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| Rabbi Yeshua (Jesus) JewBu Nazarene/Essene |
Jews who follow Judaism (as opposed to most Jews who just wear the label "Jew" like a secular identity, race, ethnicity, claim to fame, burden, or way of showing support for genocide and Western imperialism to build "Greater Israel") subscribe to a belief in kismet rather than karma.- What is KISMET? KISMET = The Jewish Koan (fate, luck, fortune, chance, destiny, predestiny, "God's plan," capricious universal indifference to anything we do because it's all written in advance and plays out by the force of the Fates).
- KISMET translation question? : r/hebrew
- Kismet is "predestination" in Abrahamic Islam
Karma-shmarma, Judaism only believes in kismet (fate, destiny)
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| The historical Buddha, the greatest Karmavadin |
Karma means "deed" or "deeds." There are all kinds of karma, that is, a great variety of intentional actions capable of bearing a result anytime in the future. The Buddha or "Awakened One" talked about karma so much that in his day he was not known as a "Buddhist." He was known as a Karmavadin, a "teacher of the efficacy of karma (action)." What we do comes back to us. The Dharmic religions, in contrast with the Abrahamic ones, teach the power of our personal action. Our deeds got us into this mess, and they can get us out (with help from others like the Buddha, the best friend of all beings, the gods, God, noble friends, parents, but mostly our own striving to develop compassion and wisdom, which lead to calm and insight).
Sadly, we often do not realize what we do in this sense. According to the
Abhidhamma, a systematic explanation of the Buddha's "
Doctrine in Ultimate Terms," what we are doing anytime we are committing an action is laying down a great number of
cittas ("
mind-moments") that act like "seeds" as it were. (What worse is that they have
javanas, "
impulsions," sub-moments of motivation, sub-
cittas, a
citta being uncountable numbers of "mind moments" not thoughts, as the term is sometimes mistranslated).
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| How many frames does it take to complete one "action" in a film? Karma has many more cittas. |
- A "thought," if one thinks about it is like a sentence. What is a sentence? It is at least one complete thought, which requires an actor and an action, even if life is not this way. Grammar imposes rules on our thinking so that noun and verb must at least be implied to speak a sensible sentence in modern English. A citta, in that case, would be like all the atoms used to write out that sentence, far from sentences themselves. (Imagine a molecule. What is it made of? Atoms. How many? An uncountable number). Cittas (the stream of consciousness or viññāna kicca) in the immaterial world of intangible software are like kalapas ("particles of perception") in the material world of tangible hardware and things.
- A better way to think about it is to imagine seeing a movie clip, a short scene. It only lasts a moment, but what is it really made of? It is made of many many individual frames, which are the sub-moments of the film. The higher the fidelity of the film, the more sub-moments. There might be 100 frames for 1 second of movie runtime. A complete "scene" might then have millions of frames. A frame is not a scene; it's not even a second of a scene.
- Now imagine that when we act (karma), our action does not take one second but a few seconds to complete. How many sub-moments elapsed? It is hard to say. Each of those mind moments has many impulsions. If each impulsion could produce a result when it ripens, one act will give results for a long time. The number "500" comes up a lot in Buddhism, but it rarely if ever means five hundred. It is an indeterminate number and a handy way of saying "many." One act of killing could easily result in 500 miserable rebirths of being killed or being sickly or having one's life shortened, and so on. The Buddha expressed this as "for a long time," meaning in many many future births.
The force or deciding factor behind a deed is the intention. What is decided? At the decisive moment of acting, what we in our normal consciousness might think is happening is just one thought.
But that is not at all what is happening. The best comparison to understand this is physics. When something happens, it appears to us that only one thing is happening, such as lighting a match. It is often, we do an act, and it is lit. However, physics tells us that many things are happening in the sub-moments. Fire itself is not a single thing at all but rather a process.
Each moment of "fire" is many (at least five) sub-moments of process:
- Heat is heating,
- oxygen is oxidizing,
- fuel is fueling,
- wick is wicking, and the
- process of combustion is processing.
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| Abhidhamma (Sayalay Susila & Seven) |
So what? Here's what. How long does it take to kill someone? With a gun, not long. An instant is enough. With a knife, as used in the infamous case of Nick Reiner murdering his parents, longer, a few instants. How long is an instant? For us in ordinary consciousness, it is just a finger snap's duration, right? But how long is it
really, say, to a physicist or a psychologist? If we
analyze it, that is, break it down to sub-moments, it's a long time.
Here's why it all matters: It isn't that one karma (one deed) will bear one result. This is completely wrong, but it's how nearly everyone talks, as if one action would bear just one result one time. One karma, one intentional action, will bear MANY results. Some might say an uncountable number of results. Now why is that? It is because each single "act" (deed) is built out of many impulsions, and it is these impulsions (as if they were seeds) that will bear results. So one single deed = a hard to count number of potential results.
The intention behind an act is so crucial that the Buddha equated
intention (
cetanā) and karma. They are not really the same thing, but so vital is that intention that it determines the classification of a deed. There are three obvious classes (good, bad, or neutral). That is, we can classify by results: This deed, when it ripens, will bear an unpleasant (possibly unbearable), unwelcome, unwanted result, so we call it bad. This other deed, when it ripens, will bear a pleasant, welcome, wanted result. Many deeds, being mixed, will bear mixed results. One might say other deeds, being neither good nor bad, will bear neutral results.
If I give even one unit (ancient
kapana, dollar,
rupee, coin), the motivation or intention behind it will reap many results many times because that one single act of giving was only accomplished through many sub-moments, many-many impulsions. If each
citta (mind moment) is composed of many sub-moments, many impulsions, and each has the power to produce a result, one can see how even a little giving is great. However, this is simultaneously saying that even the slightest wrong (misdeed, unskillful act, bad action) has the power to produce many-many unwanted results.
This is all well and good and easy enough to understand. The Buddha went further to point out things that are not at all obvious. In fact, it is unlikely that anyone but a supremely enlightened buddha could point all of these things out. Why? The first thing that is needed is access to more than normal consciousness. This even an average, normal, instructed "worldling" can master.
Never having heard the Buddha's
Dhamma (Dharma, Doctrine, Teaching), we are "uninstructed [ignorant] worldings." Having heard it, we are
instructed worldlings. Putting it into successfully practice, we experience a "change of lineage" (
gotrabhu), awaken, and are counted among the "
noble ones," the enlightened in about seven stages (now universally reduced to four main divisions (stream entry, once-returning, nonreturning, and
arhats or fully enlightened ones).
- NOTE: It may be a little confusing, but "full" enlightenment is not "supreme" enlightenment. That distinction is reserved for people like the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama (Siddhattha Gotama) who awaken to the utmost WITH the capacity to teach. Nonteaching (pacceka) buddhas awaken to the utmost, that is with the intrepid powers of a buddha or the dasa-(tathāgata-) bala.
He led us to understand one more extremely important distinction to be made. And here come to the point of all this discussion. There is a fivefold kind of karma (kamma in Pali) that might be called "the worst in the world." These are the ānantarika-kamma or:
The Five Heinous Deeds
The are five acts (five kinds of karma) that the Buddha classified as "actions with immediate destiny." They are:
- parricide (killing one's father),
- matricide (killing one's mother),
- killing an arhat (a fully enlightened person),
- wounding a buddha (a teaching [samma-sam-buddha] or nonteaching [pacceka-buddha] supremely enlightened person),
- creating a schism in the Buddha's Monastic Order (Bhikkhu or Bhikkhuni Sangha).
In A.V. 129, it is said:
"There are five irascible and incurable humans destined to the lower world [dismal subhuman planes of existence] and to hell [
avici, the waveless], namely: the parricidal, matricidal, homicidal [if the victim is an arhat], the wounder of a
buddha, the creator of a schism in the
sangha of a
buddha."
About this fifth kind, see A.X. 35, 38.
With regard to the first heinous crime, it is said in DN 2 that if [greedy son]
King Ajātasattu had not deprived his father [the Buddha's student and supporter
King Bimbisara] of life, he would have reached the path of stream-entry when he heard the Buddha teach as did all of his companions (App.)
Because he did commit this act, even though he was full of remorse for having done so, he was lost. His mind/heart could not reach the necessary calm and serenity (samatha) to attain liberating-insight (vipassana) to awaken to the ultimate truth. He did not become free of his destiny [his immediate next rebirth in the hells] as a result of his heinous deed nor of all further rebirth and suffering in samsara, the unending Cycle of Rebirth and Suffering (the Wheel of Life and Death).
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Legends of ancient races of giants (asuras in Buddhism and other Dharmic traditions) are shared among cultures that span across multiple continents around the world. They are also included in the most popular religions on earth. The ancient Greeks describe giants included among Greek gods. There are many different words used to describe races of massive humans, such as the "Nephilim" of the Jewish-Christian Bible. Descriptions of red-haired, six-fingered giants are shared by different Native American groups in North and South America, such as those in the USA and Peru. 
