Karma

Karma means action: what we do, say and think leaves a trace, and that trace comes back to us. The Sanskrit word is simply the word for deed; in Tibetan it is lé. No reward, no punishment, no authority keeping score. Cause and effect, working over a longer span than we are used to seeing.

What karma is not

In everyday English, karma has come to mean something close to cosmic justice. Someone cuts you up on the motorway and gets a puncture a mile further on: karma. That is not how it works, and the popular version does the idea no favours.

Two misunderstandings keep coming back. The first is that karma is fate, something fixed that you can do nothing about. The opposite is true. What is here now grew out of earlier actions. What comes next is being shaped right now. That makes karma the most hopeful part of the teaching rather than the bleakest.

The second is that only the deed counts. In Buddhism the intention weighs most. The same action, carried out from care or from resentment, leaves an entirely different trace. This is why practice pays so much attention to motivation. Not out of piety, but because that is where the real difference lies.

Karma in practice

Karma is the third of the four thoughts that turn the mind, the contemplations with which the Ngöndro begins. It sits between impermanence and the suffering of samsara, and that position is not accidental. Once you have seen that everything passes, and then see that actions do leave something behind, the question of what you are doing with your day arrives on its own.

At the same time, the tradition takes seriously how much is already there. Habitual patterns are old and stubborn, and good intentions on their own are no match for them. That is what purification is for. In the Ngöndro it is the practice of Vajrasattva with the hundred-syllable mantra, in which regret, confidence, resolve and remedy come together. Karma is not a debt you carry with you to the end. It is at work, and it can be worked with.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling the four thoughts come up every Saturday, at the start of the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro class in Hoofddorp. They are not covered once and then ticked off. We return to them, because they only begin to do their work once you have lived with them for a while.