Let Intention Create The Way
The Buddha, Kierkegaard, and My Daughter
Karma is often misunderstood, though of as “fate” or how this life is determined by what I did in my previous life. In fact, one of the Buddha’s intentions in teaching it was to provide a liberating, present moment tool for sculpting one’s future.
The emphasis on the Buddha’s teaching was on how our present moment intentions shape our future, not on how our past has shaped our present. He also taught that one’s actions play a role in the present— in how the present feels, and how we shape it with our attention, intention, perception and choices. In other words, both present and future are powerfully influenced by one’s mental state.
“It is intention that I call karma,” he famously said1, and what he meant by that is that one’s mental states— or intentions— are what determines the texture of an act and the results it will have. Actions of mind, word or body rooted in greed, hatred and confusion, he said, tend to have bad effects, both immediately and in the future.
If they are rooted in non-greed (generosity), non-hatred (love, patience) and non-confusion (wisdom, clarity, aspiration) then they tend to have good effects. The Buddha acknowledged that karma was not the only law at play, and that how it works itself out amidst the complexity of the cosmos is beyond our ability to grasp in its exact details, but he affirmed it was a clear pattern visible in our lives.
The Buddha’s exact taxonomy of mental states and their effects aside, I want to argue that the Buddha’s insight gives us a simple approach to decision making which also resonates with the insights of St. Ignatius and Kierkegaard.
