Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Karma and Freedom - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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Karma and Freedom - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddha Dharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:16
  Jogen: I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma. I take refuge in Sangha. Thank you for being here tonight. I'm continuing talking about, karma.
• 0:31
  On one hand, I think this is a concept, if we don't think of it metaphysically, that we understand culturally. Right? Like, new age traditions talk about state of mind and and intent and effects of that, and psychologists and therapists talk about state of mind and the effects of that. And, however, there's the level, that the Buddha was emphasizing that is a little bit different, and I'm gonna get into some of that. But to review the key points from last time.
• 1:06
  So our actions of body, speech, and mind have effects that are immediate and cumulative. K? And we have, conscious and unconscious actions of mind, speech, heart, body, attitude. I think it's really important to think of attitudes as karmic abidings that interact with externals and affect our life. And they tend to self perpetuate unless they're interrupted by awareness.
• 1:38
  The more you do something, the more you do it. Right? The more you you make a groove which we understand in different ways nowadays. And we can end up somewhere we don't want to end up because we're not paying attention to the interaction of what we do and what is starting to happen. I was talking earlier today with an extremely lonely person who is so angry and negative and judgmental and they don't really understand why they have no friends because they haven't paid attention to karma.
• 2:12
  So ultimately, we contemplate karma to vision and design our trajectory in a positive way, Not believing that some body of action is not going to have an effect. We're trying to undo the belief of, like, the get away with it mindset. And I was... I've been revisiting some of the suttas. That's the name for the Pali...
• 2:45
  Collected Pali teachings of the Buddha. And, you know, the Buddha's concern on karma is not like, what actions can I take so that I get wealthy or stay healthy or something like that? Mostly, Buddha's main concern with karma, with actions that lead to results, is not feeding tendencies that lead away from ultimate peace. And those are the the karmas, the actions that seed effects that the Buddha was, mostly concerned with. A skillful karma would be that which leads towards ultimate peace, and unskillful karma would be that which leads away from it.
• 3:36
  So most of us, we are kind of a mix of skillful and unskillful karmas and some of that's by choice and some of that is, oh, maybe interesting to notice that. By ultimate peace, the Buddha's definition is something like peace that is not dependent on circumstance. So it's not even a state so much as a the discovery of a place that is undisturbed. And there's a little bit of a seeming paradox. Well, if this place is undisturbed and it's unconditioned peace, then what does what does that have to do with karma?
• 4:23
  Why should we worry about karma if this place is undisturbed? Well, it takes supportive circumstances and the cultivation of wise intentions to lead to discover such a place. Right? We need a healthy body. We need safety.
• 4:40
  We need to train in various ways. So what are some of the tendencies that lead away from, ultimate peace according to the Buddha? And because I have lazy karma, I don't put in the time to find citations to reference where the Buddha said these things. You just kinda have to take my word for it sometimes. So what are some of the tendencies that lead away from ultimate peace, which would be considered unskillful karmas for a practitioner?
• 5:17
  First of all, be any actions that lead to a burdened conscience. Anything you do that afterwards you do not feel clean about, that sticks because your integrity is is is not in line with it. That would be... Anytime we do one of those actions, that's an unskillful karma. Whatever creates regret, whether that's how we use the Internet, how we talk to our mother on the phone, how we relate to our roommate, how we walk down the street.
• 5:52
  I don't know. It could be... Could really be it could really be very, particular. A lot of the precept study we do is a lot about this. You practice, you study the precepts.
• 6:09
  If you really live them, you're much less likely to take actions that lead to a burden to conscience. K. So that's number one tendency that leads away from ultimate peace, unskillful karma from the Buddhist point of view. Number two would be following desires without sovereignty. I'm using the word sovereignty because that's how it feels to me when I have habit energy sprout.
• 6:40
  So past karma says, hi. And I watch it arise, and I hold my ground as stillness and I don't follow it. I'm sovereign over that desire. If I don't have that ground of stillness, if I don't have that steadfastness from meditation, I can't really actually do that. And, so then basically, well, any desires I can follow, I will.
• 7:03
  That's what human beings do. If I can fulfill that desire, I'm gonna fulfill it. Especially if I think I'm gonna get away with it and it's not gonna have any negative consequences. So following a desire is without sovereignty, means no reflection. Where is this something I should do?
• 7:23
  Is this gonna lead someplace good? What's the consequence? Without a pause, without a moderation even. I think from the Buddha's point of view, it's unskillful karma from a couple, vantage points. One is that, desires don't ultimately work.
• 7:42
  They don't lead to ultimate peace. Now, could say temporarily or maybe for a long time, but still temporarily the desire to do spiritual practice is a wholesome desire. Buddha said exactly that. There's a Sutta where someone says, hey, what about the karma of spiritual practice? And he said, that's good karma.
• 8:00
  You will free yourself from that karma when you need to free yourself from that karma. For now, don't be a wise ass. Just don't try to make a loophole. Don't be a Dharma lawyer. I just forgot what I said.
• 8:16
  So, following desires without sovereignty. Oh. So the more we follow a desires without sovereignty, the more we're just at the whim of our impulses and our instincts. And that will likely have ethical effects and consequences because karma is real, but, even deeper when we follow desire without sovereignty, we're not in the still point, and then we are spiritually compromised. We're not in that place that feels like choice, that choice feeling place of awareness, where we do something, and let's say we did follow a desire, but we did that with some kind of consciousness.
• 9:01
  We really consented rather than... So from the Buddha's point of view, my understanding of his teaching, following desires without sovereignty is unskillful karma. Because the more we do that, the harder it's gonna be to stop doing that. The more we do that, the harder it's gonna be to stop doing that. Number three of the karmic tendency is that lead away from ultimate peace, a mind that is self perpetuating an occupation with views, notions, and concepts.
• 9:41
  If you read, someone was sharing... There's a body of Suttas, something called like the basket of the eights, and it's a certain way that the teachings are organized. But especially when you read source teachings from Mahayana Buddhism or the Pali Canon like I'm referencing, the Buddha didn't really want you to be super into philosophy. He didn't want you to be into Buddhism. There was no Buddhism at that point.
• 10:10
  At that point, the idea was realize your mind. Realize what this mind is. Rest in its abiding depth. All the all the cultivation of views, whether they be cosmological or philosophical or even social, from the Buddhist point of view, all of those are not helpful. Right?
• 10:37
  They they take us away from direct experience. We actually begin mistaking the menu for the meal in every domain of life. And the point of, the Dharma is that you can trust when you eat the meal, your response arises from there. A good counter argument could be made that well, there are concepts that lead to the undoing of concepts. That's a good argument.
• 11:14
  Number four of the tendencies that lead away from ultimate peace. Living in circumstances where contemplation, meditation, and virtue are not practiced or valued. That's a tough one for laypeople to hear sometimes. We don't like that. This is something the Buddha Buddha taught though, that if we live in such circumstances, if we're not careful, it will rub off rub off on us in a way that is, not helpful.
• 11:49
  Our vow may be kind of fragile. Our affinity for the spiritual path may be a little bit nascent, And so to protect that, one way to protect that is to keep good company. Now, we could say, well, there's a more subtle value of this that the circumstances where contemplation, meditation, virtue, or practice and valued are right here. They're in me. Right?
• 12:16
  I learned to do meditation in a house where drugs were being dealt continually. Nobody cared. They didn't they didn't bother me though. Nobody cared. So this is, a reminder that we're very permeable.
• 12:35
  We're so permeable to the influence of others. Have you ever noticed that if you hang around somebody, especially if they have a strong personality for a good while, you start to take on their speech habits? But we take on mind habits too. And then, a tendency that leads away from ultimate peace that, of course, we were working on, counteracting with a positive karma is distracted mind. This distracted mind is considered, a little bit like dangerous, actually, or a mind a mind that a person without any control over their attention is talked about as being somewhat of a danger to themselves.
• 13:38
  This is in light of the desire for ultimate peace. So, you know, the above could be really expressed positively. So the Buddha does talk about make make good karmic seeds. So take actions with a clear mind and a kind heart and envision the causal result. Just think about what we're doing and where it's going.
• 14:09
  That's interesting. That is not something that that that, happens if you just sit with a quiet mind. You have to use your faculty of imagination. You have to really think into the future with choices that one one is making. Then cultivating contentment would be a positive way of saying have sovereignty over desire.
• 14:33
  Cultivate contentment. And learn to appreciate, what we have, what comes towards us naturally. Buddha said a mind self perpetuating with views and concepts is not leading towards ultimate peace. That's why you meditate. He said, it's not not excellent karma to hang out with people that, are disinterested in the spiritual life.
• 15:01
  That's why we invest in spiritual friends. We we come to sangha. As you as you hear these things, I I hope you can hear it without, a kind of like rigidity or like 10 commandments kind of vibe. It's more like it's more like a soft, your life circumstances are completely workable. They can be informed by this kind of thinking.
• 15:34
  Right? And to to let them begin to be informed by this kind of thinking may be of benefit. I think that's the that's the vibe generally coming from the Buddha around this stuff. Now, in these Suttas, a lot of the time the Buddha was talking to monks and nuns, full time contemplatives. Right?
• 15:56
  So Buddha was speaking to people who said the number one thing that matters to me or I'm organizing my life around liberation. Right? So it's like a teaching coming from like that kind of level of uncompromising. He did talk differently to lay people about generosity. He did.
• 16:15
  He said, don't be heedless, keep the precepts, be generous, pay attention to your mind. We're kind of in between who the Buddha was talking about. Many of you are very serious practitioners, but you're not monks, nuns or whatever. So then I wanted to talk about, atonement and liberating karma. Somebody yesterday asked a little, asked about atonement, and I only talked on it, briefly.
• 16:50
  So atonement at one mint. Suppose that, Zazen activates a moral and ethical healing, which is to say that the whole mess of suffering depends on us never stopping and being still and looking at what's going on. The whole mess of suffering depends on human life being uninterrupted reaction, nondiscerned... It it on... Suffering depends on not stopping and looking at the mind.
• 17:32
  So we stop, and we start to see things that move through our minds and hearts that that, oh, I didn't know that was there. There's a there's a kind of ethical, reckoning with oneself when we begin to do steady practice. We begin to be in awareness that's loosened from the ego, and then all of a sudden, we are given insights on the ways that we're not free from the ego. It be... We begin to see our past often in a new light.
• 18:08
  Things things we did, things that happened, things that we thought happened to us, we might discover, oh, I I participated in some of that. Because look at this state of mind that's arising now. This state of mind that's arising now was arising in the past. So atonement means, we're doing this kind of, you know, in AA, they call it a moral inventory. I don't wanna be too heavy handed about this because the flavor is not heavy handed for everybody.
• 18:45
  But we begin to to fathom our own hearts more clearly, and the first thing is we're sitting, there's a felt acknowledgment about that. We're undoing, denial about these things that move through us. We feel them. We see them. We own them.
• 19:05
  And then atonement means we have we have a quality of of remorse. We don't want to perpetuate the unskillful reverberating karmas for ourself or for others. At this point, when we have, the, acknowledgment, the owning, and then we have, the spiritual quality of remorse, then sometimes we do corrective or repair action. Sometimes there's specific things we can do to make amends or to compensate. There's lots of practices around that.
• 19:48
  That can be very helpful. Sometimes, all we have or additionally what we have is just the intention to do better. I think we see the unskillful thing that lives through us, and we begin to counter and undo that through an intention to do better. So in this sense, we notice an unskillful karma and then we we begin to counter it with a skillful karma. You know, for...
• 20:23
  And for myself, like, I'm thinking I went into, monastic training when I was 23, and I was so selfish. I was so selfish, I didn't even know I was selfish. I never thought there was good feeling or for helping other people. Like maybe my grandma, maybe my girlfriend, but like just helping people like that was a good thing to do. No.
• 20:46
  It was all about me. And so I had this this unskillful karma of self centeredness, and then I was in this environment where the message was continually show up for others, show up for others, give, give, serve, serve, serve. And so my tendency of of selfish karma was gradually counteracted. And it's not that that... It's still not there, but now there's another momentum in my in my mind stream.
• 21:12
  Thanks to, the Dharma. Thanks to monastic life. So back to the Buddha, the Buddha, actually was ultimately not concerned about us creating good karma. And the Buddha was concerned with us undoing karma altogether so we could be really fresh awake hearts that just respond on the spot without contrivance. And so here here is actually a quote from the Buddha.
• 21:52
  Buddha says, what is the cessation of kamma? Whoever touches the release that comes from the cessation of bodily comma, verbal comma, and mental comma, this is called the cessation of comma. In other words, it's not doing. Tendencies that move through us that are not helpful, tendencies that are, just automatic habits, we just stop and watch them come and go, and in not pushing or pulling with them, they begin to lose their, body. They're bodied.
• 22:30
  They're they're re substantiated through our push and pull with them. So if we have angry thoughts, for a while, it's really helpful to counteract with loving thoughts, But eventually, even that loving thoughts becomes a new tethered post. We become imprisoned by that making of good karma. So ultimately, we wanna just be able to watch things come and go, come and go. You might experience this as, oh, thought is just a thought.
• 23:06
  I don't have to follow this. Or this impulse is simply an impulse. I don't have to follow it. Just because I have a pint of ice cream in the refrigerator and I'm feeling uncomfortable, doesn't mean when the impulse arises, I have to go eat that ice cream. And I'm using an innocuous habit because it's relatable, but there are a lot more...
• 23:30
  There are habits with much more fangs than that that many of us have. I I can be... I hold fast. It arises. It exists.
• 23:39
  It disappears. And at first, that seems like, well, like austerity or I'm just like, I don't know, hair shirting myself. I'm just I'm just, disciplining myself. But eventually, happens is that that habit, that impulse becomes transparent and begins to lose its potency. And it really is really, choice like.
• 24:04
  I could I could do it or not. And there's that that sovereignty more and more. An impulse can be followed or not from the still point. A perception can be believed or not from the still point. So I think our practice in Zen tradition, as I said last week, is a mix of simultaneously undoing the unwholesome karma, the the the reverberating habits, actions that are are not helpful to us, and cultivating positive ones at the same time.
• 24:48
  Like, we're doing we're doing them both. And then eventually, according to Buddha, maybe they both both of those fall away, and we're just left with spontaneous heart. And we're just responding moment to moment from from the deepest place that we have discovered, and we might not know what will come out. It might even surprise us.
• 25:15
  Jomon: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendust.org. Your support supports us.