Karma is so complex a topic that trying to fathom the "working out of karma" is something on a scale so staggering that it is considered one of the Four Imponderables in Buddhism. Only a buddha can begin to navigate the intricacies, probabilities, and intrepidities of how any deed (action) will meet its many results.
Therefore, the comic above is very funny. Of course, we do not see things working out! We are, for one thing, looking on too infinitesimally small a timescale. For another, imagine just the balls on a billiard table. They are all more or less equal, except for positioning.
One ball bangs into them, and no one can predict where they will go -- not even the one with the stick banging one into the others in a very controlled setting. Now take the countless variables associated with any single deed -- the intention behind it, the thoughts after it, the unknowable impacts on others... It's just too much.
Even the Buddha, when he looked into the future, did not give an exact date when things would happen. But he did know that when this or that sign appear, the results are coming, and that was on a grand scale of collective karma.
More importantly he knew that it was not possible for bad karma (such as the breaking of the Five Precepts) to produce a welcome result. This seems like nonsense to us because we get pleasant results from breaking them all the time.
What we don't know is that that result is not the karmic result, the vipaka. When that resultant ripens, woe. If we knew that, what we shrink back from the unskillful, the unwholesome, and the unwise courses of action, of which there are ten, the Ten Courses of Unwholesome Action.
The Four Imponderables
- buddha-range of buddhas [i.e., the range of powers a Buddha develops as a result of becoming a buddha];
- jhana-range of one absorbed in jhanas (the meditation absorptions) [i.e., the range of powers that one may obtain while absorbed in the jhanas];
- [precise working out of the] results of karma;
- speculation about [the origin, etc., of] the cosmos.
These four are imponderables that ought not to be speculated about [as doing so may lead one to become unhinged and nevertheless not understand them, when the path-of-practice that is the purification of the mind/heart is here and yields insight into all these things and why they are imponderable in the first place].
- NOTE: (SN 56.41 develops this speculation as the ten indeterminate).
Acinteyya literally means "that which cannot or should not be pondered or thought about, the unthinkable, the incomprehensible, the impenetrable, that which goes beyond the limits of thinking and over which therefore one should not ponder.
These Four Imponderables (unthinkables) are:
- the sphere of a buddha (buddha-visaya),
- the sphere of the meditative absorptions (jhāna-visaya),
- the sphere of karmic-results (kamma-vipāka),
- brooding over the world (loka-cintā), particularly over an absolute first beginning of it. (See A.IV.77).
SUTRA
"Therefore, O meditators, do not brood [fret, preoccupy, waste time, become distressed] over the world as to whether it is eternal or not eternal, finite or infinite (limited or endless)...
"Such brooding, O meditators, is senseless, has nothing to do with genuine good conduct (see ādibrahmacariyaka-sīla, "supreme or higher morality"), does not lead to turning away, letting go, extinction [of delusion and suffering], nor to peace, full comprehension, awakening (enlightenment), and nirvana, and so on" (S.56.41).
"Such brooding, O meditators, is senseless, has nothing to do with genuine good conduct (see ādibrahmacariyaka-sīla, "supreme or higher morality"), does not lead to turning away, letting go, extinction [of delusion and suffering], nor to peace, full comprehension, awakening (enlightenment), and nirvana, and so on" (S.56.41).
- Buddha's Wisdom (video); Ven. Nyanatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary; commentary and editing by Dhr. Seven and Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly Wiki edit
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