Kamma

Kamma (pali) or Karma (sanskrit) is viewed in a lot of different ways. The most prevalent view being that it is some sort of cosmic currnecy. You earn good currency and you can spend it on bad things. You earn bad currency and you ahve to spend it on bad things. In the end if you have a shit ton of bad Kamma you become a dung beetle or get reborn in a hell inside of a mountain for 10,000 years or somesuch.

But like everything in Buddhism it's confusing when you delve into it in greater detail. On the outside Buddhism is pretty basic, pretty easy to understand.

Generally be groovy.

But that can be overly simplisitc.

I think it's important however to start with overly simplistic terms. I also think it's just as important to recognize that there are much much deeper meanings some of which can seem to contradict your overly simplistic idea (not in this case) but the overly simplistic term puts a qualification on the deeper idea.

The problem with overly simplistic terms is that people tend to just stop there and not recognize that the overly simplistic term is just setting the stage for a much deeper discussion. Let's take an example

Do no evil.

seems pretty straight forward. but then you dig deeper. Is unmarried sex evil if it's full of love and devotion? eternal love and devotion? Is marriage good when it's two people who hate one another who are 'staying togehter because of the kids' and all the while each one is telling the child aweful things about the other parent. Sewing seeds of hate and dispair in not only themselves but in each other and in their children?

There's nuances and in Buddhism the idea of nuances is more important than the 'rules' themselves. As long as you take the rules as a context.

So back to Kamma. Cosmic currency. In much thought Kamma is currency like money, you spend it. That means there has to be someone printing it, someone storing it in the back, metting it out when you deserve it taking it away and someone weighing it when you die.

In Buddhism Kamma isn't like this. It's like anything else in the world. You smoke, that contains carcinogens, carcinogens increase your risk of cancer. the more you smoke the more likely you are to get cancer. You eat vegetables, those are full of vitamins and minerals that your body needs to survive. Kamma is the same way. Nobody out there is going to decide that you effed up. Nobody is going to judge you against a yardstick. Kamma isn't something you're going to be able to hide or something you can weigh in at the end of your life. Many prison inmates 'find jesus' on death row. And I'm sure they really mean it. When they take jesus into their heards three days or six months before they die they really, really mean it. Because they're going to die.
Kamma doesn't work that way. Any more than you can be a drunkard eating big macs and smoking for 70 years and then eat 50 lbs of carrots a day when your doctor tells you you have 2 more months to live. It just won't work.
Kamma just catches up to you and you have to maintain it, always.
 Sure, you'll slip from time to time but heck some times those really healthy people have a donut. But usually we're in the middle somewhere. We try and eat healthy but it's a bit of a pain some times so we put it off until later.

The trick is this. First realize there's no later.

Second realize you're not perfect.

If you were going to drop all bad behavior, eating habits evil thoughts, etc. you'd go join a monestary and become a monk. But I'm guessing you haven't done that or you probably wouldn't be reading this. You have a job or school, you have a family, you have responsibilities, you have a cat.

You are who you are.* Just pay attention. Don't beat yourself up for making a mistake or lie to yourself and certainly don't tell yourself it'll happen later. Later is now, right now while you are screwing things up but you can improve, just a little and that's all it takes.

So just try.

just do a better job. Even if it's only a little bit better those little bits add up. Honestly if it was easy there wouldn't have been a Buddha. If it were even remotely close to easy we wouldn't have noticed the Buddha. In a gorgeous field of flowers how do you find the prettiest. We noticed the Buddha because he bloomed on a barren rock. Sure there were little flowers here and there poking out through crags but he bloomed bright and beautiful and stood out amoungst the rest.

Now here's something to bake your noodle. The Buddha clearly defined Kamma the above way. You have a lot of bad Kamma, you suffer. period, that's what happens, not because you're judged but because you just have bad shit that you've accepted. Now he also very clearly sayd 'I declare that cetana (there's a - over the last a,) which is translated as volition, as Khamma.

So is Khamma just thought? 'just' bad thought. if you kill people becuase you're crazy do you suffer Khamma? If you get cut off on the freeway and curse the guy do you get bad Khamma?

No

and yes.

One of the things that pushed me away from Christianity was a similar idea. The idea that if I thought bad thoughts I would be damned to hell. Mearly thinking 'FUCK' if I missed the nail and hammered my finger with a big fricking hammer Jesus would put a big check in the 'going to hell' column on my holy roster. This sounded dumb frankly. So here I am now becoming more and more deeply involved in a relegion that says "Mind is the forruner of all states" that is the very first line of a text called the Dhammapada. The Dhammapada is really like those little cardboard jesus for kids books. It's the shortest and simplest of all the traditionalal Theravada canon (think of it as 'old Buddhism.') It is the text that was designed to be able to be read by the largest group of people. If you wanted to you could read it in like 20 minutes or less.
which of course means I have a 10 lb version that is VERY thorughoughly annotated and each 8-16 word verse has an acompanying page to page and a half of story from the Buddha's life illustrating it and a ton of comments.

Now both of the first two verses start with the same 2 lines.
Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā manoseṭṭhā manomayā
Manasā ce pasannena bhāsati vā karoti vā

Which are pretty much "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts." They are freqently translated more roughtly into something like "Mind is the forruner of all states"
each one is followed up by a slightly fancy way of saying if one's thoughts are bad bad shit happens (or follows like the wheel of a cart follows an ox.) and if they're good good shit happens.
But in the shorter translations each verse is actually translated as "Mind is the forruner of all evil states" and "Mind is the forruner of all good states" to simplify it a bit.

So here I am now following a religion that very clearly states that bad thoughts are bad.
The difference is context. In Buddhism we very clearly recognize that thoughts happen. They're supposed to happen. In fact one of the whole purposes of Zen Buddhism and Zazen is to _let_ them happen, rather than try and deny them. Having a bad thought isn't wrong. Clinging to that bad thought is wrong. When someone cuts us off on the freeway we're likely to have some defensive adversarial thought pop into our head.

That is normal and healthy.
let me repeat it.
when someone does something that risks your life and this adversarial angry thought pops into your head it is normal and healthy.

What is nor healthy but is unfortunately normal is for you to fume about it for the next 20 minutes. "That bastard" or even screaming out the window at the "Dubmassed jerk who just cut you off" Now you're generating a tremendous amount of energy, a tremendous amount of evil bad thought (and thus Khamma.) That is not only you but that is being sent into the world and will help destroy it.

So get the fuck over it. Shut up, stop talking about it, calm down, grow up, whatever it takes. Let the bad thought happen but then let it go.

*And so am I. ^_^