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And I mustn’t do any work at all! How could you get to the point where you don’t do any work at all? Where you just mustn’t do anything.
And you find yourself that that is as difficult as the other situation was, you see? To do nothing—really do nothing—with perfection is as difficult as to do everything. When Hindus and Buddhists use the word karma, the basic meaning of it is “action”—from the Sanskrit root kri: “to do”—and therefore there is some error in the common translation of karma as a law of cause and effect, or of cosmic retribution.
“As a man sows, so also shall he reap” has a Western flavor which is a little causal. The way the Buddha put it was slightly different: “This arises, that becomes.” Because between this and that there is a polar relationship, and the full explanation of karma in Buddhist philosophy is called pratītyasamutpāda, which means the “interdependent origination of all the forms and phases of life.” Pratītyasamutpāda. And there are twelve links, shall we say, in the chain of interdependent origination constituting a circle.
And the existence of the circle depends on the presence of every one of the links. From one point of view in Buddhism, the chain of interdependent origination is looked upon as a chain—that is to say, as a form of bondage. The constituents, as it were, of the vicious circle in which most people and beings are living, which they call saṃsāra: the “round of birth and death;” the bhavacakra: the wheel of bhava, which is “becoming.” And so, going ’round and ’round and ’round in the endless game of hide-and-seek is, from one point of view, bondage.
Bondage to karma. And if you study the Bhagavad Gita—which is not a Buddhist book, but a Hindu scripture—Krishna, the spokesman of the Gita, explains that the wise man is one who does what is called niṣkāmakarma, meaning “passionless activity” in the sense that he acts without seeking a result, without being motivated by the fruits of action, and therefore is not bound by his own action. You can be bound to saṃsāra—the wheel of birth and death—by iron chains or gold chains.
The chains are—I mean, I’m talking more or less in the language of popular Hinduism—that if you do bad deeds in this life you’ll get [a] bad result next time. If you do good deeds in this life you may be reborn as an angel or as a monk, in which you’ll get a better chance of liberation. But still: so long as you’re looking for results—be they good or evil—you’re still bound.
Now, the way in which one becomes, as it were, free of karma involves another Buddhist point of view which is a kind of—a different way of looking at the chain of interdependent origination. It’s the way which the Japanese call jiji muge (事事无碍), that is to say, the “mutual interpenetration of all things and events.” So that you could say that, actually, in fact, the deepest level of reality—this entire cosmos—is a completely harmonious and blissful manifestation of everything in a state of total enlightenment and mutual compassion. And therefore the task of the Buddhist or the Hindu discipline of meditation, the sādhanā—the “way of spiritual development”—is to realize that; for everybody to realize it effectively in his own life, and therefore cease from the illusion that the universe is a fragmented process of conflict.
But first of all, we have to be clear about karma: that it is not to be understood in the Western sense of a law of cause and effect, or of a sort of retribution system, or a law. The word “law” is most unsuitable for concepts in Eastern Indian and Chinese philosophy. The word dharma—sometimes meaning “the Buddhist’s doctrine,” or a certain way of life when you talk about a person’s svadharma—you mean “their own function.” We would translate svadharma as “vocation.” Sva is the same as the Latin sus: “one’s own.” Dharma: “function,” in this case.
“Operation,” “way of life,” “style of life,” “profession,” “trade,” “role.” It means all those things. And the one thing that dharma really never means is “law,” although it’s often translated that way. Because, you see, you don’t get the idea of law until you move to a culture where order is based on the idea of obedience.
In the West, you see, the origins of law spring from where? The laws of the Medes and Persians, the Laws of Hammurabi, the Laws of Moses, and later Roman law. The only healthy legal tradition we have in the West is British common law, which proceeds in an entirely different way from code law.
Because, you see, the difference between code law and common law is that code law is laid down by the wisdom of an all-powerful ruler who tells everybody how they must behave, and they must obey him. But common law is evolved by discussion of particular cases rather than referring all the time to abstract principles which are put down in words. And the judge—the good judge—is a wise man, a man with a sense of equity and fair play who arbitrates an issue which is debated in front of him.
And from the precedent from which he creates by his decision, common law evolves. You see, that’s a more organic way of producing law. The code law system, which we inherit from our most ancient theological backgrounds, is a tyrannical method of law by imposition.
And so you must understand that—in both Hinduism and Buddhism—there is really no fundamental idea of obedience to a personal ruler. Certainly not in Buddhism. A little bit, sometimes, in Hinduism.
But even then we get terribly mixed up because, for example, I was talking of the Bhagavad Gita: this is often translated “The Lord’s Song.” Now, for Bhagavān (or Bhagavāt in Sanskrit) “Lord”—as an English equivalent—is quite inappropriate. Because a lord is one who lords it over you. Bhagavān is a title of reverence and respect and love.
“The Song of the Beloved” would be much better, in a way—although it’s not quite correct from a strict point of view. We don’t really have an equivalent for this word, the Bhagavān. So although, you see, there has been—in India itself—tyrannical rule, and although the Arthaśāstra (as a manual of politics) gives directions to a tyrant as to how to govern by absolute power, going along with this exposition of this very Machiavellian point of view to government is the constant advice of the sage: yes, this is what you have to do in order to fulfill your office as a ruler, but never forget that you’ll never succeed.
The more you try to rule things by force, the more you will stir up violence against you. And so you can never hold on to your power and your possessions; it will always flow away from you. So there was one of those great rajas of ancient India who asked a jeweler to make him a ring that would restrain him in prosperity and support him in adversity.
And the jeweler wrote on the ring: “It will pass.” But when we come to the deep cosmological and metaphysical ideas, we don’t have law in the Western sense, and therefore nature is not looked upon as something which is an orderly system because it is obeying a commandment. In the West we inherit the idea of law from those ancient conceptions of God, and it is even passed down into science where we discuss laws of nature. But one recognizes more and more in the sciences that what we call laws of nature are simply observed regularities in the way things behave.
And in order to observe regularities you must look at things through something regular—that is to say, you must lay a ruler alongside them or compare their behavior with the regular behavior of a clock. But clocks and rulers are human inventions. They are regular measures which we use for comparing the rates of change.
Say, a clock is a measure of a rate of change. It’s quite arbitrary. But we very easily compare our regulation-measuring devices with what makes things happen, as if the sun rises because it’s six in the morning.
That’s being completely backwards in one’s thinking. And we get into the same confusion when we imagine, for example, that money is wealth. Here we have fantastic wealth, you know, and we have the technological possibility of making everybody on Earth the enjoyer of an independent income.
We can’t do it because people say, “Where’s the money going to come from?” Because they think money makes prosperity. It’s the other way around: it’s physical prosperity which has money as a way of measuring it. But people think money has to come from somewhere, like hydroelectric power or lumber or iron, and it doesn’t.
Money is something we invent, like inches. So, you remember the Great Depression; when there was a slump? And what did we have a slump of?
Money. There was no less wealth, no less energy, no less raw materials than there were before, but it’s like you came to work on building a house one day and they said, “Sorry, you can’t build this house today. No inches!” “What do you mean, no inches?” “Just inches!
We got inches of lumber, yes. We got inches of metal. We’ve even got tape measures.
But there’s a slump in inches as such,” you see? And people are that crazy! They can have a depression because they have no inches to go around, or no dollars.
That’s all a lot of nonsense! But, you see, because we get thinking backwards and making the metaphysical tail wag the dog, making the law rule things—whereas it doesn’t, it’s merely a way of measuring what happens. And so, you see, when you get into Buddhistic thought you don’t get that confusion the other way around.
So you’re looking at a system where—to go back to the Buddha’s words—“this arises, that becomes,” which is a way of saying: you can’t have this without that. You can’t have “here” without “there.” You wouldn’t know where here was unless you knew where there was. And they come into being together.
You don’t get first here and then there, or first there and then here. These arise interdependently. That’s the meaning of interdependent origination.
And to grasp the idea of interdependent origination is as important as the idea about seeing how things are related by space and intervals, and seeing, therefore, that you tend to look at life from a myopic point of view and see details; see the trees and not the forest, see yourself as something loosely related to everything else that’s going on and not integral to it. You see the the figure but ignore the background. But the figure and the background arise mutually.
They are to each other as this is to that. And so we really have to rid our brains of the notion of causality. The notion of causality being that present sets of circumstances are the result of past sets of circumstances and that, therefore, certain events (which are called causes) are responsible for following events (called effects).
And all this is an enormous piece of mumbo-jumbo, because what is not seen and what is not clear in thinking that way is that, in physical nature, there are no separate events. This is startling to people. But it’s really quite easy to see that there are no events in nature, because you can ask very simply—let’s take something called an event: how do we demark it from other events?
At what point, shall we say, were you born? Were you born at parturition? Or when the doctor slapped you on the bottom?
Or cut the umbilical cord? Or when you were conceived? Or when your father and mother were first attracted to each other?
When was it? When did you begin? There’s no way of deciding except arbitrarily.
And for legal purposes we say you were born at parturition. And that’s when the astrologer casts your horoscope—except that other astrologers disagree and want the conception time, and say that’s the real beginning. There isn’t a real beginning.
It goes back and back and back in an inseparable continuity. When are you dead? That’s another big argument.
And you can get all kinds of ideas about that. So once you see that an event is a term in an intellectual calculus—calculus being the way of measuring, say, curved formations by reducing them to point-instants and counting it, you see? But actually, the point-instants are imaginary.
The curve wiggles along and it doesn’t stutter from point to point. But in calculus you make it do that. So just as there are no point-instants in the curve, so there are no events in nature.
Nature is a constantly fluctuating pattern. You can only designate particular wiggles in a pattern arbitrarily. You can count a convex formation as one wiggle or a concave formation as one wiggle.
Then you decide if you call it—if you give the convex properties the title of “wiggle,” you have to deny it to the concave properties, and vice versa. So when you see that what we call separate events don’t exist, it becomes nonsense to speak of one event causing another. What you really mean is that the two events which you speak of as being causally related are simply two parts of the same event.
They go with each other in the same way as this with that. The relationship is not causal, it is mutual. And it works two ways in time, because so-called future events are not merely passive to past events.
But you could easily see when, for example, any biological process goes on, you can reason just as well from the future to the past as from the past to the future. Why do two mammals have sexual intercourse? Well, it isn’t just that they enjoy it, it’s also that they’re a very complex system which does this because it makes babies.
And the prospect of baby works in reverse and creates desire. You can reason that way. It’s silly because the whole process is one.
And when we speak humanly and purposively, “I am going downtown to buy groceries,” then your future event could be said to be the cause of why you’re now starting out to get into the car: buying groceries. And the the difficulty we have in seeing this to be so is that we think in an either/or way—which is what is called dualism in Hindu Buddhist thought and that liberation is being free from dualism. So when you think in an either/or way you see the figures in the background as moving, and therefore being responsible for their action.
But if somebody argues the other way around and says the figures are just following lines of force in a field—gravitational principle, say: we’re all human beings, you see; we’re all concentrated on the fact that we’re individually rushing around and doing this and that. But we don’t see that we’re equally sucked, and that we move around in response to all sorts of stimuli. But neither position is adequate.
You have to see that our being sucked by all sorts of stimuli is exactly the same thing as our apparently voluntary and deliberate action. Because what we’re looking at is not this Newtonian game of billiards, where balls roll because they are hit by cues. What we’re involved in is a dance where—for example, watch a snake: when a snake swims, there’s nothing more beautiful than watching a snake swim in water.
Lovely motion! But, you see, it wiggles along. And its wiggle is conceivable, you see, as convex—or was it concave?
This way and that way and this way and that way. Now, which side of the snake moves first hen it wiggles? See, it’s very easy to see there.
Now, when we interact with the world, what moves first? Who starts it? The objective world or the subjective world?
But they are related as this to that. You can’t have an object without a subject or a subject without an object. Can’t have something known without the knower.
And that gives the show away. There isn’t any real distinction between the knower and the known. There’s two ways of looking at something, yes; two poles of a single process.
But the knower and the known are subsumed as the knowing. And all life is knowing, being, becoming. And it isn’t something, in other words, that works by the idea of “all this happens because someone shoves it.” Now, you see, the idea “all this happens because someone shoves it” is basic to Western thinking.
There is the Lord God who’s the boss, and he sloshes this universe into being and shoves it and sets it going. And you better obey that shove, because he’s introduced into it some recalcitrance by giving to human beings what the Hebrews call the yetzer hara—the wayward spirit—so that they shall be able to play certain games on their own. Because nothing very interesting would happen if everybody obeyed God.
The whole world would be like a lifeless thing, you see? So they had to reason that into it in order to save face for God, practically, because otherwise he could be blamed for all the catastrophes that happened instead of our being able to say to each other, “Well, it’s our fault.” But you see, then: once we are up against this possibility that the distinction between what we do and what happens to us is obliterated, and therefore we would say with Hindus and Buddhists that if I run into a catastrophe, it is my karma. You see?
That means far more than that it is a punishment for something I did wrong in the past. That is a legalistic view of karma. But a naturalistic or organic view of karma is, in fact, that what happens to me is what I do.
And that, in a certain sense, I want what happens to me. We can use “want”—notice how we use this word—it means “to desire” and it mens “to lack” or “to need.” We say to somebody, “You’re wanting. You’re deficient in something that you need.” So it’s rather alarming, really, when you consider it, that you always get what you want.
Invariably. Even though you may think that it’s entirely opposed to your wishes. But if it’s your karma, everything that happens to you—put it in another way: everything that comes to you is a return to you of what goes out of you.
Yes, obviously that’s absurd if you confine the definition of yourself to your voluntary, conscious behavior. That’s a ridiculous definition of one’s self. One’s self, by any stretch of the imagination, must involve far more than the conscious and voluntary aspects of our behavior.
And if we see that it involves, intimately and inescapably, the behavior of what we call the “other,” the “not-self,” the “environment,” and see that these two are moving together like the two sides of the snake when it swims, then you get a very curious feeling. And you have to be careful of it if you’ve got a Western background. Because this is what happens to a lot of people who play around with psychedelic chemicals.
There are many, many cases of inflation among these people. That is to say, when you get this sensation that the two sides of the world—the inside and the outside—are moving together, you may think: “I am ruling it!” “I am God” in the Western sense of the word. Therefore, your ego—instead of being, as it were, integrated and transcended with all this process—merely assumes vast dimensions, has megalomania, is blown up by the mystical experience.
And so you get the holier-than-thou people going around who seem to think that they’re above all human conventions and have no obligations to anyone or anything: because they’re divine, and they can do as they damn please. What they haven’t realized is that doing as you will isn’t a new kind of behavior that you suddenly put on and say, “From now on, I’m going to go around doing as I will.” You have to realize first that that’s what you’ve always been doing. And you could look at this from a very simple point of view—it’s not a complete point of view—but you can say: “Well now, what about the people who did good and who did the things that they didn’t want to do?” You know, everybody’s mother said to us, “Darling, sometimes we have to do thing we don’t like.” Well, what about that?
Well, you can always say the kid obeyed the mother and did the thing that it didn’t like because that was the better part of wisdom. In other words, if he hadn’t done that, something worse would’ve happened. And we choose the lesser of two evils.
And when you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose the lesser of two evils, then you say, “I want out of here!” and you take the easiest way; you take the line of least resistance. So that’s your doing. Now, you can pursue that more profoundly when you stop thinking about human behavior as something that responds to the compulsion of an environment.
And you can get out of that when you see the behavior of the environment as an essential aspect of you. So it isn’t, as it were, the environment starting something, which you are therefore compelled to follow. It’s the whole system moving together.
So then, you get—in the state of liberated or mystical consciousness—you very often feel that a hill is lifting you up as you walk up it. The ground seems to heave beneath your feet, and up you go! And you get this strange feeling of lightness, of effortlessness.
Walking on air, never a care—you know? This wonderful sense that there are no obstructions anywhere. There’s nothing, as it were, banging you and making you do that.
It all flows together. And that’s a very common sense. And you are actually—in that state of consciousness—you are perceiving the goings-on, the Tao, the course of nature, in the way it’s happening.
But in the ordinary way you’ve been conditioned to resist it, to fight it, and to use those sensations of resistance to create a sensory basis for what you describe as the “ego.” The ego, in practice, is a sense of strain. When you are aware of “I,” you are aware of a basic discomfort which is located, basically, between the eyes; somewhere in here. A sort of tightness.
Also, it’s in other centers, too. It’s in the solar plexus. And there are various physical centers.
In other words, where this constant tension or resistance against it is going on. And that’s what you feel when you talk about “I.” When that tension ceases you discover immediately that the separate ego has disappeared, and that what “I” refers to is simply the total panorama of experience: everything that’s happening. That’s “I.” And obviously, I don’t know all of it because I can’t inspect all of it with my radar; with my conscious attention.
That would be a ridiculous undertaking—to know everything in that sense. We know it in a much better way, as we know how to grow hair and open and close our hands. So this point of view can be understood if we clarify the initial problems we have about it.
And I suppose the first problem is: if we accept the notion that everything that happens to us is our own karma, our own doing, then we have to be very careful of, shall we say, the devil of omnipotence, of inflation, of feeling that your ego is what is in control of all this. And the second thing is: if you think, then, that everything that happens to everybody is what they really want to happen, then you can absolve yourself from any qualms about being unkind to someone, because you could say, “Well, the unkindness I did you is what you really wanted, wasn’t it?” You know that business about the responsibility of the person who gets murdered for getting murdered? There is a curious sense in which a lot of people go around looking for trouble.
Freud pointed out quite correctly the psychology of accident-prone individuals. They seem to be attracting trouble like lights attract moths. And we’re all doing that, but we manage to remain unconscious of it so that we can praise and blame and play the game which says, “That’s not my fault, that’s your fault!” And so we go around apportioning faults to everybody.
Because if we’re going to apportion praise the good things people do, you can’t make praise mean anything unless you also go around blaming. Praise and blame go together. Supposing everybody was acting in a praiseworthy way and we praised everybody for everything—they’ll get tired of it.
They wouldn’t even notice it anymore. So, so long as you’re going to get a kick out of being praised, you’ve got to go around blaming, too. It’s very simple.
But if you see the folly of that—that praising and blaming are just creating each other—then you don’t praise and you don’t blame. You just dig the whole thing. And that’s why, when we encounter very great sages, you never hear them blame people and they very rarely praise anyone.
You try to start gossip in the presence of such a person, and you make a derogatory comment about someone, it’s as if you had thrown a rock into a well and heard no splash: a funny feeling, because you get no response, you get no agreement. And if you praise somebody, there’s also likely nothing to be said, except perhaps some remark: “Of course, you’re praising the beloved in all its manifestations.” And this disconcerts some people terribly. I’ve always noticed that real sages never gossip, never criticize persons.
Because they understand so well. The French saying tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner—“to understand all is to forgive all”—is so true if you’re experienced in just the ordinary way of dealing with human problems. If you’ve been a counselor, or psychotherapist, or minister, or anything like that, you very soon get to realize how vastly complicated people are, and to see that they really are in the messes they’re in not because of anything, but that’s the way it is.
And you stop blaming people. And because you don’t blame people you have open ears, and people come and seek your advice. Because they don’t want to come to someone who’s a counselor who will bawl them out.
It’s like dentists who simply accept the fact that people really don’t take care of their teeth and realize that the job of a dentist is precisely to look after people who can’t be bothered to take care of their teeth. It’s why he’s in business! So a good dentist doesn’t bawl his patients out because they didn’t do this, that, and the other.
Just accept it. Same with doctors. They know perfectly well that nobody’s going to live by the rules of health.
And they’re very vague as to what they are. And, you know, there’s every kind of theory about how you ought to live and what is healthy, but they change in fashion. And you ought to eat this kind of diet in 1921, but another time it’s 1930, they’ve changed their ideas altogether.
And by the time it’s 1960 it’s back again to a mixture between 1921 and 1894. Something like that, you see? It’s always changing.
So while the rules are not so—you see, if they were all absurd it would be easy. But they’re not all absurd. There’s some truth in it, always.
But nobody’s ever quite sure. So the function of healers and doctors and so on is just to do what can be done to stop the mess getting too messy. And they must accept it as that.
That’s their job. If I were healthy, I would say to the doctor, “I wouldn’t need you.” So you’re in business. Now, what about it, then?
We have difficulty in seeing this mutuality of our relationship to the rest of the world because it’s contrary to common sense, contrary to the way we’ve been brought up. And therefore we have what I would call an initial intellectual block to understanding it, quite apart from any emotional blocks or anything of that kind. But obviously we must overcome that intellectual block if we’re going to go any further and actually realize and feel this way of life’s working in this relationship between what you do and what happens to you.
Then the question arises: then what do I do? Do I go around saying to myself, “All this that’s happening to you is what I wanted. I am inside and outside.
I am the subjective and I am the objective.” I mean, you go out thinking thoughts about this so, as it were, to talk yourself into this way of feeling. Well, that’s very superficial because this new sense of relationship to nature is something much more than an idea. See, ecologists and physicists have the idea that this is so, but they—mostly, in their private life and in their ordinary human behavior—are just like other people who don’t feel it and who feel themselves in a Newtonian billiards game, even though they’ve gone on to quantum mechanics.
So there may be a transition from our ordinary way of feeling how things go on to the new way. We have to do something other than think. Because, actually, thinking is causing the trouble!
It is by thinking that we divide the world into separate events and separate things. That is calculus. And Ananda Coomaraswamy once described the life of the liberated being as a perpetual uncalculated life in the present.
And you say, “Wow! I don’t think I could do that.” That saying of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount about “be not anxious for the morrow.” The uncalculated life. “If God so clothed the grass of the field, will he not much more clothe you, faithless ones?” And I’ve never met a preacher yet who would really take that up.
They all say, “Well, of course, that’s too hard a saying for most of us. It’s not practical. Everybody has to take thought for the morrow and calculate.” Well, at this point people can go in two directions.
There’s one class of people who will say, “Alright, let’s live the uncalculated life. Let’s not make any plans.” And before you know where they are they’re living in a filthy pad, and scrounging around, and living on petty thievery, and so on. This is the usual thing.
This has got into it the wrong way. The first thing to do is just as I said: whether you like it or not and whether you know it or not, the relationship between you and the environment is always one that is harmonious. So, in the same way, you are always living the uncalculated life.
And you have to find out, first of all, that you’re always doing it, and that what you call your calculations and the things you did were funny little rationalizations. In other words, your ego has about as much control over what goes on as a child sitting next to its father in a car with a plastic steering wheel that is turning the car the way daddy drives it. Because, as I pointed out, most of the functions, most of the goings-on in you, around you, the circumstances of life, have nothing to do with your ego at all.
And you don’t even know why you make up your mind to do certain things. We know superficially; we have a few ideas. It’s like when you enter into a marriage: you have really no control over its outcome in the ordinary sense of ego control.
You’ve taken a colossal gamble in which you’ve involved enormous complexes of patterns. And maybe it’ll come out alright if you don’t interfere with it too much. You know, it’s like Oppenheimer said: it’s perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell, and the only possible way we might stop that happening is not to try to prevent it.
You know, all these wars are started out by people who think that they’re helping someone; that it’s going to make things better. So when you begin from the basis, not of saying, “I should now live the spontaneous and improvident and noncalculating style of life,” but realize you’ve always done that, only you rationalized that you didn’t. You always did what you wanted to do, basically.
Only you said sometimes, “It was my duty.” But you preferred a conception of yourself as someone who always does his duty. That flattered you. And so you were still following your own way.

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