When I first purchased my home, one of the things that attracted me to it was the trees. The property is littered with maple trees, and every summer I am serenaded by the singing birds and chirping squirrels that live in their branches. At one point, I purchased binoculars so that I could better watch all of the animal activity from my porch
But the situation hasn’t been all rainbows and sunshine. After a while, I noticed that small branches would break off several of the trees each time there was a rain storm or strong gusts of wind. I chalked this up to being a natural part of the trees’ life cycle, and I accepted that I would have to pick up sticks in the yard each time I wanted to mow the grass.
But over time the fallen branches began to get larger, and they began to fall with more frequency. When I looked into the canopy of the trees, I noticed several branches that seemed to be either dead or dying.
Something was wrong.
But the birds and the squirrels didn’t seem to be bothered, so I turned my focus to other things on the homestead that needed my attention. Each year, the trees got taller, reaching their finger-like branches into the sky as if they wanted to touch the clouds, And each year I found more broken branches on the ground around their trunks.
Then it happened.
I was sitting in my library one night, reading a book and drinking tea. There was a storm raging outside and the electricity in my century-old house flickered every now and again as lightning flashed outside. A jazz melody played softly on the record player, and I was fighting off sleep in the hope of finishing one more chapter in my book.
Then I heard a loud cracking from outside. At first, I thought it was thunder, but it sounded especially close and dissimilar from the rumblings I’d listened to throughout the evening. I rose and peered out several windows to see if something was amiss, but I couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black darkness of the countryside.
I decided that the noise must have been thunder that sounded especially loud to my sleep-deprived brain. I took that as my queue that my body needed rest more than it needed to know what would happen next in the mystery novel that I was reading.
So I turned off the record player, downed the rest of my tea, and went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, everything seemed normal. I could tell by the gray light entering my bedroom that it would be another gray, drizzly day. And there was a slight chill in the air from the window I’d left open the night before. When I looked through said window, my brain had trouble processing what it was seeing.
One of the trees in my back yard was laying on the ground. That is to say, half of it was laying on the ground—the other half was still standing and leaning in the opposite direction at a strange angle.
At first, I thought it had been struck by lightning, but when I threw on some clothes and went outside to take a close look, I saw the real culprit. The center of the tree was rotten. I could see pathways where insects had burrowed tunnels, and there were large sections that were completely hollow.
As the rot had spread outward from the center of the tree, the trunk had become progressively weaker until it was no longer able to support its own weight. What shocked me with this turn of events is that the tree hadn’t shown signs that it was struggling this badly.
It grew new leaves every year and provided a home to animals. Some parts had been dying off, but others had been growing steadily. Even at that moment, there was a squirrel looking down at me from the portion of the tree that was still standing. And it was sitting in branches that seemed full of life.
The rot had been growing for years, but I had been unable to see it.
One common misunderstanding among new Buddhist practitioners is the idea that karma is a cosmic justice system. We are rewarded for good karma, and punished for bad karma, so we must work to accumulate as many positive karma points as possible.
This is an understandable error, because when the law of karma aka “cause and effect” is first introduced, many teachers describe it in exactly this way. I think this is because a more simplified version of karma is easier for beginners to understand even if it is a bit problematic.
The truth is that while positive actions generally lead to positive results and negative actions generally lead to negative results, it can be days, months, or even years before the seeds of karmic actions grow and begin to impact our lives.
Thus, a good person may live a very hard life and a bad person may enjoy a life of ease—at least for a while. While it may take several years or even several lifetimes for the rot of our negative karma to catch up with us, those seeds will manifest.
And even if we aren’t careful to counteract them through the hard work of Buddhist practice, the results could be disastrous.
Namu Amida Butsu
Related features from BDG
Karma Through the Lens of Yogacara: Clearing Muddy Waters
Karma: It Isn’t (Always) What You Did
The Common Western Understanding of Karma
Buddhistdoor View: Karma, Compassion, and Natural Disasters
