What is Karma, Anyway?
“Welcome to the Karma Café. There’s no menu. You will be served what you deserve.”
In the popular sitcom of a decade ago, My Name is Earl, our central character, Earl Hickey, played by actor Jason Lee, describes himself:
“I’m the kind of guy that if you saw me in a convenience store, you would wait out in your car with your family until I leave the store before going in.”
Earl, admittedly, is not a nice guy. He is a petty thief, a bully, and has committed transgressions against a long list of individuals – like the time he stole a car from a one-legged woman.
One day Earl buys a scratch-off lottery ticket. When he realizes he has a $100,000 winner in his hands, he demonstrates his joy by holding up the ticket and dancing around.
Unfortunately, his exuberance carries him out onto the street, where he is promptly hit by a car and thrown over the vehicle and onto the road surface.
The lottery ticket leaves his grasp and is blown away by a breeze.
While recuperating in the hospital, Earl watches a TV talk show in which the host talks about the concept of Karma. With his new, but incomplete understanding of Karma, Earl believes that this was a sign that he must make up for his many indiscretions.
Earl makes a long list of specific people he plans to do something good for so that Karma is good to him. His notion of Karma is quite vague and simplified, but he gets the gist that it is something along the line of “You get what you sow.”
And, indeed, Karma does have something to do with actions and consequences. However, Karma’s roots and how it works are a bit more complicated.
Soon after being released from the hospital, Earl starts picking up trash because, as he says, “I was a litterbug.” While doing so, the lost winning lottery ticket is carried by a breeze and brushes up against his shoe.
Earl decides that this good fortune is evidence that he is on the right track with Karma. He resolves to use his winnings to do good for everyone on his list.
A Brief History of Karma
The time for making “well-intentioned” New Year resolutions is nearly upon us. Perhaps you are considering a personal examination of how you treat others.
If you are religious, including all of the major religions, the course is clear – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” aka, the Golden Rule.
If you are more secular, you may call upon common decency and morality to guide your relationships with others.
The Western world, through scripture and the need for cooperation among people, is familiar with a certain sense of Karma. Without even having heard the word before.
To be clear, I am not the self-appointed arbiter of proper word usage, not by a long shot. I have broken many misdemeanor rules of grammar and composition. But, sometimes, powerful words like Karma make their way to the West only to become bastardized upon arrival.
These poor facsimiles then become embedded in our current lexicon and wander through our language as a pale ghost of their original meaning.
Like the terms sea change, awesome and disgust; we often put our seal of approval on a potent word only after being dumbed down. Such is the case with the term and concept of Karma.
Karma as a religious belief arose from several major Eastern religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism and Jainism. All put their unique spin on the concept.
The sacred scripture of Hinduism describes Karma in Sanskrit like this:
“Now as a man is like this or like that,
According as he acts and according as he behaves, so he will be;
A man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
He becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds’
And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.”
Rihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th Century BCE
However, this is where Karma gets a bit complicated, particularly in the West. There is the issue of reincarnation. And, as you may know, much of Christianity does not recognize the notion of rebirth.
(Some Gnostic Christian sects, generally referred to as Neo-Manicheans, fully embrace reincarnation.)
Earl believed that his good deeds would result in good fortune during his present life, and this is how most Americans who sling this word around also believe.
But, this is not the original concept of Karma in most Eastern religions. Simply put, our deeds, good or bad, follow the soul into its next life. And this repeats over and over until the soul sheds itself of greed, hatred and ignorance. *
It may require many lives to achieve ultimate enlightenment in a state of being called Nirvana. Then, and only then, is the soul freed from endless recycling.
So, even before we had a chance to mangle the original doctrine of Karma, the idea was already opaque. I will attempt not to muddy the waters further by splitting hairs, yet I hope to clarify Karma as something much more involved than the lower-case karma of Earl Hickey.
“When Karma comes back to punch you in the face, I want to be there – just in case it needs help.”
In Earl’s view of Karma, you can atone for your sins against others and then sit back and wait for an ambiguous entity, Karma, to bring good things to your life.
List the people you have harmed in some way and pay down your debt to the universe through acts of contrition coupled with good deeds. Then you can scratch the names off your victim list and consider what good things may come your way – a great job, a new car, unexpected inheritance.
Oh, were it that simple!
The Eastern notion of Karma is independent of deities or gods.
Karma is a natural law, like the speed of light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum. Nothing can exceed this speed; in physics, it is a universal constant, a cosmic law, if you will.
Because of this, the Eastern concept of Karma and its connection to reincarnation does not get much traction here in the U.S. It may be that we didn’t just dumb it down, but re-defined Karma to suit our own needs.
We have a phrase that aligns somewhat with the Karmic conception of the consequence of action:
“What goes around comes around.”
The phrase was coined sometime in the 1970s as the New Age movement strengthened. The Russian equivalent of this phrase is a bit more poetic; “As the call, so is the echo.”
Many people believe, myself among them, that you never really get away with anything untoward or wrong; it always “comes back to haunt you.” It’s as if something resembling Karma is already a cosmic law, even here in the West.
“Karma gonna get you. Gonna knock you right on the head.” John Lennon – Instant Karma.
So, when did Karma wash up on our shores?
Chalk it up to a huckster/medium named Madame Blavatsky – she would be the darling of the Spiritualist Movement that flourished in the late 1800s.
Described as a “chain-smoking, portly, Russian dame,” Helena Blavatsky has also been described as self-promoting and prone to outrageous flights of fancy.
Blavatsky was well-traveled, intelligent and charismatic. She co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Blavatsky is credited with bringing “Eastern wisdom to Western society through this organization.” **
As far as can be determined, Helena introduced the concept of Karma to the U.S. The society, still in existence today, embraces reincarnation, which squares with Eastern religions.
Blavatsky heralded the coming of the Aquarian Age. In astrology, this is a time when the world will live in Harmony and enlightenment.
(That’s a nice thought but we are a hell of a ways from having arrived.)
If you are old enough, you may remember the 1969 hit by The Fifth Dimension called “Age of Aquarius.” You probably recall the refrain, “Let the sunshine in.”
At the time, America’s youth searched for something to believe in outside the “establishment,” and Eastern wisdom fit the bill for many.
Then, the word Karma began to pop up in songs, literature and everyday conversation. John Lennon wrote “Instant Karma” in one day in 1970. It is considered the fastest-released song in history – and a hit to boot.***
The stage was now set; the New Age movement was soon upon us. And that word, Karma, transmogrified as it is, was awaiting a man named Earl Hickey to add a uniquely American twist to its meaning.
Today’s brash and impatient society has moved a step beyond Karma, a move into more negative territory.
We hear it quite often; we see it on bumper stickers and railcar graffiti in Chicago. I’m speaking of the anti-karma slogan, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.” (This pessimistic sentiment is good for a chuckle, though!)
As for me, I prefer Anne Herbert’s encouraging words on her restaurant placemats, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”
A happy and healthy New Year and Good Karma to everyone.
Ken Springer
Ken1949bongo@gmail.com
* Stanford University, Intro to Buddhism, Waka Takahashi Brown.
** Philosophy for Life by Jules Evans.
*** Instant Karma, by John Lennon, is better known by the chorus, “We all shine on.”