A friend lamented the fact that the world is a sad place and is total unfair. And in a sense, it is very true. There are those who are born ill or crippled while others are healthy and enjoy favorable circumstances. What is the cause of such a difference in fortune, even among infants who are yet able to live out their lives?

And then there are others who just can’t seem to be able to do well no matter how hard they try, while others appear to achieve success with relative little difficulty. Is it luck? Can it be because some people are just meant to luckier and more fortunate than others?

Before I begin to answer these questions, I would like to mention the law of causality inherent in life. In layman terms, this law is often referred to as the cause and effect of life. This law actually plays a heavy role in influencing the direction of our lives. Everything that takes place does so because there is a cause and similarly, every cause yields some kind of result. Nothing happens completely spontaneously, without some sort of underlying cause.

A good cause will produce a positive result or effect and a bad cause will give rise to a negative result or effect. This principle then leads us to the concept of karma. Karma is a latent force, or potential in life that when activated by an external stimulus, produces a corresponding good or bad effect (happiness or suffering).

It is this acceptance of the concept of karma that allows me to discard the idea that our lives begins at birth and ends at death, be it to go to heaven, hell or otherwise. I prefer to embrace the concept of the eternality of life, and that living and dying are but parts of a cycle not unlike the flow and ebb of the tides, the changing of kinetic energy to potential energy and back, obeying the same rhythm as the rest of the cosmic ecology. This is because karma will have to transcend a single lifetime. The principle of karma has been operating in our lives since the remotest past and will continue to do so in the limitless future.

Hence, the answer to the questions at the beginning of this essay is that of the individual humans harvesting their karma.

However, karma should not only be used to understand the present circumstances but rather, expanded to understand how we can determine our future. Instead of viewing our lives as the harvesting of past karma, we should instead actively seek to create positive karma. We do this by shifting our focus from harvesting to sowing.

Buddhist philosophy of karma is not fatalistic. There is no ill effect that is so fixed or predetermined that good karma from the practice of Buddhism in the present cannot transform for the better. I must also add that in expedient Buddhism, the practice is to accumulate enough good karma so that we will be born in favorable conditions in the next incarnation. However, Nichiren Buddhism, which is based on the Lotus Sutra, taught that it is possible to actually transform our negative karmas to positive karmas within this lifetime. I am very willing to believe that. With no disrespect for other major faiths like Christianity and Islam, I think this kind of “salvation” suits me a lot better than an eternity in an unknown place referred to as heaven.