What's karma? Instant-COMEDY (video)

Seth Auberon, Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven (ed.) Wisdom Quarterly; Buddhist Dict.; Failstagram

WARNING: Graphic videos depict comical accidents and casual all-American violence!

(Failstagram) COMPILATION: INSTANT KARMA, Instant Justice Fails Bully Fight Funny Videos 2016

Laughing "Buddha" (a.k.a. Budai)

Karma has a very wide meaning with a great deal of detail explained by the Buddha. But in American English, "karma" means something like retribution, poetic justice, tit for tat, getting something in return just like the thing given.

The key is the underlying motivation or directed-intention (cetana) behind an act. Karma means directed "action." When the mind/heart directs the body and/or speech faculty to act -- when it wills and carries something out -- we store up the potential (latent karma) for that act to fruit.

It will not likely fruit in the same way, but whatever way it finds to produce its result, it will be pleasant if it is motivated by either nonclinging, nonaversion, or nondelusion and unpleasant if motivated by greed, aversion, or wrong view.

• What is "greed"? A better translation for lobha might be craving, clinging, grasping, or the deluded urge to get, possess, hoard things that are inherently impermanent/hurtling toward destruction as if they could produce satisfaction when they are inherently disappointing by nature. It is one of the three unwholesome roots and a synonym of lust (rāga) and thrist/craving (tanhā).

That is a simple and general way of saying something all-encompassing about a topic that is very complicated.

He firmly believes laughter is best medicine.

Our karma is our choices, our acts (of will, speech, or body), our doings. What we get in return is NOT our karma but our vipaka and phala, "mental-results" and "fruits."

 

One act produces much fruit because (as explained in the Abhidharma) one act is not really just one act but countless acts of volition, impulsions, mental directions.

 

How? "Mind" is not a thing but a process. That process is composed of countless mind-moments or "consciousnesses" (cittas and related mental factors), the discrete elements in a stream of impulsions or acts-of-will or something akin to subroutines in software.

Lying to world in self-serving bid for power

Just uttering a word or raising one's arm, for instance, requires many tiny acts. Thinking a thought, or planning something out, is overflowing with processes. These mind-moments go by at tremendous, almost unimaginable speed. They can be viewed in meditation augmented by absorption, then reviewed in a slowed down and methodical way, like reviewing a reel of film in slow motion.

 

Then we can see that what the Abhidharma ("Higher or Ultimate Teaching" of the Buddha) is talking about. It's not a commentary, as some people insist, but the Dharma when explained in ultimate rather than "conventional" terms. The sutras (discourses) are in conventional language.

(TwisterNederland) Instant-Karma Fail Compilation July 2015-February 2016

"Karma" defined
Ven. Nyanatiloka (Buddhist Dictionary, palikanon.com)

Budai/Hotei is the Fat, Happy Bodhisattva

Thus the Buddhist term "karma" by no means signifies the result of actions and quite certainly not the fate of a person or perhaps even of whole nations (the so called mass, wholesale, or group-karma*), misconceptions which, through the influence of Theosophy, have become widely spread in the West.
 

"Volition (cetanā), O meditators, is what I call action, for [it is] through volition [that] one performs the action by body, speech or mind.

"There is karma [action], O meditators, that ripens in hellish worlds... karma that ripens in the animal worlds... karma that ripens in human worlds [there are many more than one]... karma that ripens in heavenly worlds [there are many]...

"Threefold, however, is the FRUIT of karma: acts ripening during this life time, ripening in the very next birth, ripening in subsequent births..." (A.VI.63).

The three conditions or roots (mūla) of unwholesome karma are greed (lobha), hatred (dosa), and delusion (moha); wholesome karmic roots are: unselfishness, hatelessness (adosa=mettā, friendliness, goodwill, kindness), undeludedness (amoha = paññā, wisdom, right understanding, knowledge).

The Five Precepts overcome bad karma.

"Greed [clinging], O meditators, is a condition for the arising of karma; hatred [aversion] is a condition for the arising of karma; delusion [wrong view] is a condition for the arising of karma..." (A.III.112, A.III.34, A.III.147).

 

"Unwholesome actions are of three kinds, conditioned by greed, or hate, or delusion [or a combination because all acts of greed or hate are always conditioned by delusion].
 
"(1) Killing... (2) stealing... (3) sexual misconduct [intercourse with the ten off-limits partners]... (4) perjury... slander... harsh speech... foolish chit-chat [these four are together called "false speech" with (5) consuming intoxicants that lead to performing heedless actions one later regrets], if practiced, carried out, and frequently cultivated leads to rebirth in hellish worlds, or among animals, or among ghosts" (A.VIII.40).

• *[There is a kind of "group karma" as evidenced by what befell the Shakyas who had in past lives poisoned a river. See also the women who together tried to set fire to an arshat (who unbeknownst to them was protected by jhana) to conceal an accident. It is individual because everyone who participates in an act later experiences the results of that act, and as individuals tend to be reborn in again and again in groups or clusters, they will from time to time experience results, pleasant and unpleasant, together to the degree of their participation and gravity of their action.]