The very first level of practice for a Buddhist is to abide by the laws of karma: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t jump on someone’s else’s partner—in other words, behave nicely. And why does Buddha exhort us to do this? Because my doing a negative action—harming another with my body and speech driven by attachment, anger etc.—programs my mind, leaves seeds in my mind that will ripen as my future suffering.
And, of course, it’s same with happiness: my doing a positive action driven by a virtue such as love and compassion, just naturally programs my mind with that.
Buddha says we’re the creator of our own experiences and so, of course, if I buy into this view, the natural law of karma, which he says runs the universe, I will happily take this advice. I don’t want future suffering, so I won’t cause it. I do want happiness in the future, so I will cause it.
Now, that’s the explicit teaching, but what’s interesting is the more we get in touch with this view, the natural law of cause and effect, of karma—as His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, karma is like self-creation—and use it as the basis of our daily practice, the more we will see that it helps loosens the grip of ego-grasping. In other words, because karma is a great example of dependent arising, and because dependent arising is the “king of logics,” as Lama Yeshe puts it, to prove emptiness, we start to get a sense of the meaning of emptiness. It’s implicit here.
Given that this continuity of consciousness, this river of mental moments, this mind stream, which is not the handiwork of a creator or of our parents or anyone else, can be tracked back and back to countless past lives, and given that everything I’ve thought and said and done in the past has programmed this mind, then it follows that this mind is mine, the tendencies in it are mine, and it follows from that that I can therefore change them. I’m the boss, I’m in charge.
This is pretty tasty! It brings a huge sense of accountability, which counteracts the instinctive view of ego that that assumes I didn’t ask to get born, that it’s not my fault, it’s all just good luck and bad luck. This is how we all think—the monkeys and ants as well as us humans.
No wonder we suffer! We have no idea why things happen! It’s all out there and seems to happen to us; we don’t think we play any role at all. We’re innocent victims. As Lama says, this is the view of the “self-pity me.” It sounds cruel, but it’s pretty true. Because of the instinct of ego, the minute something goes wrong, everything in our being tries to get off the hook. Everything in us tries to blame someone or something else – everything but me. It’s so painful. This is the primordial view of ego-grasping: this sense of a separate, concrete, set-in-stone self who is somehow put on this planet by someone else.
But with the view of karma, we own what happens to us, both the good and the bad. We know we caused it. It’s our own karmic appearance, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche says. It’s not guilt, it’s not shame, it’s not blame. It’s not punishment and reward—there’s no such view like that in Buddhism because there’s no punisher and no rewarder. It’s a natural law that whatever we think and do and say programs us and produces the person we become.
We get this when it comes to health: the food we eat now produces the future body. Or with learning things: the music I study now, that I program my mind with, produces the musician I become. This is actually the meaning of karma at a most basic level. You don’t blame Bach and his music or Mr. Steinway and his piano for your being a good musician—or a bad one! We take responsibility: we are the main cause of the musician we become.
Dependent arising is referring to the natural law that everything that exists comes into existence in dependence upon various factors. That’s scientific fact. The most basic level of this is cause and effect: the rose is the result of various causes and conditions coming together. We know the main cause is the rose seed, but we also know it’ll never ripen until it meets the precise conditions of moisture and warmth and time, etc.
Well, Buddha says, the person is the result of various causes and conditions coming together. The crucial point he makes is the mind is the main cause—what’s in the mind from before—not the external conditions; they’re merely catalysts, just like the warmth and the moisture are the catalysts for the manifestation of the rose. The parents are not the main cause of me; the kind boyfriend is not the main cause of my happiness; the ugly boss is not the main cause of my suffering.
Working with this, getting used to this, brings profound change to our lives. We become braver, clearer, more confident, more happy, which means less attached, less angry, less fearful. And this means we’re loosening the grip of the instinct of the innocent victim, the self-pity me.
And all this leads us eventually to the subtler levels of dependent arising and the realization of emptiness, that there’s no intrinsic self, no I that doesn’t exist in dependence upon various factors.
And that’s liberation!