Kamma as a Sack of Seeds

Well, it was bound to happen. Despite the rather lengthy caveat at the beginning of this post, at least one person’s takeaway was the reification of the kamma-as-a-sack-of-seeds metaphor. Admittedly, at the time of writing that post, there was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that this might be misunderstood and I probably could have done a better job explaining it. So, in the interest of clarity, I’ll attempt to explain my choice of metaphor.

All conditioned things are impermanent.
Sabbe saàkhârâ aniccâ.”

While this truth, the first of the three characteristics of existence (tilakkhaúa), most certainly covers “gross” impermanence, such as the lifetime of a living being, the creation and deterioration of material objects, the extension and contraction of the cosmos, the duration of an emotion or a thought, and so on, it describes more precisely the moment to moment arising and passing away of material and mental phenomenon. This, incidentally, is one reason why we practice meditation – to be in this present moment, to see this arising and passing away and to truly see and experience impermanence. Of course, it begs the question, “how long is a moment?”, but that requires a whole other, rather interesting discussion on the concept of time (kâlapaññatti), so we’ll keep it simple and assign three labels – past, present and future.

We can safely say, however, that the present moment is incredibly fast. In each and every one of those present moments, there is an arising and there is passing away of materiality and mentality. Once there is a passing away, that moment becomes past, it no longer exists except as a concept*. Future moments, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, haven’t yet arrived, so there is not yet arising and passing away. An emotion/mind state/thought/idea/concept that seems to last a continuous duration of time, let’s say 5 minutes for illustrative purposes, is actually a virtually uncountable number of consciousnesses arising and passing away, to the tune of “..countless tens of millions …. in the blink of an eye or the flash of lightning”**. Although they may all seemingly have the same object – as the object itself is subject to this momentary arising and passing away – and perhaps even the same flavour, i.e. greed or anger, each and every one is unique and individual, no two consciousnesses are the same.

So how does this apply to the metaphor in the previous post? Well, I got the people bit right. On the one hand the people in the metaphor are different from each other, like consciousness, they sprout from different kammic seeds as a result of changing conditions, the conditions themselves determining which seed will sprout. The currently arisen person is in the present moment, while all the previous people are in past moments, only to be recollected as ideas/concepts; the empty space ahead is comprised of future moments*. The kammic sack of seeds, on the other hand, appears to be the same from person to person, with the exception of one seed going in and one seed going out. That enduring entity, crossing moments relatively intact, clearly and obviously contradicts the charactaristic of impermanence and by extension, no-self (anatta), if taken literally. But I couldn’t think of another way to illustrate the potentiality in any given moment for any previous kammic deed’s seed to ripen, once again, given the proper conditions. Completely open to creative suggestions (not name calling – “silly” doesn’t actually promote understanding for anyone).

In a nutshell, there is no one single entity in all of conditioned existence that spans even two moments. In any given moment, there is arising and passing away. There is no permanence, there is no self/soul. And once again:

All conditioned things are impermanent.
Sabbe saàkhârâ aniccâ.

All conditioned things are unsatisfactory/suffering.
Sabbe saàkhârâ dukkhâ.

Everything, including nibbâna, is without self.
Sabbe dhammâ anattâ.”

* My apologies if the wording of these statements sounds Sarvastivâdin, that is not the intention, but clarification, while important, would only detract from the general theme here. Thanks for your indulgence.

** The Pâéi word for the number is anekakoíisatasahassâni.

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