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In America, a lie becomes the truth with sufficient repetition. I merely tell the crowd what they need to hear to be satisfied.”
“Some prisons have armed guards, bars, and iron gates, and some have a white picket fence and a garden.”
“But as the saying goes: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Whatever happens, I look forward to the karma that accompanies it. Karma, after all, is the great teacher.”
The woman smiled. “That’s not exactly how karma works.” “Sorry.” Dorothy hesitated, then said, “How does it work?” “It’s likely that I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure that out,” Xi said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it, to keep learning, to grow, to do more good than harm, to create compassion, to understand that every person you encounter is not there by coincidence? All of us play a role in another person’s life.” “What goes around comes around.”
“You’re thinking in terms of crime and punishment, which I’m afraid is a bit reductive. Karma is more like a suitcase. You have to be unafraid to open it up and look at what’s inside, to unpack the things you don’t need. Karma is the climate of the past, which shapes how much leeway we have in the future.”
I took my questions about the confluence of karma and intergenerational trauma to Jason Wirth, doctor of philosophy at Seattle University, and Soto Zen priest. When I first met Jason, it was at Seattle’s Kubota Garden. He asked about my faith and I cheekily said, “I’m a deist, agnostic, Shinto, Jesuit—a little bit of everything, with the option to change my beliefs as I discover new things along the way.” To which Jason smiled gently and said, “I think that means you’re a Buddhist.” He may be right.
It was an eerie, head-shaking experience to write about a highly politicized epidemic in the past, in the middle of a highly politicized global pandemic in the present. As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and tragically, the more people die.
