A Fistful of Sand

The Paḷi word kamma (Sanskrit karma) is taken to mean "action". In Buddhist doctrine kamma refers to any intentional mental, verbal or bodily act; that is, an act of will. The Buddha says: ‘I say that intention is kamma, because having first intended one acts with body, speech or mind.’ (Anguttara Nikaya 3.415). According to the Buddha, every intentional action modifies our consciousness, thus building our character and thereby influencing our behavior, our experience and consequently our destiny. Positive intentional actions motivated by generosity, love, and wisdom tend towards outcomes that are experienced as positive, while intentional negative actions motivated by greed, hatred and delusion tend towards outcomes experienced as negative. The doctrine of kamma is probably the most misunderstood of all the Buddha’s teachings. The four most common misunderstandings are these Everything that happens to us is the result of our past kamma. In actual fac...

My comments on the Shurangama Sutra caused a bit of a flurry. A couple of Mahayana priests, Zen types, opted out of the newsletter and dropped out of HJCL. That's fine because it is none of my business what people think of me. My business is solely what I think and that’s okay. Although I am always amazed at the lack of intellectual reasoning that goes hand in hand with religion. This is perhaps why the Buddha was opposed to religion and called it “a very bad idea”. (I’m paraphrasing here.) In Theravada Buddha refers to the person of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha of this dispensation. What he said was the whole of the teaching as we have it. In Mahayana Buddha refers to a concept called “Buddha” and there is no single dispensation, in spite of what the Buddha said. Under the proviso that “buddha” is a concept nearly anything can be attributed to it. It’s strange that nearly every academician and scholar on Earth agrees that the Pali Canon is closest in meaning, if not t...