karma 102 on buddha and the removal of karma

[saint_monkey]

rilt wrote: (after reading my long rant on karma)

So to rid yourself of karma you do nothing as much as possible to avoid gaining karma? Is that why buddhist monks live in isolated places so they will be less likely to collect karma? Hrm.

Hrm. Some people belive just that. The only way to live a life as free of karma as possible, is to become isolationist. Buddhist monks do cloister themselves, partly for this reason, but mostly because later followers of buddha saw this as a way to evangelize buddhism. (You get in with the monks, you have a pretty good time of it, meditate all day, get supported by the community and respected as a wise man, sounds like a good deal to your average resident of Nepal and india in about 200 or 300 BC... India was still heavy into castes at the time, so it was a cool way to short circuit the whole caste system.) buddha was not an isolationist, he roamed about, living from doorstep to doorstep. But anyhow, there are groups in India, like the Jains, that cover thier faces with veils and wear no clothes, for fear, not only of using animal products, but of inhaling insects or protists. In fact, a noble way for an older Jain to die, and obtain enlightenment, is for him (or her) to retreat into thier rooms, meditate, and starve to death. You see, many religions that prescribed to the idea of karma, said that there were three ways to obtain release from karma, generally you have to do all of them together. The first, was to meditate. Once a hindu or buddhist gets the hang of meditating, they can subtract the ego from the process, and then they start burning off karma. The second was to read the Upanishads, the Sutras, and the Vedas. These are the "Holy books" of this religion. Unlike most other holy books, the Vedas are tracts that give advice about the right way to do all sorts of things.(the Kama Sutra is one, Kama means "Love" Sutra means "guidebook." But there are political Sutras, Cooking Sutras, Ayurvedic (Homeopathic) sutras, etc.)) Also unlike the bible and other scriptures, they are recognized to be the theories of wise men, not generally the words of gods, and are therefore open for debate. If you come up with a better idea, you can concievably get the rules changed. It isn't an easy process, but Vedas are still being written and revised today. The third way, is to practice Yoga, (yes, the exercise.) As laid out in the Yoga Sutra. (sounds like some type of drink you'd get ant an indian restaurant. "Yes, I'll have the Aloo Gobi, some Naan and a Sweet Yoga Sutra please.") A final way, added later after buddha, is the sudden awakening method, which sort of means that one day, "you just get it." So the Jain starving him or herself, they are meditating, (buring off karma) and then living without harming other things, which keeps them from adding any more on.

But this old way of thinking of karma, and karma removal, led to all kinds of odd rules and questions from all the common people, who not desiring to come back to the world and possibly be a politician, were anxious to get things right. The upanishads are full of transcripts of sermons where people in the crowd ask things like "do i earn karma while i sleep? do i remove it? Is sleeping meditating?" and then the rest of the book is an argument over what exactly the answer is (they agreed, eventually that they are "yes" and "no" and "no.")
So you end up with lots of examples and theories and explainations. "The body has twelve internal parts, there are fourteen kinds of right action, whereas mental obstcles come in three types, etc. " Leading to a long road map to enlightenment that would be, well impossible really, to achieve.

This generally continued until Buddha came along. I'm not going to tell the whole story of Buddha. It does relate in a way, because he tried lots of different things and never found satisfaction. I can recommend two "westernizations" of the story for you, "Siddhartha," by Hermann Hesse, and "the Razor's Edge" by Sommerset Maugham, if you are interested in learning more about that. But suffice it to say, that Buddha, after trying everything, became disgusted, and he sat down under a tree and sort of figured everything out. "The key to it," (he said, after becoming enlightened and running off to town to preach his first sermon,) "is dissatisfaction. Everything is dissatisfying, and must be so, by it's very nature." Actually, he had three parts:

1. there is a noble truth of pain, everything is painful and dissatisfying.
2. there is a cause to dissatisfaction, namely you. you crave this, you hunger for that, and nothing is as good as it should be.
3. there is a cure for dissatisfaction, since there is a cause --you-- we can control pain, mainly by fixing you.

now here we get to the real shaker, buddha claimed to have figured out how people relate to the universe, how incorrect thoughts and actions led to karma... he called it the "Twelve Fold Chain of Dependant Origination (now with new whitening power.):"

• ignorance(the inability to obtain nirvana) comes from karma
• karma comes from consciousness (remember, any action performed consciously, to suit your OWN ego, therefore all actions you are conscious of,)
• consciousness comes from "name and form" (aka ego)
• the name and form come from your senses (here they mean, your body. your physical senses, not what you "FEEL" when you sense things, that comes a little bit later))
• your senses come from contact
• contact comes from sensation, (now we are talking what you "FEEL."
• sensation comes from desire
• desire comes from attachment,
• attachment comes from existance
• existance comes from birth,
• birth comes from doing things wrong the last time around.

simple enough. and to the average hindu at the time, logical enough, it was all in the vedas, in the middle of those indecipherable rules. Now here buddha drops the bomb, by flipping the chain upside down you have a twelve step program to enlightenment.

• eliminate karma, and you eliminate consciousness
• eliminate consciousness, and you eliminate ego
• eliminate ego and you eliminate your senses
• eliminate the senses and you eliminate contact
• eliminate contact and you eliminate experience or sensation
• eliminate sensation, and you take out desire
• knock out desire and you cease all attachment
• ceasing attachment ceases your existance
• ceasing existance ceases rebirth
• with cessation of rebirth -- BAM -- nirvana.

In the course of this process, you cease karma building right away, in the second step or so. So, while meditating to eliminate the need for your senses, you will encounter powers unknown to man (travelling backwards in time, living a lifetime in a single heartbeat, walking on water, astral projection, etc) using these supernatural powers (while in a meditative trance, called Samhadi,) you burn off the cat-karma, and the insect-karma, and the god-karma, by projecting yourself into bodies of cats and gods and working your karma off. A really super meditator can even help work off someone else's karma.

So that's karma 102. I am hungry now (no enlightenment for me,) so i am going to get some food.