Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 3/13/2009

Question
QUESTION: Hi Laurie, Buddhism is based on reason, not faith.  However, after we die, a Buddhist believes that karma, to  some degree, effects what happens.  However, since no one knows what happens to us after we die, how can a Buddhist make that statement, if its not based on faith?  Thanks

ANSWER: Hello, Marc

You have asked a very interesting and kind of tricky question.  I’ll do my best to answer it.

It is clear that Buddha’s teachings are based on reason.  Even Buddha himself said not to believe anything he said just because he said it.  He said we must try his teachings out ourselves and see if they make sense for us.  If they do, adopt them and if they don’t then put them aside.

As far as faith goes, most religions want you to believe everything on blind faith; don’t question, just believe. Buddhism does not exclude faith as part of their religion. But instead of blind faith, it is a faith based on reason. Here is an example of what I mean by that.

Let’s say you are walking in the woods during the winter and you come to a lake.  It is a big lake and you know that if the lake is frozen, you can walk across it and cut a half hour out of the time to reach your destination which is on the other side of the lake.  You know it’s been awfully cold for a long time and you decide you are going to try to cross the frozen lake.  Well, you know that although it looks frozen, you cannot tell just by looking.  So, you carefully place one foot on the ice and slowly put more and more of your weight on the ice.  It holds.  Great.  So, you try the second step.  Again, you are extremely careful and slow not trusting if the ice is thick enough or not.  But the second step holds.  Great.  Cautiously you take your third step.  The ice holds.  You continue this way for several more steps. Now you are out about five feet onto the lake.  But the ice is holding.  So you take another step.  This time you are a little more trusting.  It holds.  So now with each step you become more and more trusting.  That is faith.  You have no idea if the next step will hold but because all the other steps have, you put more and more faith in the fact that the lake is truly frozen solid and will allow you to reach the other side safely.

This is the same with Buddhist studies.  One starts with very simple teachings on basic meditation, compassion and the Four Noble Truths, for example.  Once you have tested those and seen that they ring true for you and find the benefits of believing in them, you then start studying things that are a bit more complex. You study about karma and dependant arising and you apply those to your life and see if they make sense and are logical.  Once you see the benefits in believing in those and how that helps you, then you continue down the path and study other things.  Eventually you study emptiness.  You test that out and see if it makes sense and apply it to your life and see if it helps you.  This all may take months or years.  But through this time, you have been testing these teachings and found that they are all based on logic and help you in your day to day life and all make sense.

Now, the subject comes up about what happens after death. You cannot recall your own reincarnation experiences, but the same person that has been telling you all these other things that have worked and have helped you and are logical, is now telling you this.  And he is telling you this because either he, himself has experienced it and has had this direct experience of dying and being reborn (with enough wisdom and clarity to be able to  recall it)  or is a teacher that is known for teaching dharma correctly and who has had many attainments and realizations himself is telling you that it is true.  So, just like the example of the lake, you really don’t know if the lake will hold your next step, you take it on faith because it has up to now.

So, with the teachings.  You take the ones on dying on faith because everything these teachers have been saying has been true up to now, logically their teachings on what happens after death should also be true.

You say that no one knows what happens after we die. It is true that most of us do not know what happens after we die.  But those people who have practiced Buddhism correctly and have died and returned in other bodies can explain what it is like.

Buddhists say that our mental continuum goes on from one life to the next. This mental continuum holds our karmic seeds.  These are karmas that we carry from one life to another.  Once we are reborn, we experience the results of the karma of past lives.  For me, from my side, it is the only thing that makes the world make sense.  This explains why bad things happen to good people; why some people are born blind or deaf or to mothers on crack, while other people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths.  It explains why twins have different personalities; why there are Mozarts and Beethovens.  There must be some logical reason for these things.  No compassionate God would choose some folks to suffer and some not.  Karma and reincarnation are the only logical answers.

But Buddhism is different from many religions because they teach that if you cannot understand, relate or deal with a certain part of the Buddhists teachings, that is fine.  Don’t worry about it.  Just put them away and work with the ones you can understand.  Eventually, you will learn more and more and then you can revisit that part that did not make sense and perhaps at a later time, it will make complete sense.  The study of Buddhism is the study of the mind, which is always changing. If we practice Buddhism correctly, it is always evolving for the better and becoming wiser and clearer.  And things that did not make sense before eventually become clear.

I hope this answer helped a bit.  Don’t hesitate to ask any further questions.



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi Laurie, I have a follow up based on something you said here.  You said, only karma makes sense to understand why some people are innocently born into bad situations (ie born blind, etc), yet I was told that Buddhism believes that karma is a a-moral force, a force of nature, that a Buddhist would believe if someone is born without arms, a buddhist would be more likely to blame genetics than karma.  Karma is like nature, a tornadoe, a force that is a-moral, part of the scheme of things but only a part of nature while a Hindu sees karma effecting your atman, not a Buddhist.  Can you please reply?

Answer
Hi Marc.

No problem.  I hope I can clarify things a bit.

As far as what you were told that Buddhists, believe; there are many different Buddhists who say many different things. I am not familiar with all of them. The answers I am giving you are the most accurate ones I can give based on my studies so far from a Tibetan Mahayana Gelugpa Buddhist point of view. I follow the same lineage of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama. So the answer I will give is as close to what His Holiness believes about karma as I can get after my years of study.

In a sense, karma is a-moral and also a force of nature insomuch as karma can be likened to the law of nature such as cause and effect; what goes around comes around; every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Karma is a-moral in that works with complete equanimity.  It works the same for all sentient beings. It does not judge. It simply delivers the effect of the action you have done. Karma is logical.  Nothing happens to us randomly without a reason for it to happen.

According to the Buddhism I study, when someone does something, the deed creates an imprint on the person’s mental continuum, which travels with them from life to life until the karma manifests. If one does a positive action, a positive imprint is created, a negative action leaves a negative one; a neutral action leaves a neutral imprint.  We call these imprints seeds.  When the correct causes and conditions appear in that person’s life, based on the past action, the karmic seed will ripen and the person will experience a result similar to the deed that created the seed in the first place.  It is as simple as that.

If someone is born without arms, that might indeed be caused by genetics.  But why did that specific person get born into a family where they would be subject to such genetics? Fate? Random chance? Bad luck?  None of those, according to the Buddhism I follow. It is karma.  That person had the karma based on their past actions to be born without arms and so they were.

So, in the tornado example, the tornado is not the karma.  The fact that the tornado struck my house and missed yours, for example is how karma works.  It was my karma for the tornado to hit me due to my past actions. The tornado struck my house because the causes and conditions for that bad thing to happen ripened at that moment for me.  You did not have the karma for the tornado to hit your house.  That is why it did not.

You are correct in that according to the Buddhism I follow, karma cannot affect our atman, since we really do not believe that we have an atman.  As I understand it, we have what is called very subtle nature which contains our mental continuum.  It is this that goes from life to life and is the closest thing we have as an atman (soul). From what I understand, karma does not affect our mental continuum.  Instead, karmic seeds attach to our mental continuum and travel from life to life on it, until that karmic seed ripens due to meeting the correct causes and conditions. When the correct causes and conditions manifest in our lives, then the karma ripens and we experience the effect; positive, negative or neutral.

I hope this helps explain a bit about how karma works.  Don’t hesitate to ask for any further clarification or any other question.