Karma and Determinism It is less defiant than foolhardy to boast that transience does not make one long to leave this world, since ceaseless change has the final say, removing not only all one's pleasures and occupations but at last life itself without asking one's permission or preference of time or place. But notice that it is attachment to life, not life itself, from which we must escape. The Buddhist is enjoined to live out his still-unexhausted karma with detachment, not merely to evade it. Samsara, in all its transience, demands to be accepted just as it is, because here and now it cannot be otherwise. Those dharmas, or constituents of existence, which in the present moment are coming into manifestation realize sets or series of possibilities in the Unmanifest that must inevitably appear. For when the latent causes of the past have matured and current conditions are favourable and ready, the karmic fruit cannot help but ripen and fall. Buddhism teaches neither a cast-iron determinism nor an arbitrary predestination: man does possess free will, but this is so conditioned by past actions and present circumstances, both individual and collective, that he can only to an increasingly limited degree rearrange finite things and events and modify their future appearances nearer to his desires. At the beginning of a game of chess, the hopeful player has a choice of a large number of possible moves; in the end, no matter what move the defeated player makes, he puts his king in check. The law of karma, of equal and opposite action and reaction, is ineluctable and cannot be abrogated, even by a Buddha who, though omniscient and omnipresent, is not the Omnipotent Creator. At first sight it might seem as though the law of karma possessed omnipotence instead of the Buddha, but the method that he devised and practised uses karma to overcome karma and so reach Nirvana. Sooner or later one must pay the price of every thought, word, and deed with impartial and self-imposed justice; but our sentence can be mitigated and even rescinded by the transference of Amida Buddha's merits and thanks to his Great Compassion. My own evil karma of thought, word, and deed, bought in the past at such great expense, now compels my rebirth into that internecine species whose chief occupation has long been the enslavement, torture, and extermination of its own kind as well as all others. With the communal karma of humanity my own is inextricably involved, so that this season in Hell is both inescapable and justly self-imposed. Reflections on the Dharma - Harold Stewart Return to Muryoko Contents Page