Article taken from Beliefnet.com

The Consolation of Karma
Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman talks about how
suffering, even through the tsunami disaster, can
offer a karmic advantage.

Interview by Lisa Schneider



Robert Thurman holds the first endowed chair in
Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the United States, at
Columbia University in New York. He is the author of
the international best-seller "Inner Revolution," and
the co-founder and president of Tibet House U.S., a
nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation
of Tibetan culture.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Does karma
play a role?

Abstractly speaking, karma is not really a theory of
fate; it's a causal theory. And it says that anything
bad that happens to you is a resonance of something
bad that you perpetrated in a previous life.
The main thing about karma, what we might want to call
collective karma, when there's a disaster where people
haven't done anything and a terrible thing happens
from nature, is that the bodhisattva, or the outside
person looking at the situation, never invokes the
karma theory and says, "Well, I don't have to worry
about them because that was their bad karma and they
got wasted and too bad--as if it were some sort of
fate or a way of writing off the disaster. It should
never be used that way.

The bodhisattva never accepts the absoluteness of that
explanation, although she would be aware of it. She
would think of it as a terrible tragedy, unprovoked
and unmerited, and would try to do everything possible
to save the people from the disaster and help the
survivors.

On the other hand, the karma theory that everything
bad that happens to me is from my own negative action
in the past is always useful for the person who
suffers. In other words, using the karma theory to
blame the victim is good for the victim to do about
themselves. This is a very surprising idea. If the
victims just sit and shake their fist at the universe,
shout at God (if they are theists) or shout at karma,
then they weaken themselves in the sense that they
have just emphasized their helplessness.

Whereas if they say, I'm going to use this disaster
that happened to me as if it were expiating previous
things that I did to the world that were negative, and
I'm going to grow stronger from it....In other words,
I can't do anything about the disaster but I can do
something about my reaction to it. I'm not going to
add to the suffering it has caused with a new
suffering of agonizing about myself and feeling
helpless and feeling angry at the external world. I'm
going to take responsibility for being in the way of
the disaster as part of my own karma and therefore I'm
going to use this tragedy as an advantage toward
freedom, towards Buddhahood.


Is that a way they can find meaning in their
suffering?

They find meaning and they find advantage is the main
point. They can say, this is going to be a conscious
effort I'm going to do.

Now if they got killed, of course they're not going to
do anything in that life. But from the Buddhist point
of view, if they have a lingering memory of a
catastrophe because they died in a moment of panic and
fear and worry for their loved ones and so on, if they
retain some memory of this death—which often the
just-dead do, in the Buddhist view in the bardo, the
between state—and they're saying, well, this is a
terrible karma thing that happened to me and others. I
will try to make my suffering a sacrifice, an
expiation of previous things that I caused, and I'm
going to have a better life in the future. And I'm
going to try to help the beings who died, my loved
ones and others, and be of more help to them in my
next life.

So that they would try to take advantage in the
between-state in the after-death state in order to
improve their rebirth, rather than just freak out.

What solace can Buddhism offer to survivors who have
lost loved ones?

The solace to survivors who have lost someone is:
Well, they lost this life, I lost my contact with
them, but moaning and groaning and freaking out about
it and being angry about it isn't going to help. I
should send them good prayers and good vibrations
about their rebirth. If I dearly love them, I will
pray to meet them again in the coming life, in
wherever they are reborn, to make the world in general
a better place for them, and vow to rejoin them (if
it's a soulmate sort of thing) in another life. So the
consolation of karma is not just identifying the lost
beings with the embodiment of a particular life, but
feeling a sense of spiritual connection to their
larger continuity of life and sending good vibes
toward that.

The theist says it's God's will and God took care of
them and hopes to join them in heaven, which is also
good consolation and sort of leaves it up to God. But
the karma is seeing it as a process in which you are
also a responsible actor. Otherwise the vastness of
the causal mixes is so huge it's pretty
incomprehensible, and no wonder some people call it
God, or God's will, or providence.

But the key thing is that karma is not the exercise of
a particular agency or divinity; it is an impersonal
process of causality. I call it evolutionary
causality.

What do you mean by that?

It's a causality by which beings evolve. Like if they
do an action of a certain type, they get an effect
from that action because it changes their being and
their being evolves. It can evolve in a negative or a
positive direction depending on whether the actions
are negative or positive. In a way, karma is a
biological theory just like a Western genetic
biological theory. And it is very like a genetic
biological theory in that it has humans being reborn
as animals, animals as humans. And it adds to that
also the idea of the spiritual gene or the soul gene
being interwoven within that genetic rebirth process.
So that your own individual consciousness can become
the animal or become the god or become the human or
whatever it becomes.

It's hard to generalize across cultures, but is there
a traditional mourning period for Buddhists?

In the Buddhist context, they consider that the
weeping and wailing and shrieking and tearing hair and
clothes, that kind of thing, is not actually a good
idea. It doesn't really relieve the bereaved; in fact
it even pumps up their emotion. But the main point
from the Buddhist point of view is that the one who
just died, being still aware of what those left
behind, the survivors are doing for a while--the
departed one gets very anxious and upset and preserves
that raw emotion as very disturbing. So whenever
someone is overcome by grief, the tendency, especially
in Tibetan Buddhist culture, is to try to calm that
survivor down and have them think of good and positive
thoughts and send good vibes.

So the nature of their grief should take the form of
looking forward and being compassionate with others?

Yes, that's considered better--sincerely sending
really strong caring and loving vibes toward the one
who passed away. Because the main person in transition
at that time, the most difficult transition, is the
death-rebirth transition in the Buddhist view. The one
left behind is not that drastic in the sense that
they're still in their familiar embodiment, even
though it may be a big disruption for them. So the
priority is to send the good vibes to the departed, in
the Buddhist world view.





=====
Love All & Serve All

Saravanan (Velu)
Holistic Lifestyle Practitioner
Centre of Integrated Medicine
Healing With Tender Loving Care.

If you don't take care of your body, where would you live?





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