You Are Not Being Punished — You Are Being Continued

Middleway (Buddhism Podcast) #Religion, #Beliefs, #beliefsystems,


You did something years ago you still wish you hadn't. Maybe you've been quietly waiting for the bill to come due.

What the Buddha taught about karma is not what most of us think it is. It is stranger. And more liberating.

Karma may be the most misused word in the English language. Most of what we say about it — the Buddha explicitly rejected.

In this video:
• Four misreadings: cosmic justice, New Age magnetism, fatalism, punishment
• [AN 3.61] — The Buddha's explicit rejection of pubbekatahetu (past-action determinism)
• [MN 101] — The Jain position is what most people call "karma" today; the Buddha attacked it
• Dhammapada 1-2: "As the wheel of the cart, the track of the ox" — Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu translation, translator named
• [AN 6.63] — Cetanā = kamma: "Intention, I tell you, IS kamma"
• Surgeon's scalpel vs attacker's knife: same act, different intention, different kamma
• [AN 5.57] — Kammadāyāda: "heir of one's kamma" — NOT "punished by" kamma
• [MN 135] — Owners, heirs, born of actions
• Anatṭā tension: what continues if there is no self? (honest treatment)
• Rebirth: honest acknowledgment of canonical position
• [MN 136] — The canon refuses universal "what goes around comes around"
• [AN 3.99] — Salt crystal: present cultivation determines how past kamma is felt
• [MN 131] — "You shouldn't chase after the past" — present intention = freedom
• [MN 57] — The fourth kamma: the path itself is kamma that ends kamma
• Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu "kamma as skill" framing (flagged as his reading)
• Close: "The question kamma really asks is not 'what did you do?' but 'what are you intending right now?'"