How can you feel compassion and pity for other people if you believe in karma and believe that they deserve all the suffering and troubles?

One Answer

1. This is quite a difficult thing to explain. What is important here is that in Buddhism, the concepts of good and evil, as well as love and empathy, have a slightly different meaning compared to Christianity. The goal of Buddhist practice is to calm the mind, and all strong emotions are an obstacle in the way and must be discarded. The ideal person of Buddhism, then it is an enlightened person, an arahant, who is absolutely calm, he does not care about anything in this world. More precisely, he does not feel emotions about anything. This does not mean that he does not care about everything and everyone, but this “does not care” and is called metta, or loving kindness, compassion.

   In one of the most popular suttas of the Pali canon, the Karania Metta Sutta dhamma.ru -The Buddha explains how to develop metta (loving kindness, compassion) and what are the benefits of its manifestation. Specifically, it says:

   “May all beings be happy,

   Let no one deceive each other,

   And he doesn't despise anyone anywhere,

   Let it be out of indignation or annoyance

   He doesn't want others to suffer.”

   That is, a person who develops metta develops a calm, even, Non – judgmental attitude towards All beings in the universe, no matter who they are-the narakas (infernal spirits) or the gods of the Brahma world. Because when we evaluate someone or something, our mind is agitated. For a Buddhist, the fervent struggle against evil is evil in itself, because thinking about “bad” and ” good “(especially about “bad”) does not calm the mind and does not lead it accordingly away from the goal of the path, that is, nibbana.

   Therefore, the person who develops metta develops it in order not to think about whether the beings for whom he feels compassion are good or bad. This compassion is not fervent Christian love, it is even, calm benevolence.

   In addition, the kammic paths are extremely complex and intricate. Being born into the human world is a rare piece of luck in itself, because most beings in samsara have existed and still exist in the lower realms (hell, the animal world, the world of hungry spirits), where the level of suffering is much higher than human. In one of the suttas, the Buddha reminds the monks around him that they themselves have incarnated as cows countless times before, and the ground under their feet is practically soaked in the blood of these unfortunate cows.

   But even in the human world, we sometimes experience great suffering because the “kammic boomerang” catches up with us from past or even the life before last. In general, only Buddhas can see how the mechanism of kamma works.

   Thus, reasoning in the style of “we are good and they are bad and therefore deserve to suffer” is generally not very correct both from a logical point of view (it is still unknown what suffering or problems will “catch up” with us in the future and therefore it is not for us to judge what we deserve and who does not deserve), and from the point of view of

   But there is another extremely important thing: in addition to kamma, life is subject to a large number of different factors, among which the most important is the factor of free will. Because if everything was determined only by kamma, there would be no development and all reality would be rigidly determined. However, All living beings can show strong-willed efforts and change their lives for the better. It is clear that, for example, for animals, this is more of a theoretical possibility (although there are cases of self-sacrifice in the animal world, and the dog that saved people can count on serious kammic “bonuses”), but for the same people it is very real. So when we say to ourselves, “May all beings be happy,” we wish them the exercise of this very free will for their own good and deliverance from suffering in the future.

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