Karma

Master Linji said:

You go all over the place, saying, 'There's religious practice, there's enlightenment.' Make no mistake! If there were such a thing as religious practice, it would all be just karma keeping you in the realm of birth and death. You say, 'I observe all the six rules and the ten thousand practices.' In my view all that sort of thing is just creating karma. Seeking Buddha, seeking the Dharma—that's just creating karma that leads to hell. Seeking the bodhisattvas—that too is creating karma. Studying sutras, studying doctrine—that too is creating karma. The buddhas and patriarchs are people who don't have anything to do. Hence, whether they have defilements and doings or are without defilements and doings, their karma is clean and pure.

The way Linji uses the term karma, it refers to actions that create momentum keeping people in samsara (the worldly succession of suffering, the cycle of birth and death).

Modern Western use of the the term karma seems to focus on bad karma, in the sense that someone performs a malicious act and then the universe somehow conspires to punish the act.

What is of particular interest then is that Linji points out that actions many modern practising Buddhists consider meritorious, or good karma, are not any different in their ultimate effect. That is a warning.

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Huangbo also says:

If you are attached to forms, practices and meritorious performances, your way of thinking is false and quite incompatible with the Way.

This statement obliterates the dedication to the accumulation of merit many people take as the path. It is the bread and butter of many teachings, but it is not the way of realisation in this life.

Using Buddhist expressions, bad karma leads to worse rebirth, whereas good karma leads to a better rebirth. As Linji says, it would all be just karma keeping you in the realm of birth and death.

Whilst we may agree that good actions are generally not as life complicating as bad actions, what does Linji mean when he says the enlightened crowd displays clean and pure karma?

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A well known gongan goes:

A student asked, 'Does a greatly cultivated man still fall into cause and effect or not?" I answered him, 'He does not fall into cause and effect,' and I fell into a wild fox body for five hundred lives. Now I ask the teacher to turn a word in my behalf." Baizhang said, "He is not blind to cause and effect." The old man was greatly enlightened at these words.

Not being blind to karma sounds like seeing its principle, having the freedom to partake, yet not without the insight to immediately obliterate its traces, like a snowflake on a furnace.

It is like producing good or bad karma are akin to good and bad decisions in a game, then winning some or losing some successively, carrying some advantage or disadvantage into the next game.

Yet Chan masters are not addicted to gambling. They can gamble if needed, with that good hand up their sleeves, but they shake out all winnings and losses. If they are the house, and all the players, what gain or loss is there?

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How does r/zen see karma and the relation of these actions to the cycle of birth and death? Here is a hypothesis:

1. The ignorant conceptual viewpoint sets up entities within the actual unity of experience.
2. This ignorance ascribes independent existence to these distinguished entities.
3. One component of this distinction is giving rise to an idea of self and other.
4. Exclusive identification with the concept of self gives rise to preferences.
5. This leads to thoughts and actions (karma) with ideas of good and bad.
6. These propensities condition a personality to act habitually.
7. This conditioning sustains the cycle of suffering.

In this model, the buddhas and patriarchs are people who don't have anything to do because the whole process must be a bit of a joke in the absence of the initial ignorance (1).

People who observe all the six rules and the ten thousand practices would therefore still be perpetuating the fundamental error, concerned with the colourings of leaves and branches, not cutting at the root.

It's all going somewhere, but where is there to go?

Submitted May 21, 2022 at 08:17AM by Xuansha https://ift.tt/bdMwsEV