Well, given I have training in Zen, particularly Buddhism, I thought I could give the official Buddhist take on this.
Karma is a doctrine of morality in Buddhism. Moral (wholesome) actions - by manner of action, speech or thought - cause pleasant results; Immoral (unwholesome) actions cause unpleasant results. The doctrine says that all happiness and suffering is caused by a being’s own moral or immoral act, either in this life or previous lives.
In fact, you could directly translate karma as intent (cetanā). And from the Abhidharma, which is a text compiled by enlightened disciples of the Buddha:
What is cetanā? It is a mental activity that propels the mind forward. It has the function of making the mind settle on what is positive, negative, or indeterminate.
Some points worth noting:
-
There are four types of karma
- Dark karma (producing dark results)
- Bright karma (producing bright results)
- Mixed karma (producing dark and bright results)
- Neutral karma (producing neither dark nor bright results) ← Leads to enlightenment
-
Karma is not completely deterministic. Intent is what makes it variable. By providing wholesome conditions, you allow wholesome conditions to ripen. By providing unwholesome conditions, you allow unwholesome conditions to ripen.
- For example, bad friends enable bad actions, enabling dark karma. Doing more bad deeds enable you to do bad deeds more easily, enabling even more dark karma to ripen.
- On the other hand, good friends enable good actions, spiritual friends enable neutral actions, etc. Good deeds enable further good deeds, etc.
-
A karmic action has three components that needs to be fulfilled. If any of them are not complete, then the full karmic “ripple” does not occur - Intention, Action and Result. An example:
- Intention: “I want to stand out.”
- Action: Lying about your achievements.
- Result: Deceiving people, and gaining a mental imprint in your consciousness.
- Hence, you can have just intention, or intention+action, or intention+action+result, or even without intention you might accidentally do it (action+result), etc. So all these permutations control how karma fruitions.
-
Karma is completely individual, unique to each being’s mental-stream. This means that there is no actual thing as collective karma (although it can seem to look that way).
- The Buddha’s definition:
-
To the extent that there are beings — past and future, passing away and re-arising — all beings are the owner of their actions, heir to their actions, born of their actions, related through their actions, and have their actions as their arbitrator. Whatever they do, for good or for evil, to that will they fall heir.’
So karma removal may not actually make much sense. Instead, it is much better for us to change ourselves right now so that negative karma does not have as much ability to ripen for us, and to nourish our own positive actions so that positive karma can ripen more easily for us. Be kind, loving, help people and do positive deeds.
And if we want to transcend negative karma, we need to be able to discard the “storage consciousness” (Alaya-vijnana) that houses these mental imprints (analogy used are like sleeping seeds that ripen when conditions come). Only way that happens is through awakening, leading to full enlightenment.
