Karma: The only edifice which survives the heritage of time

The karma of action follows us to the end of our days and beyond

By Surya Vishwa 

Karma means action. Every 24 hours we are engaged in karma. When we plough the field, carry out our office, academic and domestic work, every single action is connected to thought. Thought is the wheel that propels action. We think that we need a faster and more luxurious harvest. So we need to apply chemicals on the ground because it will eradicate pests and weeds. Our thought has led to action of killing much of our biodiversity. Thus, our everyday necessity of agriculture is steeped in a certain kind of action. The root of this action is the attachment to ‘more’ and to ‘speed.’ We think that leaving nature alone and consuming the extent to what it will provide will be insufficient and we create solutions which we believe will feed us more and quicker.

Every action of course has an equal and opposite reaction. 

The chemicals have an element of poison and when we apply poison to the ground that poison gets into us humans. Since there is an element of poison in these substances it will get into waterways and the soil. This means that the waterways, the soil and the humans will have some residues of poison in them. Poison cannot signify health. It can signify only illness. Whether it is the chemical poison put into earth or the poison of craving in the mind, the result is contamination.

The cycle of Karma is accepted especially in the spiritual teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism which believes that we cannot easily escape from our actions – the action, rooted in mental energy of thought, is transformed into a surviving attachment that continues surpassing the boundaries of death.

This is why complete liberation from the cycle of life is the hardest thing a human can achieve as the Buddha did. 

Our thoughts, in this eternal procession of life is the iron fence that girdles us to people, things and identities. These can easily tip into the zone of arrogance, delusion and superiority. 

These identities could be gender, religious and historical and applicable to how a person views his position in the world and how this view determines what he does and behaves. Wealth can be accumulated to be used for common good and create more repetitive good. Wealth can be accumulated with a hoarding mindset to exploit and plunder. 

The result of this is not abundance but repetitive poverty in thought and action – a debilitating karmic cycle of corruption and despair. 

The detachment that is preached by the Buddha and pursued in many ways by Hindu sages and explained in the Upanishads and Rig Vedas is of utmost relevance in every sphere of modern life and should not be isolated and placed on the shelves of religion to catch dust and be taken out only on holy days or the death bed.

When one is detached one will appreciate the benevolence of the nature, recognising that each human is a construct of it and will hence not pursue excess and profit at the cost of ill health and death. 

When one is detached one will neutralise the karmic bondage. One will live and let live.

One will accept wealth and the creation of it to benefit beyond oneself (with oneself included). One will be equally concerned about how one keeps oneself clothed and fed as one would with one’s neighbour and hence would not seek to compete at the detriment of the wellbeing of the other. Harmful words and deeds would then not be resorted to. 

The karma of action follows us to the end of our days and beyond, enslaving and trapping.

There are many studies on re-incarnation by global spiritual masters and scientists (this divide is lessened now and there are especially in the international context spiritual masters who are also scientists as in the modern science of the Western world) that create for those that seek, an interesting repository of delving into time. Thereby we can examine how the energy our actions effect the ever evolving psyche of reality. 

Unbridled attachment is that which makes our minds a lunatic asylum. It transforms even that which is pure into a defilement.

Love is for example a very pure attribute. Love is central to life. However the pristine sheen of love is often lost as it is mistaken as attachment, lust or craving. Love in retrospect is nothing but freeing and liberating.

Love of one’s religion can make one treat all human beings with kindness, compassion and respect. It can make one distil from the tabernacle of religion the benediction of spirituality and cremate upon the pyres of awareness delusion that transforms religion into a mere label.

Craving to preserve an identity can sometimes signal the very destruction of it as we have seen in the world. Yet, preserving the identity of what is humane can be the best preserver of culture, humanity and religion. 

There is only so much of time within which a structure will last. The best of archaeological expertise and action can protect a structure from the vicissitudes of time, chance and circumstances only up to a limited scale. 

Yet, the Dharma survives. The Dharma of the Buddha is the edifice that is constructed with the solid bricks of metta, muditha and karuna which purifies action and thereby polishes karma with the sheen of righteousness. This edifice can never be bulldozed. This edifice can never be contested using narrow labelling and used to trigger conflict. In contrast it is the one through which people, communities and nations can prevent unrest, friction and wars, eradicating karmic baggage. The foundation of this edifice is wisdom. It cuts like a sharp knife through the fallacy of permanence. Thus in an ever changing impermanent world the Dharma as taught by the Buddha is one truth that can never decay or crumble. It is this true heritage of humanity that must seek to unify human beings.