Karma

“Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect.”

The Buddha, Anguttara Nikaya, 6.63

Lots of people in the modern United States think they know what karma is. Karma, as the saying goes, is a bitch, often accompanied by an image or a story of a person who engages in some obvious misconduct and quickly suffers her/his comeuppance for it.

But karma is not a bitch. Karma is a law of nature, like gravity. It is true that, if you jump off of a building, gravity will seem like more an enemy than a friend, but that’s not gravity’s fault. We all know solid bodies, including our own, will fall in space. Neither gravity nor karma really cares about you per se. Both are completely impersonal. If you attribute hostility or any other emotion to them, you are making a mistake.

Buddhists say that karma is just the law of cause and effect. Do X, expect Y. Do good, expect to be happy. Do bad, expect to be sad. In modern scientific terms, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, except that the reaction, or action, follows in the same direction as the intent.

Karma can be where Buddhism seems to veer closest to being metaphysical. Likely part of the reason humans like to make up gods is because the temporal connection between the cause and the effect can be highly attenuated. Again, if you believe in rebirth, the effects of your misdeeds may not visit you until a subsequent lifetime, or the reason for your misfortune right now may be a misdeed in a…