Well, good evening. It's very strange to walk across the courtyard here. The tree is gone. I don't know if you were there this morning. We had a ceremony. The tree, the plum tree, when they cut it down, it was completely rotted out. From the center, he cut with his hand and threw it to the stone. He threw it back at the stone. In this case, he wasn't given force. There were very few blossoms. He just ran into the blossoms. Anyhow, I wanted to just acknowledge that we're trying to do something essentially impossible here.

[01:18]

And I realize I felt, after last week's class, It's just too much. There's too much material to cover in such a concentrated way. So I apologize for that. And I don't know what else to do, given the fact that this was scheduled for a whole week. So today, we will try to cover two major topics of basic Buddhism. each of which could be the subject of a class. And I think they're somewhat related. And I really, again, I invite you to interrupt me and ask questions. So I'd like to talk about karma and then the precepts. Both the precepts, as I said, kind of framework for Buddhist ethics, but also the precepts in the context of Vinaya.

[02:32]

Vinaya rules for the life of monks and nuns, which is very particular. It's a particular elaboration of the precepts. So both of these aspects emerged very early in the Buddhist awakening, that the fact of karma, the particular Buddhist understanding of karma, was inherent in the vision that he had on his awakening, and then that he elaborated on his first seven weeks of sitting, as he got deeper and deeper into the nature of dependent origination, and how things give birth to other things, and karma is an essential ingredient in that.

[03:41]

And then the precepts, or the first moral teachings, are a key part of, as I was saying, the Eightfold Path, which breaks down roughly into areas of ethics and morality, samadhi, or concentration. So in the Eightfold Path, precepts are expressed as right speech, right action and right livelihood. And then they expand from there. But I think I'm going to start with karma because... Well, you could go either way. You could go with the precepts flowing from karma or the karma flowing from the precepts because they co-arise. But there's been a lot of discussion about karma.

[04:46]

A lot of very strange and misguided talk about the tsunami as an expression of karma. And people from every faith wanting to give a kind of personality and an agency to nature. My view of the tsunami is that it was a phenomenon, it was the Earth setting itself back in balance. you know, physical forces that were out of balance, you know, plates bind up on one another, and that force has to be released.

[05:54]

That's not karma. And I was very troubled yesterday. I was, as I was reading about this thing, this program, and I came, there was a piece, a belief that is very interesting. tsunami was it karma robert thurman says yes uh somebody else says no uh lama surya das says don't blame the victims you know it's like it's it's a strange reduction to sound bites but i was really troubled by what robert thurman said because what he said was everything that happens to us is karma and that's not the buddhism's thing So let me read you the Dharmapada, and then we'll talk about it. And also, this is really interesting to discuss, though. Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart.

[07:01]

If you speak with a corrupted heart, suffering follows you as the wheel of the cart, the track of the ox, the pulse. Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart. If you speak or act with a calm, bright heart, then happiness follows you like a shadow that never leaves. So it's a very poetic expression. But what the Buddha said in Nangatara Nikaya, one of the early sutras, he said, I declare, O bhikkhus, that volition is karma. having willed one's acts by body, speech, and thought. So everything that we do is not karma. Karma literally means action or doing, but what it means is intentional action.

[08:06]

and action covers actions of the mind, words, and physical acts. So really, karma just means, quite simply, choice. Every place that we make a choice in our life, then that's an act that has the factor of karma in it. And things that are unintentional or involuntary or unconscious, they do not constitute karma. Now, one could, one can of course always go back and look at since we have a very developed sense of the unconscious, what kind of unconscious motivations there are.

[09:13]

And those we can discuss, whether they're karma or not. But there are many causes for things in this world. For each thing we choose to think or do or say, there is a consequence. And it's not like retribution. It's just, it's a physical, it's almost like a law of physics. Naturally, there is a linkage between what we do, our action, which constitutes karma, and the result of that. the fruit of that epocha. So just as every object in the daylight is accompanied by a shadow, so every volitional action is inevitably accompanied by its effect.

[10:29]

Karma, you can see, is like a seed that's been planted, a seed that has potential. And vipaka is the fruit that arises from that seed. So this is just the mechanism. So far, are you with me? Yeah. I hear you describing it as more than a personal karma. So I'm thinking in terms of, maybe this is too tangential, but collective karma? Well, let's get to that. Let's not start there. Because this is where things get unclear. So I want to go back to karma as a form of causation.

[11:54]

So this notion of karma arose in the Buddhist understanding as an expression of dependent origination, which is a large theory of causation. The Buddha also said, he explained that not everything, first of all, things arise from a variety of causes, and not everything is karma, even personal. He writes, things can be born originating from bile, from phlegm, or wind. from the union of bodily humors, from seasonal change, from disruptive circumstances, arriving suddenly due to the action of another person, or born of the fruition of karma.

[13:00]

So these are all factors. Does that make sense? And when something happens to us, I mean, the part about Bob Kirman's piece that I think is really useful, and I think this is actually what he was trying to say in a surprisingly unskillful way for somebody with his mental force, is that it's always helpful to consider, did I have a part? in creating this. And there's this wonderful sermon, very early sermon by Martin Luther King, where he describes, I think this was in a newsletter, where he talks about, if somebody hates you or dislikes you, and the first thing you should do is

[14:12]

just is to investigate very deep down whether somewhere along the line, in some way, there's something we may have done or participated in that caused that person to have negative feelings about me. So it's always helpful to consider it. The thing is that what we want to get away from, and this is the tone that I'm really reacting to in all the speculating about the tsunami, is a tone of blame the victims. And this is radically what, in fact, the Buddha was turning away from. in his understanding, which was a tremendous break from the religious orthodoxy of the time.

[15:28]

Religious orthodoxy essentially declared that karma was a kind of mechanistic fate, that if you were born to a certain state or a certain caste, that was locked in. And you were born that way because that's what you deserved. And you could never change that. Maybe you could change it in the next life. That was something speculative. But the radical notion in Buddhism is that anyone could become a Brahman. That Brahman, or nobility, was about the present, your present comportment in life and how you were with people.

[16:32]

It had nothing to do with where you were born, what class or what color. There's a whole lot of writings When Buddha talked about, essentially he was talking about race and color, the word was Nirvana, V-A-R-N-A, and he just cut across that every time, that what was important to him was how a person acted, and that determined their class. you know, were they of a class of person that's awake, or a class of person that's deluded? Were they on the path, you know, or were they in complete denial or rejection? That designated how he looked at me.

[17:32]

And so karma Again, karma became a very developed theory as Buddhism became a kind of more of an orthodoxly developed religion, that karma-like dependent origination, and you'll notice I'm skirting the whole idea of dependent origination, was seen as Buddhism developed in the you know, around 3400 AD, karma was seen to unfold over three lives, past life, present life, and future life. But in the early teachings, Buddha doesn't talk about this. He doesn't. That's the kind of metaphysical speculation that he just wasn't involved in.

[18:34]

And that's really We can't speculate. We don't know. Maybe some of you know about your past life. Most of us know. And we don't have any idea about our future life. We can know an awful lot about our present life and how it unfolds. So the opportunity in Buddhism that karma was not this mechanically developing force, but that at any point you could wake up, which means at any point you can turn your karma in the direction of enlightenment. That's the story, you know, that's the essence of the story of Angulimala.

[19:35]

Some of you know that Angulimala was a mass murderer. He was on a spiritual path, and he had a strange spiritual teacher who said, well, the way you will become a completely realized being is you need to go and kill a hundred people, and cut off their fingers, and make a necklace of their fingers. And that's what Angulimala means, mala of fingers. And he wore this garland of fingers around his neck. And he was a mass murderer who was hated and feared. And he came to a village at one point where he had 99. And he had decided, this guy, the Buddha, was going to be my hunters. So he heard Buddha was there and he came looking for him and he came up behind him and he said, he shouted out, stop!

[20:48]

And the Buddha just walked on and Angulimala started running after him. The Buddha just walked on, but it seemed like no matter how fast Angulimala ran, he couldn't catch the Buddha. Poop just seemed heaven to him walking home. And he said, once again, stop, Reverend Monk. And Buddha stopped and turned around. He said, I have stopped already. Why don't you stop? And with that, he woke up, and he actually He became a monk. He repented all of his actions. He actually ultimately became an Arhat. And he also did not avoid his karma.

[22:00]

I mean, he transformed it in some way. shortly after he was awakened he went back to his home village and he was recognized and he was stoned by villagers even though he was a monk and he cried out to buddha to help him buddha said bear it angulimala bear it this is This is the fruition of your karma. You have to bear it. But he did survive it. So even a mass murderer, upon awakening and understanding the truth, could transform his or her karma. And I think that's the radical nature of Buddhism.

[23:04]

For us, at least in our tradition, when we look at our lives we can see our karma unfolding and generally kind of the more tuned in you are, the more aware you are of yourself, the faster that karma will come to fruit. So you do something, you know, and if you're awake, if you're mindful, that result will come relatively quickly. But it doesn't always. I mean, it may not come for a very long time. But, you know, it works out. And again, what the Buddha says is, There's no point in trying to figure out all the strands of causation that bring about events in life.

[24:16]

We can't know it. We can't know our past karma. We can repent it. And the essence of that repentance is just to It's linked to renewing our vow to live an enlightened life. We know that there are things that we've done wrong. And our repentance and the vow to renew ourselves is completely wrong. So that's what we do in this practice. But I just want to lay out also, as I said, he explains in one sutra, I just quoted, what these various sources are. There are actually, in the sutras, there are also five, he designates five kinds of process which operate in the physical and mental realms.

[25:23]

They are called Niyamas. And so there's physical, inorganic niyamas like wind and rain and seasons. There's bija niyama, which is the order of seeds or germs, sort of physical, organic. So, you know, if you have a grain of rice, you don't get an apple. So that's not a matter of karma, that's a matter of how things were made up, then there's karma, there's several others, including consciousness and including kinds of natural phenomena that cause earthquakes. So these are, it's just important to remember that all of these things are

[26:28]

operating as causation, and they're all operating together. So when something happens, it's not necessarily a matter of human agency, or certainly a personal agency. So to get to Elizabeth's question, there's not a lot of talk about collective karma in the sutras, but there are examples of it. There's a very interesting story, which I've been researching this week, there's something else I've been writing. So, late in his life, there's a very, it was a complicated conflict that arose between the king of the Kosalin people, which was actually a large grouping in North India.

[27:39]

He harbored a very strong resentment against the Shakyas, the Buddhist clan, who were actually sort of small clan people, much smaller than Kosalins. The Buddha heard about this and went to the border between the Shakya kingdom and the Kosala kingdom and sat down there to intervene in the war that he could see was coming. And it was a beautiful story. He sat under a dead tree on the Shakya side and King Virudhava came up to him His army was there and he came up. He said, well, I invite you to, this tree provides no shade. Please come and sit under the wide banyan trees on my side of the border.

[28:45]

And the Buddha thanked him and said, it's very cool to sit in the shade of one's kin. And Nidodhara was removed by this and went back to his capital, turned the armies back. So the armies went back. And then after a while, he thought about it. He got pissed off again. And they got the armies out and came back. And Buddha was still sitting there and intervened again. The armies went back. That happened a third time. And the fourth time, the Buddha saw that this war was inevitable. And he sat there. It's a really interesting story. He sat there and watched the Shakyamuni tribe be completely wiped out.

[29:48]

They were gone from history from that point on. And he got a terrible headache. which is interesting. It's kind of very humanizing media. And he was plagued by headaches for the rest of his life, which is also humanizing media, which is interesting. But what he saw was that this war was inevitable because of the karma, because of karma of the Shakyas who had, in another incident not long before and and i haven't got this story why this happened but they poisoned all the fish in the river i think essentially to deny them to them so they killed all the fish and that was the karma that uh set the stage for that so they were wiped out and uh the

[31:01]

the description in the commentaries, it's kind of like, probably like what was happening in the Hebrew scriptures at probably roughly the same time, but it was very, very bloody. So then the Kosalins, Peter David leaves the Kosalins back, and they camp by the river that night, And a huge torrent comes up, and most of his army is wiped away. So this is an expression of collective harm, I think, at least to my understanding. And there's a really interesting quotation. Wait, which? What is the expression? Both of them. Both? Yes. A tsunami? I'm not quite tsunami. I know, but I mean huge torrent? Yes.

[32:07]

In the story, in this story, it's framed as a result of that action. And, you know, none of this stuff, you can't pin this down. But, you know, in the Buddha's notion the world is, the whole world is alive and interconnected. And in ours it is, too. Whether there was agency in that, I don't know. But, you know, the... This is exactly the realm of unclarity. Yeah. But isn't the difference that, like you said, this arm may act like single-mindedly. Yeah. Their volition is single-mindedly. And if you want to draw a parallel to the tsunami, then everyone involved in that disaster would have needed to have collectively avoided it. Perhaps so. That's the way I think about it, but it's really not susceptible to strict logic.

[33:18]

What I wanted to say, though, the human part of it is more clear, but really, not necessarily. I mean, their poisoning the fish created karma, and we can see one kind of agency or another kind of agency. You can see the agency of the natural world or the agency of the human world, and in a certain sense, they're not necessarily distinct. it's hard to say. But let me read this quotation from Ken Jones, who's a writer on engaged Buddhism. I like this. This is, �Institutions and society at large are shaped by complex conditioning forces, such as physical geography, of which karma of their members is only a part.

[34:21]

And the social dynamic is more than the mere aggregate of individuals, but is expressed through cultures, institutions, and social structures. To emphasize this point, it is more accurate to refer to societal culture. So the intent of past generations remains embedded in the inertia of cultural norms and social institutions, and it's eroded more or less slowly by subsequent generations. Does that make sense? He's writing a little naughty. But you could say, for example, and actually it's this really interesting book on the ethnic struggle in former Yugoslavia, in Croats and Serbs.

[35:24]

Each time, when that struggle emerged, what they brought out were myths that were hundreds of years old. And those myths, you know, in sort of psychological terms, were a way of transmitting karma from generation to generation. And those myths were carefully taught from parent to child. And so they were continued that way. They were consciously nourished in a sense. That, to my mind, falls into the realm of karma. And we're all affected by those things. It affects the way we think. It affects the dynamics. of race in our society. It affects the dynamics between other peoples in conflict around the world. And it's like, again, said Martin Luther King, it's like somebody somewhere's got to have enough sense to break this chain.

[36:38]

Breaking the chain had a certain meaning to him, but not so different from Arthur's saying, I'm not going to continue This cycle of violence is not going to continue. This cycle of harm or hatred, it has to stop with me. And that will turn this corner. So that's, in a very rough way, how I think about social collective karma. Beyond that, You know, it's just business.

[37:54]

Well, that makes sense. The point of this notion of karma is really to take responsibility for yourself. That's the useful aspect of it. to theorize is really in the realm of metaphysical speculation. But to ask yourself, how do I take responsibility? This is a very pressing question. And ultimately, that question is going to, you're going to get into a question, well, what do I do in this world?

[39:36]

You know, how do I take care of the world? How is it my responsibility? And that's where it starts to go after. And you know, you can't arrive at any, any one fixed idea. I think it'll be good now to move into the precepts. There's a logic to that. But I think so long as each of us is looking at ourself in our conduct in the world, then we're trying to attune to our karma. Yeah. Enough to believe it. But not in the strength of meditation, but just like this.

[40:58]

You see, the concept is that there is more of a total understanding that I really feel. It's not just about the environment. It's more about the game that you play. I feel like it's a lot easier for us to just bring one of the conditions with us and tell her to sit down and let her talk about this, to say that her life is as important and important in the universe, and make some kind of sense that other people live in such more horrible situations. Keep that. Well, I'm with you. And all I can say, I don't, I try not to stand, although I think it, why is this happening?

[42:02]

But really the more telling question, The Zen question is not why, but how. How do I act in the face of this? How do I, you know, fulfill the Bodhisattva vow, which is next week's class, to save all sentient beings? So how is the more important question, which is not to completely dismiss having an analysis of what's going on, but just to know that that analysis gets a view. It may or may not be accurate and may or may not be useful. I've heard of these stories in my head, and I've never heard this.

[43:05]

There's a Taoist story, which you've probably heard. And very early, it's from like 200 BC. A farmer has a horse. The horse runs away. They have this conversation. Oh, terrible, bad luck. The farmer says, maybe it's The horse comes back with, like, leading a bunch of other horses. It's a hope, but wonderful luck. The horse says, maybe so. The farmer says, maybe so. It was Mr. Head. The farmer's son that's riding all these horses, he's really into these horses, and he gets up. And one of them throws him, and he breaks his head. And the leader says, oh, bad luck. And war breaks out. And they conscript all the able young men, but not the farmer's son.

[44:10]

So this is constantly unfolding. And if we get stuck in any one view, we try to lock it in time. It's quite apart from how that's going to unfold in the moment. Nonetheless, as humans, we're really turned inside out by the suffering that we see in the world. And if we're not turned inside out by it, we're just going to lose it. And I was thinking about what you were saying, and that the way I'm seeing it is that karma is in relation to the cause of the event, and the cause would focus on this abolition of action.

[45:15]

And it seems to me that The way we often discuss it is that there's a kind of account to the memory, so it carries an account with it. And it all balances out. If you're a good person, good things will happen to you. If you're a bad person, bad things will happen to you. It seems to me that's not the way to look at it. The focus is on the cause, not on the effect. So the totally exploited, abused thing that we were talking about, has probably done some bad things in the middle of his life, but not so much to bring these terrible atrocities upon him. And maybe no more than you? Yeah, I don't think the point is that anything that happens to you is because you've accumulated a negative account. I think the point is just to look at the cause side and say, you may do little negative things. You may be a fundamentally good person. You may be a fundamentally bad person. You may do a lot of bad things. there are going to be certain consequences later in your life for most things.

[46:18]

And that's not to say that everything that happens in your life will be excluded in terms of your actions, but whatever actions you do engage in will have consequences. Just remember also, this is from the sutra, when the Buddha says about things that come, arriving suddenly due to the action of another person, So that has nothing to do with your action, you're just the victim of it. Which doesn't have to do with any cause necessarily that you have created. This world is full of victims of other people's quite conscious wrongdoing and delusion. And they're just the victims of it. In that sense, that wrongdoing and delusion, as far as they experience, is not a whole lot different than the tsunami.

[47:24]

If you're the victim of the Holocaust or of war in Rwanda, it's almost as if that was a force of nature. Now, the people who are doing that are going to improve terrible karma. I feel like my problem with Parman is that it feels like it's so easy for Parman to slip into the key. I know that Parman is not about Buddha, but I also know that there are Buddhists. You know, I knew some Chinese Buddhists who have their books actually about specific karmic effects based on their actions. For example, in some book, it says that if a woman has an abortion, that when she dies,

[48:30]

Vetus is waiting for her in a bucket of blood, okay? If you're a murderer and you die, or a snail, because a snail can never look at its mother's face, this is the worst possible thing. In Chinese culture. So, here you are, so what does that mean about snails? You know, they're from a murder, so, it's like, it becomes very bizarre. And that to me is just total folklore, and I don't believe in any of that stuff. And I also feel like it's a way for people to look at people who are unfortunate, people who are poor, people who are victims, and blame them and say, well, you know, they deserved it somehow because in a past life they must have done something terrible, like this child, you know, who has this horrible situation, family situation, he must have been a terrible person in his past life. To me, I just, you know, I don't know, I think, I don't know if karma is sometimes used as a way to try to explain to make the world somehow make sense, then the world is not going to completely make sense.

[49:36]

Also, I was thinking about how Shakyamuni Buddha taught about no self. His teaching was that there's no self. There's no I. There's no soul. But then he did negate that idea of reincarnation, because karma He didn't say there was no self either. It depends on what you mean by self. There is no permanent self that's in Atman, no soul that's continued. But he wouldn't say whether there was a self. When confronted on that directly, he remained silent. because ultimately there is something that functions.

[50:37]

There's this collection of aspects and abilities and functions that all work together that we, for shorthand, call self. Now, when you want to really reify that and turn that into something that, oh, that gets, he didn't talk about reincarnation, he talked about rebirth. But there's tremendous ambiguity. And there's this wonderful sutra, the Kalama Sutra, where the Buddha, he was preaching to the Kalamas, he said, well, don't believe anything because a teacher said it, because you read it in a book, or because you saw it in a movie. The only thing that you should trust is your experience, something that you confirm for yourself.

[51:49]

So you can't confirm that. None of us can confirm that. It's right, it's folklore that a mother who has an abortion is going to find her child in a bucket of blood. We can't confirm any of these things. But what we can confirm is when you do something that's not right, something comes back, one way or the other. That's pretty clear. Talking about children, well, who's to know what it is? It's like, as Ken Jones said, those children are also the product of social forces. That's another form of causation. But I remember very vividly this guy Jarvis Masters, who was on death row, and

[52:49]

His teacher passed away, a Tibetan teacher. He's a guy whose name I'm blocking right now. But when he came to San Quentin to give Jarvis some comment, what he said was, don't blame anyone else for the situation that you're in. He wasn't saying, blame yourself. He was saying, take responsibility. So I think this goes to what Malcolm was saying, that it's a matter of causes, not effects. So what we're about in practice is the generation of wholesome causes. Regardless of what effects we're experiencing, the practice keeps pointing us towards living in a wholesome, harmonious way. And that is the generation of the algorithm.

[53:58]

I think we should stop for a few minutes and then see where it is. Let's take a break for about five minutes and then come back. Move a little bit into the precepts. OK?

[54:14]

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