Karma is the moral law of cause and effect. The law of karma has been referred to many times by all religions of the world. All religions speak the truths such as: You reap what you sow; do good and get good; evil begets evil etc. There is huge inequality in the world today. Some are born rich and others are in extreme poverty, one is the son of a prince and another is one of several children of a beggar; some are healthy and others are born sick; a few are born with huge talents of music, painting and other abilities; some are born saints and others are criminals from young age; some are idiots and others are born geniuses. Such disparity and differences makes us wonder if there are errors in the plans of creation and if God is in His senses when He goes on with His job of creation and maintaining the world. Else why should some be cursed from birth and others blessed from the moment they are born? Are there accidents happening everywhere?
No. The blueprint and the working of the Universe show great precision and intelligence. Everything happens for a reason and the laws by which the Universe operates are mathematical and exact. We reap what we sow. Every action has an equal reaction. And all the goodness and miseries that we see around us are created by us. We are wholly responsible for who and what we are. Our actions of this lifetime and previous lifetimes come back to us in our genetic blueprint and DNA coding creating our miseries and blessings in life. Let us see the life of the mean butcher to understand the operation of the law of karma:
Once, there was a butcher who was very mean and wicked. He relished his job of slaughtering pigs and selling the pork as it gave him ample opportunities to torture the pigs before killing them. To him, the sweetest sound in the world was the squealing of pigs in pain and torment. He never had any good thoughts nor did he do any good deeds in his life.
Time passed by and the butcher fell ill. He became very sick and suffered terribly before he died. He lived alone and there was no one to take care of him or check on him. He crawled around for days in agony, squealing and grunting like a pig being slaughtered. His home was near a Buddhist monastery where Buddha and his monks had come for a visit. The monks heard the painful squeals from the home of the butcher and assumed that the butcher was doing his daily slaughter of pigs for selling at his shop. They all shook their head in disapproval but no one did anything as it was a regular occurrence. The screams and painful moans kept coming for many days and suddenly stopped one day. The monks were sorry and pained at the thought of so many animals suffering terrible pain before being slaughtered.
Buddha overheard the monks discussing amongst themselves. He said: O monks, the butcher was not slaughtering pigs. He was ill and in great pain. He had no one to take care of him and he suffered for many days squealing in pain and torment, very much like the pigs he used to torment before he slaughtered them mercilessly. The butcher’s bad karma finally caught up with him. Today he died and he is reborn in a pitiable state of existence. Dear monks, be careful of what you do in life. When you do evil, it rebounds on you like it did on the butcher. There is no escaping our evil deeds. We suffer in this lifetime due to our evil deeds and we also suffer in the hereafter. There is no escaping the suffering in both existences.
There is ONLY one method of overcoming and wiping out karma from our lives. That is by doing tapas. When we are sincere and do the spiritual practices of japa and meditation given by the Guru and follow the other teachings, we create sufficient divine vibrations by which we burn out negative karma. Long, intense, sincere tapas brings about divine grace which is the panacea for all the material and spiritual illness. So let us do our regular tapas to redefine our lives.
