The trouble with karma

I have been having a philosophical issue with karma that has all but destroyed my practice and my belief in Nichiren's Buddhism as practiced in the SGI, for years, although I play along (most of the time).

I cannot avoid the conclusion that "karma" is bullshit.

Here's why –Buddhism – and reason – concludes that the Universe and all things in the Universe are eternal. Neverbegininning and Neverending. In his lectures on such things as the Lotus Sutra, President Ikeda has frequently mentioned the Law of the Conservation of Energy – that energy and its concurrent manifestation as matter can never be created or destroyed.

Buddhism is perhaps unique among religions in that it states that the Universe was never created, and will never be destroyed. Science says the same thing. Everything that is, and everything that ever was and everything that ever will be, whether we can see it now or whether it is currently in its dormant state of ku … always was and always will be.

Therefore, you have been here for eternity.

An infinite number of lifetimes. Not a thousand lifetimes. Not a millions lifetimes. Not a billion billion lifetimes.

But you have lived an INFINITE number of lifetimes.

You have therefore experienced and done EVERYTHING YOU POSSIBLY COULD.

In that infinite number of lifetimes, in that infinite number of cycles of the universe; in what is beyond our brain's capacity to imagine. You have had lifetimes of constant joys and births; you have had lifetimes in which we have personally found the cure for cancer. You have had lifetimes in which you have been Nichiren, and lifetimes in which you have been Devadatta. You have spent lifetimes being Gods; you have spent lifetimes being Hitlers destroying races and galaxies. You have spent lifetimes in which all your consciousness has been unbelievable agony, and you have experienced lifetimes of unimaginable joy.

We are talking about ETERNITY here, folks.

Not a billion times cycling through this, not walking through solar systems dropping a grain of sand in each one.

But ETERNITY.

Buddhism talks about FOREVER, never-beginning, never-ending.

Infinity.

And we will experience infinity all over again in the future. And infinity by definition contains an infinite number of infinities. In short – by the Buddhist definition of the universe – YOU HAVE ALREADY DONE EVERYTHING! AND YOU WILL DO EVERYTHING AGAIN.

THEREFORE, YOUR KARMA IS LITERALLY "MAXED OUT".

So… what we do in this lifetime, is infinitesimally MEANINGLESS.

AND ALL OF US HAVE DONE EVERYTHING, AND WILL DO EVERYTHING AGAIN IN THE FUTURE. THEREFORE, NOTHING WE DO IN THIS LIFETIME WILL HAVE ANY EFFECT ON OUR ETERNAL LIVES.

So why be nice? Why bother doing shakubuku? We have been and will be shakubukuing an infinite number of people in the future; heck, we already have in the past.

Why not just rape and steal and murder and take what we want? Your karma will even itself out through eternity.

For me, I am just hardwired to try to be nice and empathetic and magnanimous I guess, and I honestly feel I have missed out a lot of "normal", "human" experiences and emotions and successes because of it.


Why bother? I mean these questions literally.

And seriously. I am simply postulating from the "eternity", from the "lifetime after lifetime" that we bandy about at discussion meetings, that SGI-USA writes about in every issue of Living Buddhism.

When I chant, I can feel good and positive, and these thoughts evaporate for the moment – but they also evaporate when I am eating Ben & Jerry's.

This is a thought paradigm I cannot simply "put aside" and forget about, as much as I would like to do so.