The Law of Kamma

Summary of the Lord Buddha’s Teachings

    The round of rebirth is perpetuated by the Law of Kamma which works all the time and never rests. It sends the consequences of our past overall Kamma as soon as it can and they manifest themselves as life's vicissitudes. Our good Kamma gives happy consequences while our bad Kamma gives unhappy consequences. In the context of the round of rebirth, there are four different types of human beings:

       1. Individuals Who Come from Darkness and Return to Darkness: An individual is reborn in abject circumstances and commits misdeeds through his body, his words, and his thoughts. After he dies, he will be reborn in the States of Unhappiness.

      2. Individuals Who Come from Darkness  and  Return to Light:  An individual is reborn in abject circumstances and endeavors to perform honest deeds through his body, his words, and his thoughts. After he dies, he will be reborn in the States of Happiness.

        3. Individuals Who Come from Light  and  Return to Darkness: An individual is born in good circumstances but commits misdeeds through his body, his words, and his thoughts. After he dies, he will be reborn in the States of Unhappiness.

       4. Individuals Who Come from Light and Return to Light:  An individual is born in good circumstances and performs honest deeds through his body, his words, and his thoughts. After he dies, he will be reborn in the States of Happiness.

      Of all living beings within the round of rebirth, human beings have the best opportunity to rid themselves of all defilements and achieve Emancipation. The process of Emancipation requires the scrupulous training of the body, the words, and the thoughts according to The Threefold Training and The Eightfold Path. The more scrupulous the training, the shorter the round of rebirth will be.

     Individuals who can achieve Emancipation through the Four Noble Truths and are on their way to attain Nibbana include Stream-Enterers (Sota-pannas), Once-Returners (Sakata-gamis), and Non-Returners (Ana-gamis). These holy individuals have a small amount of defilements left in their nature. If they can completely remove their residual defilements from their nature in the present lifetime, as soon as they die they will attain Nibbana and will no longer undergo the round of rebirth as in
the cases of the holiest individuals that include the Lord Buddhas, the Silent Buddhas, and the Arahats. As long as human beings cannot remove all the defilements from their nature, they will continue to undergo the round of rebirth just like the rest of the living beings. Living beings continues to encounter suffering as a result of their inherent defilements. All living beings risk the danger of committing misdeeds and receiving the ill consequences of their misdeeds. All living beings share the suffering of birth, aging, illnesses, and death. We are all compatriots under the dictate of our own defilements and the Law of Kamma. Therefore, we should not view each other as enemy, since our common enemy is the force which compels all living beings to undergo the endless round of rebirth.

     "Our nature is led by our mind. The mind is chief. Everything is achieved by the mind. If a person's mind is evil, whatever he says or does will eventually cause him to suffer." Everything depends on the mind. Someone once asked the Lord Buddha, "Of all the physical, verbal, and mental deeds, which type of deeds can wreak the most havoc?" The Lord Buddha answered that mental deeds can wreak the most havoc. The Lord Buddha also gave us an analogy to demonstrate the point. Suppose there was a village inhabited by 100 or 1,000 people and a man decided to kill all the inhabitants. He could succeed in killing perhaps ten to fifty people before he became physically fatigued and overcome by his enemy. This analogy shows clearly how one's mind is capable of thinking about doing something at a scale far greater than what can actually be carried out physically and verbally. If human beings can control themselves by practicing morality, there will not be any need for law and order, which serve to solve problems at the end result rather than at the root cause. Every human problem can be ended when each human being practices morality which is the beginning of all decency. It is crucially important that every human being learns to control his mind by returning it to its original location. A decent mind leads to decent words and action. Decency comes from keeping the Precepts so meticulously that not even a single thought of committing a misdeed is present. When the body is at peace, so will the mind be. Once both the body and the mind are at peace, it gives rise to mental discipline. The more mental discipline one possesses, the brighter one's insight will be. The more insight one gains, the better one can penetrate the reality of life, the reality of the worlds, and the reality of the Law of Kamma.