I so rarely hear of karma being mentioned in a way with which I agree, so either I'm just plain wrong or everyone else is just stupid; and my attention to grammar is too meticulous for me to be wrong.
Even at the monastery, I had to cringe when I heard someone mention something about a car accident and injury, and "What have I done to get this karma?". Dumbass. I think as a general rule, when one thinks about karma, don't be thinking "me". There is no 'me' in
Think of karma as a squishy stress ball, and if you press in on one side, it presses out somewhere else. But it's all one thing. My karma is the same thing as your karma and everyone else's karma. It's just the manifestations that are different, and manifested reality, the difference, is delusion. The "linear equation" karma is just so egocentric and dualistic, it can't be right. And any human morality or subjective indignation should just be let go. The universe isn't that petty.
And another thing! All discriminating and dualistic thoughts and actions, which is to say short of enlightenment, create karma. So even calling that guy "dumbass", if I'm attached to a notion of a dumbass, if I think of him as a dumbass separate from everything else in the universe that is not "dumbass", that creates bad karma. Fortunately, we are all dumbasses.
Actually, I think I'll stop there since I'm not sure I had any direct insight into the idea, and even though I feel I know what I'm talking about, it does come a bit too close to the Buddhist party line on the subject. Not that that's bad or good, I'm just not into dogma. It tempts the need for stamps of approval, which I eschew.
new topic:
I think my resistance to the label "Buddhist" is probably futile, and eventually I'm just going to have to accept it. Buddhism, and I say this with a grain of salt planted firmly in my cheek, hasn't taught me anything. It was more my thoughts were my own, and writings associated with Buddhism articulated them very well, and have continued, along with ideas from other traditions, to help guide the development of my being.
The danger, of course, is that it's like a church with something nice written on the front. So you step in the door and someone gives you a pamphlet. Next thing you know, you're espousing stuff from the pamphlet which you haven't critically digested, but you do it because you like being called the label that got stuck on you when you entered the front door.
But the problem with resisting being identified as Buddhist is that a lot of these things may be terms of art, and resisting the identity risks losing the point of reference. In fact, for most Americans, "karma" is dualistic, moral, petty, and smug. So I am wrong in my formulation of karma because I'm not talking about the same thing as most Americans, even in an American Zen Buddhist monastery. (which is not to deny the possibility that I am, in fact, just plain wrong).
