Dharma Talk July 18th: Intention

By Bup Chon

Many people who may know me at the temple or at my job many not be aware that I am also a martial arts teacher. I teach a Japanese Sword art a couple of nights a week and have been involved in martial arts for a large part of my life. Those who know me in that world may also know of my life at the temple. I often get, from both worlds, a question along the lines of: "How can you be a Buddhist and also be a martial arts teacher?" They seem to struggle with a dichotomy that they see between those two worlds. How can someone study the Dharma and also do something that seems so violent.

Before I tell you how I answer that question, let me first ask you a few questions:

Do you think I can take this big statue of the Buddha sitting behind me and smash it over your head and maybe severly hurt or kill you? Probably, its big and heavy.

Do you think I could take my mala and put it around your neck and choke you, probably killing you if it was done long enough? Probably so, the mala is pretty think and strong.

Do you think I could grab these brass candle sticks and strike you with them?

How about taking the cushion I am sitting on and put it over your face, cutting off your air?

So why don't I do those things? Because that is not my intention to do so, I sit here to try and help people, not harm them. The item in my hand is very secondary, either a sword or a stick of incense. That intention is also a very important part of our practice.

Intention ties into the concept of Karma and the results of good or bad Karma. Many people (especially raised in the west) have a very skewed idea of what karma is. They think of it as the result of something. Somebody does something bad, and three days later an anvil falls on their head, and people say: "Well, there's karma for ya!".

However, that would be saying that there is someone, or something that is watching, judging and creating, through some force, an action of retribution on that person. So if someone is bad, this "watcher" tracks on the chart of good and bad karma and dishes out the appropriate punishment. I believe we are ingrained with this idea from the years of growing up under the belief that someone (like God) is watching and judging every move to determine if we are good and go to heaven, or bad and go to hell. It also like Santa - he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you are awake, he knows if you have been good or bad...so be good for goodness sake (by the way, Santa really sounds a lot like a stalker).

The Truth however, is that there is nobody watching you, and "Karma" is not the result, its the origination. Karma is what you put out into the world, the world that is subject to one of the most basic Buddhist concepts; that of cause and effect (Hetu, cause and Phala, effect). All things that arise effect one another endlessly and there is nothing that does not fall into that rule. However, Karma, the origination, can go into two different areas of storing good or bad "Karmic effects" based on your intention.

Lets say you are walking down the street and you accidently step on a bug, compared to walking down the street, seeing a bug and stomping on it. The cause - stomping on the bug and the result - the bug dying are the same in both cases. However, due to your intention, the karmic energy is either good (or without blame) or bad (with the intention to kill).

So, if nobody is watching, who cares?

Well, someone is watching - you. You are watching you. You are also part of the universal consciousness that we are all a part of. So the building of bad karmic results does have effects over time.

Picture yourself walking up in a brand new apartment, with clean white walls, fresh hardwood floors and not a spot of dust anywhere. You spend your day eating and drinking, throwing your garbage around. You don't clean up, get tired and go to bed. You wake up the next day and the garbage is still there, and today to get more food and maybe relieve yourself in the corner. More garbage builds up, you get tired again. By a few days in, its getting hard to sleep. The air is stale, the flies and the dirt start to cause disease. You wake up the next day tired and crabby, and so on.

Now picture the same room. You eat whole foods, there is no waste. You clean the room at the end of the day, making it even cleaner then the day before. You go to sleep and wake up the next day, the room is still shining, you clean it some more...

The idea of the room is like your karmic storehouse. You can fill it with dirt and garbage, or you can endeavour to polish it. Every time you go to sleep and wake up is like rebirth. Each time you are reborn, the environment you left behind is either that much cleaner, or that much worse.

So as we watch our actions in our practice, also watch your intention or motivations behind them. It can be the difference between holding in your hand a weapon to harm others, or sitting on it to help us all.