Excuses

Actress Sharon Stone recently made some outrageously stupid comments about the Sichuan Earthquake being caused by “bad karma”.  BBC has recently posted an article deconstructing this foolishness. One of the BBC commenters has essentially summed up my perspective on Stone’s remarks:

“Sharon Stone’s comment is the idiotic New Age equivalent of fundamentalist Christians’ ignorant statements that AIDs is God’s retribution for homosexuality and pre-marital sex.”

I think that’s about right. “Karma” is one of the world’s most famous excuses, the other favorites being God, Satan, History, and Darwin. Simply attributing events to any of these forces explains nothing. This device is a way of shirking responsibility, either personal responsibility (“it’s not my fault”) or one’s responsibility to help others (“well, they deserved it”). It seems to me the hallmark of the last several generations to deny responsibility and try to avoid consequences.

This is not to say that I think karma functions only as an excuse (nor do I think God, history, evolution, etc are merely exuses). I think the basic principle of karma is sound—although that basic principle is not reducible to the vaccuous truism that “when you’re not nice bad things happen to you”. I know of no sincere Buddhists who would describe karma that way, or use it to write off the tragedy in China.

It seems to me that a truly spiritual response to a disaster such as the one in Sichuan province is not to try and explain it away through an appeal to some ”higher power”, but to go out and help people rebuild the best we can. We should not lament bad luck, but try to reverse it. This begins with accepting responsibility for ourselves and our responsibilities toward others. There’s an old Daoist saying in the context of longevity practice, but I think it embodies this attitude quite nicely:

The length of my life depends not on Heaven, but on myself.

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