The K Factor

Hey,
Something I've wondered about, but doesn't seem to be brought up much in pragmatic circles is the effect of past karma on present practice. Most of us are ostensibly doing a Buddhist practice, but it rarely comes up. There may not be a ton of applicable value in discussing it, but I do feel that karma could be that unknown factor that makes the difference between people who soar through the path, and others who seem to languish. Maybe those who languish simple have more karma to wade through until they're ready to break free. If that's the case, it could bring about some acceptance of where one's at by understanding that it's a purification process and you just do what you can in this lifetime. But this is also taking the multi-life stance into account, which some people may not believe.

What do others think?

-T

edit... my question was answered by a closer reading of the original post.

I don't think past lives limits progress in this life. What has happened is always tautological --- you can always say "it happened because it was meant to happen". The question is, what are we doing when we are orienting our self (including our so-called progress) in time?

Thinking about the past is about pride and shame
Thinking of the future is hope and fear
Thinking about the present is self and other, subject and object...
So watch out!

I'll preface by saying that my retreat background is exclusively in the Goenka tradition and like any tradition, they teach the dharma with their own flavor. Some of the things they teach I haven't seen clearly represented in the suttas, but they purportedly to teach what the Buddha taught according to the pali canon and a lineage of monks in Burma.

Anywho, they teach that our current mind/body state is a result of past conditioning, sankaras, the sum total of which is our karma. Sankaras are spoken of as a kind of fuel that's been stockpiled from past actions (and lives) and feeds the present moment of reactions. I've read a chunk of the pali canon, and I've never really seen sankaras spoken of as such. Sankaras do appear in dependent origination, but not in a way that necessarily supports this interpretation.

In this interpretation, by meditating and remaining equanimous with the 3 characteristics of experience, we're burning up our stockpile of sankaras and therefore purifying the mind.

I think I've done the Goenka tradition justice with this explanation. That's essentially the context I'm asking the question in, but your answers don't have to be shoehorned into this context.

Here's the thing, if the sankaras are real things, then samsara is endless and no being would ever reach the end... it is in the nature of life for there to be unsatisfactory events within experience. If that unsatisfactoriness is assumed to be a real thing, there is no end of samsara. Not for us, nor for the Buddha who had to deal with a lot of crap even after his awakeneing.

What happens when people make great progress is they see the reality of the sankaras -- they are both real and empty at the same time. When this is seen, the conditioning nature of sankaras is defeated.

The practice that you are doing now (looking at the point of contact of sensation and seeing how feelings propagate from +/-/0 sensations) will eventually lead you to see the empty nature of the sankaras. Of you could say, the not-self nature of the sankaras.

So past lives really is a metaphysical explanation. The more immediate explanation is the degree of conditioning is proportional to the amount of belief in the reality of sankaras... or, saying it the dharma way, the degree of samsara is proportional to the amount of fundamental ignorance of the not-self nature of the sankaras.

(Does this explanation help?)

Teague, I haven't done Goenka at all, but I've done a lot of Mahasi, and the Burmese tradition relies very heavily on Abhidhamma to set up their explanatory framework (indeed some would argue they privilege Abhidhamma over the Pali canon). The explanation of sankharas you've given here sounds like a possible abhidhamma concept. It might also have some relation to the more Mahayana idea of alaya-vijnana, or the planting of seeds in consciousness, which are stored in a storehouse to ripen later. Explanations like this are a way of dealing with the problem of a temporal gap between cause and effect. My understanding of Pali Canon 'sankhara' is as 'formation.' I find Jayarava and also Thanissaro good on these issues.

We can read kamma as either arising from past lives; or else as arising only from this life but including the circumstances which shaped us before we had conscious choices (i.e. our parents' history, genetic inheritance, etc). Which one works for you will just depend on worldview. But either way we find ourselves 'thrown,' or 'fallen' (as Heidegger would say) into a particular present circumstance, leading into the future, where our life paths will be shaped by effects of earlier causes that are beyond control.

I would also say that, as I understand the Pali Canon, progress on its path is a combination of creating good kamma/not creating bad kamma, AND stepping off the wheel of kamma (as intention) - BOTH are essential.

Might be worth pondering: why ask the question? The Buddha was pretty clear that belief in rebirth is right view, but then the questions would arise, to what extent are you committed solely to that path or that view of awakening - and even more important, what impact does pondering this question and possibly coming to a conclusion about it have on how you will act? (for example, do you need to be more urgent, or do you need to relax more?) And do we have a choice over what we believe anyway, and if so how?

Incidentally, the Buddha did say somewhere that pondering the precise working out of the results of kamma will drive you mad

ETA: there is also an interesting question here around 'soaring through the path.' I don't want to deny the fact that many people, certainly at times myself included, feel that they are making slow progress, are frustrated and suffering. However there is an underlying paradigm there that what people who've had an awakening experience 'have' is essentially the same, only faster or slower i.e. that someone who practiced for a year and had such an experience 'has the same thing' as someone who practiced (no doubt in different ways, learning different things, with different goals) for ten years, or whatever it might be.

One of the interesting things that seems to be coming out in recent times, both in discussions here and elsewhere and in e.g. Adyashanti's 'End of Your World' and similar, is that there are differences in what 'awakening' is or means. It's been valuable for me over time to examine my own ideas about what experiences other people describe themselves as having which seem like 'better' or 'further' or 'more' to me, and how this mindset itself is an obstacle, a subtle one which reveals itself only gradually.

Thanks Everythird. The interpretation I've been taught must be from the Abhidhamma, and that would explain why I never saw it in the suttas.

This stuff doesn't have a huge impact on how I practice on a day to day level, because I've seen the effects of meditating on my life, and the results are sufficient to justify the effort. But I do find these topics interesting intellectually, and they are pertinent to practice and motivation on a macro level. Before I sat my first retreat and learned how to meditate I scoffed at the idea of rebirth, karma, and all that. But being steeped in it for so long kinda opened up my mind. What had an even bigger impact was reading accounts of children who remember past lives and I started thinking that maybe all that crazy stuff is true. What if there actually are some people who had stream entry seven lives ago, and this is the life that the finish the thing off? There's no way of really knowing, so it's just kinda like staring up into the night sky and pondering the vastness of space.

The purpose of this thread wasn't really to find an answer within this topic. I just wanted to hear what people think.

Depending on one's historical or critical frame of reference, the Buddhist view of karma (which was really "intention" rather than "action") could be viewed as a theodicy: a way to make logical sense of the fact that bad things often happen to people with no obvious present-life wrong doing. In the earliest texts, the Buddha is pretty much the only one who claims to know the actual workings of karma. He pretty much told people not to think about it too much, because it would make them crazy, more or less.

Karma is usually presented - in our modern day context - as conditioning and habit patterns. If that's the case, regardless of whether it's from the present life or a prior one, it makes little difference. Some people get the flu every year, others don't. Some suffer from mental illness that is passed on genetically; a sort of family karma. Whatever the case, we're dealing with karma all the time. To make a big mystical deal out of it probably isn't necessary.

Still a good question, nonetheless.

This is a cool topic; it pertains to something very essential to me which is integrating insight into everyday life (working with circumstances, working with intention-patterns and habits).

Also, in terms of the 'big picture' questions about multiple lives etc., I think we can think it through with clarity.

Consider two basic possibilities: 1) at death, oblivion
2) at death, experience continues

By cultivating insight, kindness and peace right now, whatever outcome (1 or 2) there will be benefit for us and others.

Personally I find '2' to be... well, pretty intimidating. There is so much suffering in life, and things become so much easier in some important ways with age and maturity, that repeating infancy and childhood sounds pretty rough.

However, I can look at how my mind functions in the dreamstate: a state that is far less grounded by incoming sense-data than the waking state-- and see that there are changes in the kinds of dreams dreamt, the nature of dreaming itself, the quality of awakeness and freedom that can be present in the dream, all of which seem due to cultivation.

By analogy, if some kind of experience continues after death I imagine it would be even more unstable than the dream state since it would have even less grounding from incoming sense-impressions. So this can provide motivation to really commit oneself to practice, even without 'believing' in rebirth, just by entertaining the possibility. And even in the case of oblivion after death, cultivating freedom and clear seeing and kindness obviously benefits self and others now so nothing is lost by practicing now in that case either. Win/win.

ETA: 1) see how neatly I have resolved my cognitive dissonance of traditional worldview and modern one lol? 2) This reminds me of an old Tibetan saying: "in life, we make mind; in death, mind makes us." haha it gives me the chills!

As someone who is also well steeped in Goenka, I can see where this question is coming from. Also, I have been reading a lot of the KFD practice thread and seeing that many people have practiced the same amount with the same vigor and similar instructions, yet do not progress as quickly on the path of insight. I think what Teague is getting at is that this can be disheartening, but a way of making sense of it is the concept of accumulated sankaras that you have to "burn through" may be greater for some than others.

I agree with Everythird that perhaps this concept of karma is an ancient way of conceptualizing what we now look at as the "nature vs nurture" question in modern psychology, why are we the way we are? Why do some people seem so much happier/smarter/capable etc? Buddhist texts do refer to countless past lives seen by the buddha upon his awakening, so I don't really know what to make of that, but to be completely honest I am not entirely against the concept of past lives and a consciousness that persists after we die, especially after looking at the huge lack of understanding we have scientifically about the subtle universe, and the reluctance of modern science to explore it.

But that is a tangent, what I originally meant to say was, karma and sankaras seemed very abstract to me when I first started practicing, but now I think of them as my "patterns." I think it is safe to say we all have them, for me it is more worry and tension, for others it may be anger, depression, whatever. I think that, from a pragmatic view, once we are able to observe these patterns objectively, they lose their grip and gradually begin to drop away as we are mindful and equanimous with them rather than being tossed around by them- and by doing so they are "burned up." The cycles of fear, pain, worry, sankaras, bad karma, whatever you want to call it, are all referring to the same thing and it is actually much simpler than we want it to be. Goenka explains this as, (paraphrasing), When we step out of the cycle for even just a moment it is like your head comes above the water, that moment may become a few seconds, and a few minutes, until eventually you are out of it [the sankara/past karma].

Here is one of my favorite authors take on reincarnation - Thomas Campbell on Reincarnation
Been a while since I watched it....
~D