Where Have I Gone Wrong: Karma and Zen Practice

The above is from today’s bike ride around Bald Eagle Lake. A bit of ice has transmogrified to water but just around the edges. People are still out on the ice pulling in their hockey rink fences and other projects worthy of risking life and limb. 

Speaking of which, Harry comments to my last post with a couple questions. Here’s one: “How should we concern ourselves with karma i.e. what is ‘it’ and why should we know?”

“I” am karma. Reflecting on karma (action+volition) is a central part of my practice. It’s very simply about taking full responsibility for this life, past-present-future. Understanding karma (or not) informs moment-by-moment action. Falling down and getting up.

“I” am also the essential world. In the Harada-Yasutani koan process, after getting a good taste of the essential world through Mu, the checking questions, and the miscellaneous koans, the person then takes up the Wild Fox Koan, working the karmic and essential perspectives. 

In Dogen studies, the best text to work through on this topic is “Great Practice” (“Daishugyo”) – one of Dogen’s commentaries on the Wild Fox Koan.

Here’s a passage from the “Maybe Next Life” chapter of Keep Me In Your Heart A While:

From the perspective of disconnection, karma and rebirth are cultural trappings that can be cast aside in favor of scientific materialism.
 
This perspective rests in part on a subtle form of racism—we Western white people know better than our little Asian forebears. Such practitioners misapprehend the teaching of nonself and find the teaching of karma and emptiness in conflict. At present, there are many who cherish this view.  How sad that the path of the ancestors has become obscured.

Then there is another type who zealously accepts the teaching of karma and rebirth without reflection, without regard for modern developments in critical analysis, and without concern for the emerging context of contemporary global culture. Instead of acknowledging their own corruptibility, they use the precepts to judge others, and insert their own values and judgements into other’s lives.

Such blind belief in karma and rebirth is a Zen version of oppression by the group, a modern form of power identified by French philosopher, Michel Foucault. Both belief in karma and rebirth and belief in no-karma and no-rebirth might be just head-trips. And those who believe in nothing are insufferable and said to be incurable.

Thus the Buddha warned: Conjecture about the precise working out of the results of karma is an unconjecturable not to be conjectured about, because that would bring madness and vexation to anyone who conjectured about it. 

Likewise, Charles Schulz wrote, “Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong?’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’”

No matter how long we suffer and swirl trying to definitively understand our past mistakes and their effects on our lives and on the lives of those we love, we cannot precisely pin down many of the causes and conditions.

In order to avoid sleepless nights, madness, and vexation, the Zen school discovered a sideways approach to studying karma through wholehearted inquiry rather than circuitous conjecture. We step away from obsessing about our own lives by quietly contemplating a story about all of our lives. Taken up sincerely, this meditation becomes an old-fashioned  smack-down wrestling event with our self-clinging taking quite a beating.