Law of karma concept is encircled with misbelief and confusion such as “the law of karma was invented by the Buddha” while it was actually discovered by the Buddha; it’s one law of nature that already existed.
Anybody who reaches that state of enlightenment can see the whole process of karma, so the karma is something that we can prove by ourselves. The word karma means “action with intention”. Everything that we do creates consequences. When it comes to the law of karma, it means “what goes around comes around”, whatever we do, whatever seed we planted, will grow to be the fruit in the future. Everything that has the cause always delivers an effect, no action goes to vain.
Most of the time people take the law of karma as personality; which is wrong. “I did something not nice doesn’t mean I am a bad person”, it doesn’t work that way.
The hard part is that we don’t know how these affects are going to come into our life because it doesn’t work like rice and beans. If you plant rice, within 3 month you can harvest the rice and get a lot of crops, but if you plant apple it will take 3 years for the apple tree to give the fruit and it will continue bearing fruit for another 10 years, which is different from rice. Karma is very hard to understand in the sense that we don’t know whether the fruit that we plant today will give the result tomorrow or some years later and that’s why people tend to forget about their karma because sometime it takes very long time for the effect to happen. Not to mention that some situations can be the result of a combination of positive and negative karma. For example, you get into trouble and at the same time there is somebody to help you out, those effects are the result of the combination of bad and good karma in the past, you did something bad against somebody but you also have good karma of helping others so those things combine to become that situation in your life.
When it comes to “karma”, we should not try to understand it based on our human intelligence; how the karma should result but rather focus on the cause of the action, that way we can take control. You are who you are today is the result of countless past karma combined and there are a lot of things that you can’t change that still can affect you. How you have been eating the last 10 years, will affect your health in the next 20 years. By changing to healthy diet today won’t make you become healthy immediately, that’s how karma works. What happens to you today could be the result of the karma you did 10 lifetimes ago or 20 lifetimes ago, combined with your action yesterday and they continue to give effect in future lives too.
The important notion is that “we can design our life”. We can understand life as both predestined and can be designed on choice of free-will. For the part that is predestined based on past karma, whatever we had done in the past, we can’t erase it, we can’t undo it, so just forget about it, take it as a lesson. Focus on today, so we can grow into a better state tomorrow; and that’s how we design our future. However, even though some situations are predestined by our past karma, we can still influence it and change it to be more positive later on by adding more good karma in our present time. When we know how the law of karma works, we can work around it, we can manage our life, we can take control of our life. What you want to be in the future, is the matter of choice and the result of action that you have done today.
