Skip to Content

What is The Law of Karma and Causality Principle

What is The Law of Karma and Causality Principle?

The impetus that impels a human being to pass from round to round of birth and death is given by karmic force.

Acts of the body, speech, and mind produce inward and external results that, in combination with the fruits of different acts, become the causes of further and yet further results, many of which involve the doer.

In this way, Karma (causative energy) leads to chains of action and reaction extending from life to life and governing the circumstances of each.

Faith in the action of Karma must not be confused with predetermination, predestination, or fatalism. Even though we are bound to reap all we sow we are free to sow new seeds that will bear good fruit.

Furthermore, with the gradual negation of the ego, Karma’s hold is loosened. The karmic process is intricate.

A criminal, for instance, incurs more than legal punishment or terror of discovery; the consequences of his crime affect his personality either by coarsening it or by afflicting him with sorrow; that coarsening or affliction will, in turn, produce results; and those results, yet others. 

So, whether or not legal punishment follows, the consequences of wrongdoing are serious.

Whereas a Christian may hope that his piety and acts of kindness will be accepted as atonement, a Buddhist practitioner, comprehends that his severest judge, jailer, and executioner are himself and that sentence by this judge is mandatory, understands that virtue and evil never cancel out each other, that he will harvest and consume the fruits of each.

Otherwise, in the Buddhist view, evil is not sin but ignorance (for no one able to foresee all the karmic consequences of an evil deed could bring himself to commit such a deed).

Consequently, the remedy is the wisdom that tends to the diminution of the ego and to a weakening of karmic force.

This oversimplified account of Karma’s workings represents the level at which they are commonly understood, however, the concept of Karma as explained by Buddhist philosophers is very much more subtle and, perhaps, more convincing to those capable of comprehends it.

 Sol Luckman said:

“Contrary to popular misconception, karma has nothing to do with punishment and reward. It exists as part of our holographic universe’s binary or dualistic operating system only to teach us responsibility for our creations — and all things we experience are our creations.”

Image credit – Shutterstock

READ THIS NEXT: Karmic Relationships – Connections Between Love, Suffering and Karma

nahita

Wednesday 24th of February 2016

I'm currently debating whether or not Karma exists on my blog and it's been tough to wrap my head around the idea but this article has soothed my conscience.