From bad will come the long and unbearable pain of the three lower realms; from good the higher, happier realms from which to swiftly enter the echelons of awakening. Know this and think upon it day after day.

Happiness always comes from virtue; it never comes from non-virtue. Pain always comes from non-virtue, never from virtue. Similarly, virtue always produces happiness, never suffering, and non-virtue always produces suffering, never happiness. This is the first quality of karma.

We hear this and we say, “Yes, it makes a lot of sense.” When we are about to do something non-virtuous do we think about this? No. If attachment is in our minds, we are thinking about how to get what we want. If we are upset or angry about something, we are thinking about how to eliminate our stress and anger. We are not thinking about the long-term results. Very often we do not even think about the short-term results.

We should train ourselves to slow down and think about the results of our actions because once karma is created it does not vanish. This is the second quality of karma. It leaves an energy trace, a karmic seed, or a “having happened” stamp in our mind that influences our future lives and our future in this life. It does not disappear. If we purify it, negative karma will diminish. If we get angry and have wrong views, our virtuous karma will also diminish in power. But things do not vanish.

A third quality is that results increase, like from a small seed you can get a big tree, and from a small action, we can get a big result.

The fourth one is if you do not create the cause, you do not get the result. We want lots of stuff, and we are willing to pray, “May this come about, may that come about,” but we inadvertently create karma when prayers are answered. However, if we do not think about doing prayers or aspiring for things but 264 | July practise the Dharma and create virtues and abandoning non-virtues; it is like, “Come on, can’t things just happen without causes?” Somehow our intellectual understanding of how karma works does not match our actions, and we get very sloppy.

When we create non-virtue, we never think, “This is going to lead me to a horrible rebirth,” or, “This is going to interfere with my conditions to practise the Dharma,” or, “This is going to obscure my mind more, so I’m going to find it harder to realise emptiness.” We do not think like that. We just go ahead and do whatever non-virtuous action we want, thinking, “Oh it doesn’t matter, it’s only a small thing.” Similarly, with creating virtue, we are like, “Well, I’ll just pray, and I’ll offer money for people to do prayers and pujas, and that is good enough, isn’t it?” We also need to restrain ourselves from the ten non-virtues and put our energy into creating the ten virtuous pathways of action. There is often a disconnect in our minds. We need to watch out for this.

“365 Gems of Wisdom” e-book is out now!