

By creating dissonance between the violence being performed on-screen and the player’s own feelings, the game illuminates the stubborn nature of karma. We feel frustrated at our own lack of agency, our inability to avoid the game’s violence, and yet we are forced to ask: How often do we truly exercise agency in our own lives regarding such matters? How willing are most of us to simply cede responsibility because it feels easier and to accept instead the ingrained patterns of behavior passed down to us through culture, biology, and history, no matter how harmful they may be?

Seen in this way, we are stuck in the same rut as Ellie. It’s simple to say that violence is wrong or that vengeance only begets more vengeance. It’s far harder to break the chains of cause and effect in our own lives that have conditioned so many cycles of oppression and hate—the same chains that bind Ellie to her inexorable path of vengeance.

The ethical dilemma we face in The Last of Us Part II harkens back to a breathtaking moment in 2015’s deeply philosophical interactive game The Beginner’s Guide. At the midway point of its simulated walk, you enter a cozy home on a wintry tundra. An offscreen narrator begs you to help tidy up the house by clearing the table, straightening the bookcase, and making the bed. More of these genial requests pile up—to clean the couch, mop the floor, scour the dishes, scrub the tub. What’s remarkable about the scene, and what illustrates its karmic dimension, is that it never has to end. The requests loop infinitely, and the game provides no prompts suggesting how to move on. Theoretically, you could stay inside these warm and welcoming confines forever.

With time, however, the realization dawns upon you: This is the state of an unmindful life: an endless litany of tasks, performed solely because the chain of cause and effect has demanded it of you. You as the player have been automatically reacting to these requests, asleep within the pleasant illusion of the digital world.

Here is the rare opening the game has given you: Now you can take responsibility for your actions. You can open your eyes to the profound role old karma has played in your life, stop your mechanical responses, and make a decision to step outside this illusion and into the bracing cold outside. Or you can stay within the endless loop of reactivity that will keep you imprisoned within a warm and deluding dream.The choice is yours.

As we can see, video games are remarkably good at performing this kind of sleight of hand: luring the player into a reactive mind state through the magnetic pull of interactivity and then throwing back the veil of ignorance to reveal exactly how constricting such habits of mind are. Though rare, such moments in gaming can be literally revelatory. They open our eyes toward a singular truth—that we, the players, are alive and that with effort we can transcend the bonds of habitual living into the expansiveness of the present. In this way, games bring us back to ourselves.

Of course, given the infancy of the medium, such moments in gaming are uncommon. Far more prevalent are the experiences offered by popular open world games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3. What such games accomplish is to immerse the player deeply in the experience of being a desperado or vigilante. And yet a nagging sense lingers in the background that we are spending hours of our lives merely responding to our karmic drives, imprisoned by a digitally manifested monkey mind that urges us to collect the next item and conquer the next task. What such games lack is the momentary awakening that allows us to grasp that this moment is everything and that the possibilities from this digital vantage point are infinite.

Nobody should expect the creators of every hack-’n’-slash or shoot-’em-up adventure to leap at the possibility of making us, their fans, reflect on our own karma. But as gaming grows as an art form, a number of independent developers and studios have taken it upon themselves to reflect on the medium’s hyperviolent past and move toward a more nuanced ethic. Games like The Last of Us Part II and The Beginner’s Guide raise the possibility that more developers might use interactivity to help players pause, be still, watch their impulses, and escape the prison of mindlessness.

It may seem like a stretch that a controller could guide someone toward this sort of awakening. But in the current moment, when so many homebound Americans are turning to video games as an escape, perhaps being pointed toward the world before our own noses is exactly what we need.

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Unlike a painting, our minds are not fixed. It is like the image is wiped clean and a new one is created every moment. While the next image will often be very similar to the previous one, it is never exactly the same. It is constantly changing in subtle ways leading to an endless stream of karmic appearances. . . . Think of the places that appeared to you in childhood and the places that appear to you now. Think of the people you have met and the emotions or thoughts you have had. If we compare all these experiences, we can begin to get a sense of how powerful and creative our karma can be.

♦

From The Realm of Shambhala: A Complete Vision for Humanity’s Perfection by Shar Khentrul Jamphel Lodrö (Khentrul Rinpoche) © 2021. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications.

The post A New Mind Each Moment appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One of the Buddha’s major accomplishments was to establish a religion that doesn’t depend on who you are or where you come from. His teachings were for everyone—regardless of tribe, caste, or nationality—who wanted to put an end to suffering. Since his time, those teachings have managed to spread throughout the world, transcending boundaries and divisions, because they treat people as responsible individuals, rather than lumping them into groups. They recommend that we evaluate ourselves by our own current actions, rather than by the actions of other members of the group into which we’re currently reborn.

We may be interconnected, but it’s not through what we are—or through the categories that other people would use to define us. It’s through what we, as individuals, choose to do to one another. In the Buddha’s terms, we’re “karma-related,” related through karma, for good or for ill.

That’s how we find ourselves born into particular groups of people. It’s not the case that first you’re born into a group and then, after joining that group, you assume the karma of its earlier members. The causal pattern actually goes the other way: First, through your own individual intentions, you develop a karmic profile. Then you’re born with people who have similar profiles in their individual backgrounds. 

So, if a particular group—such as a family or a nation—suffers hardships, it’s not because the long departed members of that group created bad karma. It’s because the individuals currently in the group have similar bad karma in their own past. Even then, though, their karma is individual—as shown by the fact that hardships suffered by a group are rarely distributed evenly. Some people suffer greatly; others are barely grazed.

And remember: People are not always reborn into the same family, ethnic group, nation, gender, or even species. Sometimes you go from a class of oppressors to a class of the oppressed, and sometimes back. The Buddha’s image is of a stick thrown up into the air: Sometimes it lands on its base, sometimes on its tip, sometimes smack on its middle. We’re slippery characters, changing roles all the time. 

This is why the proper response when groups of people suffer is not to callously believe that they deserve it. After all, the Buddha taught a path for the end to all suffering, “deserved” or not. As he said, when you see people suffering, don’t look down on them. Remind yourself that, in the long course of rebirth, you’ve been there, too. When you see people enjoying the pleasures of wealth, don’t resent them. You’ve been there as well. You’ve seen how wealth can come and go.

The ultimate purpose of this reflection is to spark a desire to get out of the karmic network altogether. The interim reaction, though, should be empathy: We’ve all been in this together for far too long. It’s time that we helped one another, rather than taking advantage of people when they’re down.

The Buddha’s image of each person’s karma is seeds sown in a field: Some seeds are sprouting right now; others are waiting to sprout. When you see the sufferings of others, you’re seeing only their seeds that are currently sprouting. The good seeds waiting to sprout, you can’t see. At the same time, you don’t know what bad seeds are lying in wait in your own field. 

Still, the most important seeds in your field are the ones you’re planting right now, because they can determine whether you’ll suffer from your old seeds or not.

So you look for the good old seeds in other people’s fields that may be ready to sprout, and try to get them to plant good new seeds so that they won’t have to suffer from any bad seeds already sprouting. After all, that’s how you’d like them to treat you when your bad seeds start to mature. Acting in this way, you create good karma for yourself, and a more humane world all around.      

The post Karma Is Individual appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One of our favorite avadanas, or teaching stories, from the Karmashataka is the tale of the god Maniprabha, whose body, like the celestial mansion he lived in, shone with light and was adorned with fine jewels. One day when the Buddha was teaching at Jeta Grove (near the ancient Indian city of Shravasti), the brightly shining deity came to the garden with flowers, which he scattered over the Buddha to show homage. He then bent down to touch his head to the Buddha’s feet in a traditional gesture of respect before sitting to hear the dharma. (The image of a god bowing down to the Buddha may be surprising for some readers. But in the Buddhist framework, buddhas far exceed the gods in spiritual realization. Maniprabha’s deference to the Buddha is an embodied expression of this truth.) The Buddha offered a teaching that had such an immediate and profound effect on Maniprabha that the young god’s eventual awakening became inevitable. In celebration he rose from his seat, again touched his head to the feet of the Blessed One, circumambulated him three times, and disappeared upon the spot.

Some of the other monks in the sangha were confused. They had been studying with “continued, earnest, and sleepless efforts at dusk and dawn” when they saw Maniprabha’s great light emanate and then disappear. They went to the Buddha to ask what had happened. The Buddha explained, but the monks still had questions. They inquired how it came to be that Maniprabha had taken rebirth as a god whose residence was a celestial mansion and whose body was ornamented with divine jewels.

As is often the case in the Karmasha­taka, the Buddha’s response comes in the form of a story within the story. The story takes place long before Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha—before he was even born. Back then, Buddha Kashyapa, one of the other buddhas the sutras say have appeared throughout history, was teaching the dharma. At the time, there lived in Varanasi a householder of tremendous wealth. After Buddha Kashyapa’s final passing, the householder, out of deep devotion, built a great stupa (shrine) containing the hair and nail relics of Buddha Kashyapa’s holy body. This stupa was so magnificent that even its rain gutters glimmered with jewels. Not only that, but the householder organized the construction of an associated monastery. For the rest of his life, he faithfully served the monks who studied and practiced there and provided for their every need.

The Buddha explained to the monks that after going for refuge and maintaining the fundamental precepts of a lay vow-holder all his life, the householder was reborn among the gods in a celestial mansion made of jewels. That householder’s name? Maniprabha, which means “Jewel-Light.”

Like all the stories of the Karmashataka, the story of Maniprabha is a gem that crystallizes for us certain essential teachings on karma. One facet is the enormous power of actions taken from a mindset of devotion.

True devotion does not actually drain us. It is a source of vibrant energy that makes our commitments come alive and become a source of joy.

When we think about karma, we often focus a concrete action and its effects, easily overlooking the importance of the underlying intention. Yet as Joseph Goldstein points out, “the Buddha used the term karma specifically referring to volition, the intention or motive behind an action. He said that karma is volition because it is the motivation behind the action that determines the karmic fruit. Inherent in each intention in the mind is an energy powerful enough to bring about subsequent results.” Indeed, the Buddha stated, “Action (karma) is volition, for after having intended something, one accomplishes action through body, speech, and mind.”

The story of Maniprabha starts with a description of his numerous acts of devotion. Far from being a set of isolated occurrences, these actions are an upwelling of Maniprabha’s devotion in previous lifetimes. In honor of the earlier buddha Kashyapa, he built a magnificent stupa and an associated monastery where he rendered service all his life, and provided for the material well-being of the monastics there. But Maniprabha’s devotion was directed not only to these two buddhas. From his consistent, lifelong support of the monastery, we recognize that his devotion is also to the dharma and sangha, to notions of love and service, to compassion, and to putting others first.

In the course of the story, Maniprabha is never depicted as wavering. He appears with purpose, fulfills that purpose, and departs. Moreover, in the story of his past life, we are given to understand that the service he rendered was a joyful commitment that he never abandoned. The purity of that devotion later manifests concretely in the pristine qualities of his future rebirth in the god realm—in his brilliant appearance, his splendid ornamentation, his divine residence, and his clear intention. Practitioners will find it particularly interesting to note that his acts of devotion gave rise to the auspicious circumstances needed to receive teachings directly from a buddha. Not only that, but Maniprabha was able to comprehend the teaching so deeply that he arrived speedily at the threshold of liberation.

Seen in relation to our own practice, the potential benefits of devotion are numerous. Devotion has the quality of stabilizing the mind. When something occurs that in other contexts might set us off balance, devotion helps us stay on course. For example, at times when we hear criticism from others, we may notice that our potential reactivity and defensiveness are allayed by the depth of our conviction in the dharma. We are able to actually hear their feedback and contemplate its validity without losing our emotional center.

Devotion is akin to love: when cultivated, it grows over time. It develops within the context of an ongoing relationship. When that relationship—with a person, to the teachings generally, or to a certain lineage or practice—is healthy and not excessively predicated on projected longing, devotion matures and deepens. It is balanced. It becomes less superficial as it increases.

In keeping with our individual temperaments and inclinations, we may find ourselves drawn to certain devotional acts and disinclined to others. Traditional forms such as making offerings, building stupas, or bowing our heads or bodies are certainly important. But there are also contemporary forms more familiar to us: we can set out the cushions at the dharma center, “like and subscribe” to our favorite dharma sources on social media, or help to update Rinpoche’s iPhone. We may be spontaneously engaging in these activities without recognizing the devotion we are already expressing.

Simply attending dharma teachings with a mind that is genuinely open and receptive, not armored or argumentative, can itself be an act of devotion. It is a practice to notice where devotion already exists in our minds and hearts. That mindful awareness increases their power.

When emphasizing intention and devotion, the thought does come to us: Isn’t it enough that I’m here at the dharma talk? Or that I made it onto this cushion? Aren’t these virtuous actions good enough on their own? There can be a sense in our daily practice—and in our lives—that going through the motions is enough. This is especially true when we’re experiencing the challenges of life, and we find ourselves tired, overwhelmed, scared, anxious, busy, or burdened, as we often have every reason to be. Devotion feels like yet another item on our to-do list.

True devotion, however, does not actually drain us. It is a source of vibrant energy that makes our commitments come alive and become a source of joy.

Strengthened by devotion, we are more resilient when we encounter exhaustion, criticism, or the questions that arise naturally along the way. Our efforts will continue to grow in spite of challenges and even in response to them.

We know we’re experiencing devotion when we feel a genuine, spontaneous appreciation for the gifts we are receiving—for the fact that we can meet with qualified teachers, hear the word of the dharma, and find support in the sangha. Devotion is the wish to demonstrate this appreciation in respectful form, to pay homage as Maniprabha did.

Maniprabha leaped to repay the Buddha’s kindness without hesitation. Similarly, the dharma can inspire a realization of our wondrous good fortune that naturally overflows in an abundance of gratitude.

♦

This is the second installment in a four-part series on the Karmashataka (“The Hundred Deeds”) Sutra, a collection of ancient teaching stories on karma that has recently been translated from Tibetan into English. Read the first installation here. 

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