287-Karma is very individual- Buddhism in daily life

Karma is very individual

How people treat us is their karma, how we react is ours!

Karma is a term from Sanskrit and roughly translated means "effect". According to the concept of karma, there is causality between cause and effect, between thoughts, actions and consequences.

According to Buddhist teachings, karma is a law, not dependent on a judge, and remains immutably linked to rebirth.

Thus, every action of a human being causes a consequence for which the person acting later has to take responsibility, quasi "gets back", if not in this life, then at least in the next.

So, according to the concept of karma, it is already determined how I will fare, it is "written", so to speak. No matter how I behave now, my karma from before, as well as from previous lives will hit me, nothing I can change, no matter what I do, following my fate, events will roll over me.

Sense of a Buddhist life in the "now" and "here" thus determines the position of the course for the karma of the future, but cannot correct failures of the past.

According to Buddha, it is precisely our thoughts (as the origin of all actions) that are the cause of karma; negative causes are said to lead only to negative karma (and vice versa). The underlying information is stored in us (like in a seed), is by its nature in a karmic consciousness a part of our existence.

In our western linguistic usage we always deal very loosely with the word "karma"; if something does not go well, many people say "karma", "fate", and accept the events as God-given, giving little thought to cause and effect. The development of our stream of consciousness is not questioned, that's just the way it is, you can't change it.

Is it really like that?

Do we want to try to influence our karma consciously and actively? Maybe it would be fun, change us, improve our lives?

Personally, I believe in the premise of karma, everyone gets what he deserves. In my mind, life is predetermined, like a movie that follows a script, triggered by causality and controlled by reactions to past behavior.

My karma was to travel to the Shaolin Temple, arriving over 30 years ago where Chan (Zen) Buddhism was once born. Along the way I met people who were very familiar to me, others were not.

According to the teachings of the great Buddha, those who have experienced "enlightenment" fall out of the cycle of rebirths.

It might be worth a try, don't you think?

Reincarnation and karma form a wonderful, quite incomparable world myth, against which every other dogma must seem petty and narrow-minded.

- Richard Wagner - German composer - 1813 to 1883

Every chess game is a lesson in karma: No move without consequences.

- Andreas Tenzer - German philosopher - born 1954

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