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Troy has fallen, they say: and that was Karma; because Paris, and Troy in supporting him, had sinned against Zeus the patron of hospitality, to whom the offense rose like vultures with rifled nest, wheeling in mid-heaven on strong oars of wings, screaming for retribution.
But "there is a divinity that shapes our ends etc." It was to be. It was Karma, or Kismet, or whatever the word is. I locked the door behind Hannah, and stood with tradgic feet, "where the brook and river meet." What was I to do? I was inocent, but I looked gilty. This, as everyone knows, is worse than gilt.
But Gautama, who denied the separate existence of the soul, maintained that it was not the self, but the Karma, which passed from one birth to another; and thus there became the oneness of Karma without an identity of soul passing through and uniting the myriad incarnations of the person involved. How can one substitute here a sameness of Karma for identity of soul?
Why, why shall I not be in the first ranks of the warriors of Buddhism? Why has Karma decided so? But so it must be! And Russia must first wash herself from the insult of revolution, purifying herself with blood and death; and all people accepting Communism must perish with their families in order that all their offspring may be rooted out!"
In Buddhism, though the Pitakas speak continually of rebirth, metempsychosis is an incorrect expression since there is no soul to transmigrate and there is strictly speaking nothing but karma. Karma is also used in the more concrete sense of the merit or demerit acquired by various acts. Thus we hear of karma which manifests itself in this life, and of karma which only manifests itself in another.
All substance, like all mind, has its Karma; planets, like men, are shaped by the creative power of acts and thoughts; and every atom goes to its appointed place, sooner or later, according to the moral or immoral quality of the tendencies that inform it.
For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of him: she had let the divine force, the influx of the human spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity, flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to the Greeks in vain as all Greek history and Karma since has been proclaiming.
The ignorant man having attained to an abject state, grossly abuses the gods, not knowing that it is the consequence of his own evil karma. The foolish, the designing and the fickle, O good Brahmana, always attain the very reverse of happiness or misery. Neither learning nor good morals, nor personal exertion can save them.
How little of the tortuosity of metaphysics is here; but what grand efficacity of super-ethics! You remember what Light on the Path says about the man who is a link between the noise of the market-place and the silence of the snow-capped Himalayas; and what it says about the danger of seeking to sow good karma for oneself, how the man that does so will only be sowing the giant weed of selfhood.
We consider that such an interpretation of the Law of Karma is forced and unnatural, and results from the seeming natural tendency of the human mind to build up devils for itself and hells of one kind or another.
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