“We are already in the ocean of Buddha’s world, but we don’t know where the water is.”
– Dainin Katagiri, “Each Moment Is the Universe”
Dainin Katagiri was born and raised in Japan and did his early training in Zen there before coming to the U.S. in the 1960s to help support the growing interest in Zen study and practice in the West. I’ve been reading a collection of his talks titled “Each Moment Is the Universe” and trying to make some sense of it. The title itself is like a koan to me, mysterious and elusive, but also sweet and rich with implicit meaning.
He speaks at length about the Buddhist idea of karma, admitting – much to my own relief – that it is a notoriously tricky topic to wrestle with or to understand. At one point, he says:
“Karma in Buddhism means to act, to work, or to do.”
So far, so good, although, according to Katagiri Roshi, this includes both mental and physical action.
Our common sense understanding of human action is that it has an observable beginning and an observable end. You pick something up, for example, and then you put it down. Or you let out a shout, and the sound you’re making starts and stops, then fades away. But in thinking about karma, we have to think about some aspect of the action remaining and being carried forward into the future, like a perfume might leave a lingering scent in a room, or the way a sound might echo and reverberate for some time in a canyon.
Likewise karma, as Katagiri talks about it, seems to be something that accompanies us as we make our way down whatever road we’re traveling.
One difficulty with this image is that karma – much like a sense of sinfulness – often seems much heavier, much more substantial, than a scent in the air or an echo on the wind. The burden of our past actions can often feel more like a heavy set of chains wrapped around us – like the chains tormenting the ghost of Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol” – holding us hostage and keeping us stuck, unable to move freely or to make positive changes in our lives.
“Karma’s a Bitch”
The popular – and decidedly limited – conception of karma in the West often hinges on the idea that our past actions have definite consequences, and especially that the bad things we do will come back to revisit us, or – just as likely – to haunt us and punish us.
“What goes around, comes around,” you might hear people say, or even the more pointed phrase “Karma’s a bitch.” The idea of righteous payback for those who do wrong is an attractive idea – at least until we’re the ones doing the wrong!
But Katagiri warns that we can’t think of karma only in this limited – and often extremely negative – sense.
“Karma is not something pessimistic. If you think of karma as something wrong, you are seeing karma only according to what happened in the past. You look at the past and karma becomes a monster. So you should also look at karma in the present and future. Then karma becomes something very wide and really alive.”
Thinking about karma as some sort of cosmic comeuppance probably has its uses – at least up to a point – in spurring us onward towards repentance. But the problem with making karma a monster is that, in doing so, we give it too much power, too much importance, and too much sway over who we are now. In the same way, when our practice of repentance is all tied up in sorrow, grief, and shame over our past actions, we give those actions – and especially those actions we deem most sinful – too much power over our present and over our future. We forget that each moment the world and all things in it are, in some mysterious sense, made new again.
When we get too caught up in making a monster out of karma, we’re the ones who usually end up ghastly and disfigured.
Old Life, New Beginnings
Katagiri continues:
“Karma is nothing but energy, the mainspring of creating vitality. If you see this original nature of karma, if you really understand this, that is called freedom. Freedom means that in the next moment you can manifest your life in a new way.”
I don’t know about you, but I find both comfort and inspiration in this broader understanding of the relationship between past, present, and future. There’s no denying that the past affects the present, and there’s no denying that our own past thoughts, words, and actions have an impact on who we are now and how we relate to others, to the world around us, and to ourselves.
But that’s not the end of the story. In some deeper sense, the story is starting anew each moment. Each moment is the universe, and every breath another turn of the page.