Expert: Alex Wilding - 11/28/2011

Question
What role does awareness play in karma. I always here Buddhists talk about being awaken or becoming conscious. What role does being unaware play in your laws of reciprocity. I mean do 5 year old kids get whats coming to them for being mean in daycare.

Answer
The importance of awareness is huge, not to say total.
What you do is only one of the factors that goes into forming the result of an action. Who you do it to, under what circumstances you do it, and whether it conflicts with any vows you hold are also important. But most important of all is your motivation, in other words your frame of mind. If a dog catches a rabbit, kills and eats it, that's not great, but it's hardly going to send the dog to a bad rebirth: it's a dog's nature to do that. He can not really help it.
Five-year old kids are, as far as I have seen, highly varied beings. Some have much more capacity to understand what they are doing than others, or so it seems to me. But as a general rule I suppose a five-year old will be less able to control, say, an outburst of temper than an adult. It follows logically that the karmic result will not be so clear.
Then again, we can not see the results of karma in any particularly specific way, we can only guess. Buddhist scriptures counsel very strongly against saying things like "Oh, bad thing X happened to person Y - person Y must have been very wicked in the past". The picture is always more complicated than that!
I hope that goes some way towards an answer.
All the best
Alex Wilding