But discussing it (thank goodness we still have 100-minute classes at Lang) allowed us to see and see through many common misunderstandings. Such as that karma is a like a point-system, a system you can and should learn to play. Of course you shouldn't do things known (however that is) to be fruitful in a bad karmic way, like causing suffering. Yet the solution to the problem of karma - all acts are ultimately fruitful of dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness) - is not to play the system skilfully, but not to play,
or, more subtly, to play without playing. You need to understand karmic causality in order not to get ensnared in it. (Pic's unrelated but irresistible.)That's still relatively easy (in theory - not in practice!). It gets even more complicated when you consider that what makes actions karmically fruitful in one way or the other isn't the act itself or its outcome, but the intention. In the lingo of contemporary western moral philosophy, this is just deontology. In its theistic forebears, deontology recalled that God knew the secrets of our hearts and rewarded or punished accordingly. But in Theravada Buddhism, there is no God to do this. Instead, there's something in the intentions themselves which triggers karmic consequences. To put it in crude and deliberately misleading terms, "mental" or "spiritual" causes generate sometimes "physical" or "material" effects. In the grand scheme of things these consequences seem to be of far greater moment than the mere "consequences" of our acts themselves (like if we actually succeed in carrying out the intended act, or if it has the intended result). And this is because objective, "physical" or "material" reality is an illusion, is in fact more like what we take the "mental" or "spiritual" to be.
Karma is a "law of cause and effect" which must, in some way, subsume "physical" laws of nature, but is really not a physical law. It accounts for how physical-seeming phenomena arise in the variously clouded consciousnesses of physical-seeming agents, but the causality in question is other than the "physical" causality of our familiar "laws of nature." (Forgive all the scare-quotes, but they may be necessary here.)
What's this got to do with ethics? Good question!
