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Volition: The Basis of Karma


SUTRA #2
Ultimately, life is neither suffering nor bliss.
It is what you make it.
The Consequence of Calculation
It happened.
On a certain evening, two friends were walking together. It was their weekly custom to visit a prostitute every Saturday evening. While they were walking toward the prostitute’s house, they heard a voice delivering a discourse on the Bhagavad Gita, India’s great sacred text.
One friend was seized by guilt. He decided not to visit the prostitute and said he would rather improve himself by attend- ing the lecture on the Gita. The other man left him there and went ahead.
Now, the man sitting in the lecture hall found his thoughts
were full of his friend who was with the prostitute. He began to envy him. While he was stuck in this lecture room, the other man, he was convinced, was having the time of his life. O, dostunun dini diskursiya yerinə əxlaqsızlıq yuvasını seçməklə çox ağıllı hərəkət ediyi fikrini ağlından ata bilmirdi. He couldn’t help feeling his friend was far more intelligent in choos- ing the brothel over a scriptural discourse.
Now, the man who had gone to the prostitute’s house found his mind was full of his friend at the lecture hall. He was filled with admiration for his friend who had chosen the path to lib- eration by opting for a spiritual discourse over carnal pleasures. This story was often related by the great twentieth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. He always drew attention to the central paradox: it is the man at the Gita discourse (who kept thinking about what was happening in the prostitute’s house) who piled up the adverse karma. It is he who suffered, Sri Ramakrishna pointed out, much more than the
man who visited the prostitute.
Why?
Because although karma denotes action of body, mind, and energy, it is not about action alone. The man who went to the prostitute did not pile up as much karma as his friend because he did not make a calculation. His friend, on the other hand, secretly wished he was with her but believed that by going to the discourse he would get one step closer to heaven. That calculation meant an acquisition of more karma. Ironically, the man who thought about how to shed karma actually ended up accumulating it!
The man with the prostitute, on the other hand, was seized by a sense of the limitation of his experience. That would have impelled him in the future to seek something more. So the experience with the prostitute became a trigger for his personal growth.
This story points to a common mistake. People often assume
karma is only about external action. They think performing acts of charity and virtue will earn them good karma. What they never quite realize is that it is about something much subtler.
Karma is much more fundamentally about volition.
Volition: The Basis of Karma 27
The reason why religious teachings all over the world are always talking about love is that the moment you become loving, you are naturally at your best in relation to others. The moment you view everyone with love, your intention is automatically inclusive. Regardless of what blunders you may commit in the name of love, the karma still does not accumulate beyond a point.
Your intention makes all the difference. If you say something prompted by love, and another person gets hurt, that is his karma, not yours. But if you say something out of hatred and another person has no problem with it, it is good karma for them and not for you! You still acquire negative karma. How the recipient of your hatred reacts is not the point. The accumulation of karma is determined by your intention, not merely by its impact on someone else.
Consider another situation. Let us say you are playing with a knife. It accidentally hits someone and they fall down dead. This is one kind of karma. In another scenario, you get into an argument with someone while cutting vegetables. In the heat of the moment, you stab them and they die. In a third situation, you meticulously plan how you would dispose of an enemy; you pursue them and thrust a knife into them. In a fourth scenario, you behave in a very friendly manner with someone and invite them over to dinner; after a wonderfully cordial meal, when they are sitting back satiated, you slit their throat. This is yet another kind of karma. In a fifth situation, you are perfectly normal in your behavior with a person, but internally you keep plotting all the terrible things you want to do to them.
28 KARMA
In the first four cases, the same ingredients are present: you, the other person, the knife, and death. The karma, however, is not the same. It is not difficult to guess which will breed the worst karmas. By worst, I do not mean the most immoral; I mean that which creates the worst consequences for you. The consequence for the other person is the same, but the impact on you is determined by the nature of your volition. It is the level of bitterness and hatred that causes karma, not the act alone.
The fifth scenario is actually the worst in terms of karmic accumulation. The first four talk about situations in which the result is the same for the other person. In the fifth, there is no consequence for the other person. They have been released from their karma, so it is good for them. But your karma is much stronger because, here, you are repeating the act a million times within yourself. Acting out the bitterness externally has a grave physical consequence for you (a jail sentence). But allowing the bitterness to grow and multiply within has even deeper internal consequences. Intention motivated by a personal agenda always accrues much more karma. If you keep repeating the same mental action, it is because you have a strong personal stake in the matter. You may not be sentenced to prison, but you have imprisoned yourself!
It is interesting that legal systems in most parts of the world
also take intention into account when determining the punish- ment for a crime. A cold-blooded premeditated murder is treated quite differently, for instance, from a crime of passion committed in the heat of the moment.
And yet the karmic consequence is not a punishment. The
consequence is simply life’s way of trying to work out the karma you are constantly creating. If you perform only negative mental karma, there may be no external consequence, but you experience a deeper level of internal suffering.

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2/8/21 3:08 PM