Dosho Port has a post up called "Dharma as Moral Principle" that has a great quote from the book The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character by Dale Wright.
This vividly illuminates the Buddha's teaching on karma --
Every choice we face provides us with an opportunity either to embrace or to break the hold that the past has had on us. No matter how often we have chosen a certain way in the past, so long as we are human, we retain the freedom (to varying degrees) to disown earlier patterns and to break out onto a new path. But all of our previous decisions are weighing heavily in the direction of the character we have formed for ourselves through previous actions, thus making decisive change difficult.
Wright says also that karma is "... one of the most ingenious cultural achievements to emerge from ancient India. It has enormous promise for future world culture - a way to understand the relationship between moral acts and the kinds of life that they help shape."
Karma is essential to Buddhist understanding of morality, but not because it is some kind of rewards-or-punishments system. It isn't. Karma makes no judgments, nor is it directed by some cosmic intelligence who knows if you've been naughty or nice. The Buddha also taught that karma is not fate. It does not bind you to a pre-determined future because of something you've done in the past.
However, Wright says karma is a "way to understand the relationship between moral acts and the kinds of life that they help shape." The life we are living is being shaped by our thoughts, words, and deeds. And this is happening right now; you don't have to wait for some other life to experience the effects of your actions.
Decisions made do weigh on us, and their presence is lasting. This is why human freedom is so profound in its significance, awesome in its magnitude. All of us, to the extent that we are human and free, remember with terror and regret bad decisions that we have made in the past. These memories sensitize us to the responsibilities that accompany our freedom and help us to grasp just what is at stake each time we choose."
With every choice we make, we create our lives. Our choices also impact countless other lives. The more you appreciate this, the more mindful you become of the choices you make. For this reason, karma is essential to Buddhist understanding of morality.
From this perspective, merely following a list of rules said to have been formulated by a God sometime during the Iron Age is a poor substitute for morality. This legalistic view of morality presents morality as a restriction. But human freedom is "so profound in its significance, awesome in its magnitude," Wright says. And this takes us to moment-to-moment practice. Moment to moment, we can choose to stay stuck, or we can choose to be free (and yes, I'm giving myself a pep talk here).
Sometimes I wish that the word karma had never entered pop culture via the sixties and so forth. As in that little jar for tips at Starbucks that says “karma jar”. It really has put the idea in most people’s heads that karma is some kind of magic.
“With every choice we make, we create our lives. Our choices also impact countless other lives.”
Reading this entry I can’t help but think of Sartre’s existentialism (”With every choice we make, we create our lives”)– except that Buddhism goes beyond this separate, isolated, Cartesean self, recognising the inter-dependence of all beings (”Our choices also impact countless other lives”).
As much as I have been attracted to existentialism in the past, I have always had this nagging feeling that, at bottom, the decisions one makes are purely subjective. Buddhism goes beyond this the understanding of “emptiness,” which implies an intricate and infinite network beings all connected together (or “inter-being,” as Thich Nhat Hanh likes to say) .
P.S. This is not to imply that Buddhism is just simply another philosophy that is equally interchangeable with something like existentialism.
P.P.S. I’m really enjoying these karma-related posts!