[Buddha-l] H.H. The Dalai Lama on Stone and Karma

[Richard Hayes]

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 17:12 +0800, Wong Weng Fai wrote:

> The following from Yahoo! News... confirms it: to H.H. everything is 
> karma.

I suspect that this is a very simplified way of affirming the claim in
the Abhidharmakosha that any event that does not actively impede an
effect can be considered a cause of that effect. One kind of event among
many is deliberate action, also known as karma. Following the general
notion of causation, we can say that any karma that does not actively
impede an effect is part of the infinitely large complex of causes of
that effect. The action of writing this e-mail, insofar as it is not
actively impeding the next suicide bombing in Baghdad, will have to be
considered one of the causes of that unfortunate event (if indeed it
ever takes place).

Everything the Dalai Lama ever said can be seen as part of the causal
complex of Sharon Stone's saying (correctly) that the actions of the
Chinese in Tibet were part of the infinitely large complex of causes of
the earthquakes in Sichuan. (She should have added that everything the
all the Dalai Lamas have ever said, and all the actions of the
descendants of Abraham, and the action of the fly that landed on a leaf
of spinach in my garden on a July afternoon last summer, also helped
cause the earthquakes in Sichuan. Probably she did not have time to
enumerate all the causes of those earthquakes.)

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico