Karma: it’s not just intention
The other day I wrote about how karma isn’t the mystical and external “cosmic force” that many people think it to be — a force that impersonally metes out rewards and punishments: do good things and the sun will shine on your picnic, do bad things and it’ll rain.
Instead, karma (according to the Buddha) is to do with the ethical status of our intentions and how those naturally lead to our becoming more mired in suffering or freed from it. Karma is psychology: do this, and you’ll feel that. Karma is about how your mind changes and becomes happier when you’re less selfish and more generous, less angry and more loving.
The word karma is basically another term for Buddhist ethics.
But the idea that karma is intention can be misused. I’ve seen lots of people, bull in a china shop–style, hurt others and then say that they didn’t do anything wrong because they didn’t have any intention to cause harm. That’s a narrow take on karma (and ethics), and one that doesn’t take into account the subtlety of the Buddha’s teaching.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of how we might play the “I can’t have done anything unskillful because I didn’t have bad intentions” game.
Fresh in my mind, because there’s a video [1] been circulating about this, is men cat-calling women in public. In the video I’m thinking of, Shoshana Roberts was filmed walking silently down the street by a friend with a hidden camera. Roberts was catcalled over 100 times in ten hours. That’s just the verbal interactions, not the whistles or stares. She was followed by one man who stalked her for five minutes, often staring intensely at her from the side. Others were demanding: “You don’t wanna talk?” Some turned critical or aggressive when they didn’t get a flirtatious response in return: “Someone’s acknowledging you for being beautiful — you should say thank you more.”
Now, I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of the men who catcalled Roberts thought they had good intentions. They probably felt they were complimenting her. But the experience of having your appearance (to be crude, your ass) commented on (“I just saw a thousand dollars!”) over and over again can be distressing. Needless to say, being followed by a stranger can be very threatening.
So this is an example of where we need to be aware of not just what we think are our intentions, but of the effect of our actions, which can reveal unacknowledged intentions. This is something the Buddha himself stressed:
Having done a verbal action, you should reflect on it: ‘This verbal action I have done — did it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Was it an unskillful verbal action, with painful consequences, painful results?’ If, on reflection, you know that it led to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both; it was an unskillful verbal action with painful consequences, painful results, then you should confess it, reveal it, lay it open to the Teacher or to a knowledgeable companion in the holy life. Having confessed it… you should exercise restraint in the future. [2]
Because the thing is, it’s not always easy to know our own intentions. It’s easy for us to fool ourselves. But if you know that many women don’t like being given random “compliments” on the street, then when you continue to do so it’s no longer about them, it’s about you. Your intention is revealed as not being about complimenting another person in order to do them a favor, but about expressing your (unwanted) attraction. It becomes about control: I catcall, you smile, and if you don’t cooperate I’ll get nasty. It becomes about you imposing your will on another person — which is why the women involved in that video have received death and rape threats for having made it.
Another example is vegetarianism. Most people who eat meat say that they like animals. They don’t think of themselves as cruel. Most of them are shocked by actual cruelty and want animal abusers to go to jail. And at the same time, they pay people to abuse animals on their behalf. They don’t think of themselves as doing this, but of course when they buy meat they’re financially rewarding people who raise animals in stressful and unnatural conditions, transport them, terrified, long distances in trucks, herd them into a slaughterhouse, shoot them in the head, hoist them into the air by their back legs, cut their throats, and then disembowel and dismember them in preparation for being shrink-wrapped and sold. Ka-ching.
There’s no overt ill intent when you pick up a steak at the supermarket, but that’s what you’re paying to have done on your behalf.
So if we’re going to take the Buddha’s teachings seriously as a guide for living, then we need to examine the consequences of our actions:
Having done a bodily action [like buying meat], you should reflect on it: ‘This bodily action I have done — did it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Was it an unskillful bodily action, with painful consequences, painful results?’ If, on reflection, you know that it led to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both; it was an unskillful bodily action with painful consequences, painful results, then you should confess it, reveal it, lay it open to the Teacher or to a knowledgeable companion in the holy life. Having confessed it… you should exercise restraint in the future. [3]
Implicit in buying meat are attitudes like, “You are more useful to me dead than alive,” and “I kind of like you, but I’m hungry, and so I don’t mind you being killed.” The attitudes are rarely if ever experienced as overtly as that (and I’ve expressed them rather crudely here) but something like that is going on. I know. I used to eat meat.
We can’t avoid causing harm or hurting people. The Buddha pointed out that sometimes we have say things that will cause distress. But he set a high bar for this: we have to consider, before we say such a thing: are our words true, are they expressed kindly, are they intended to help the other person, are they crafted in such a way that they’ll lead to harmony, and are they expressed at the right time (a requirement that implies a good knowledge of the other person’s state of receptivity)?
We’re never actually going to get to the point where we never hurt or upset another person. People were upset with the Buddha all the time! But it’s a noble effort to work on reducing the amount of pain we cause.
There’s a kind of brutal honesty required in looking for our real intentions. We really need to acknowledge the harm we’re doing, and if it doesn’t seem at first that we have any intention to harm, we need to look deeper. When we’re systematically causing distress or harm to others, then there’s some attitude there that needs to be brought to light.
***
[1] 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman
[2] Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta
[3] Ibid.
Related posts:
“Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.” George Eliot
It ain’t all karma
“Being in the moment”
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