Understanding Karma

     Karma is one concept from the East that has made quite a bit of headway into Western culture. It has been defined like this:

1. Hinduism & Buddhism The total effect of a person’s actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person’s existence, regarded as determining the person’s destiny.
2. Fate; destiny.

     3. Informal: A distinctive aura, atmosphere, or feeling: “There’s bad karma around the house               today.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/karma)

     I find it interesting that there are actually definitions that are different, or not related to “Hinduism & Buddhism,” as if our culture could take a word with such history and revise it however we see fit. Of course, this is what we’ve done, and unfortunately, it has given rise to much misunderstanding about the function of karma in our lives.

    The concept that karma determines the “person’s destiny,” as written in the first and second definitions, gives rise to the idea that karma is fatalism or determinism: do good, and good things will happen to you, do bad, and bad things will follow. This is a highly simplistic view of karma and ultimately not very accurate, for as we know, bad things happen to good people, and vice versa. The idea that we do actions and create effects is also a bit of a misunderstanding: when, for example, are you ever going to have the opportunity to start from a blank slate from which your actions will now have effect your future life? Life is constantly effect, one after another. It may be more accurate to say that Karma is actually the “law of effect and cause,” since we will never make a decision independent of effects that have already been put in motion.