Buddhist Advice Column: Is there proof of karma?

Q I would like to believe in karma. But is there any proof of it? And what evidence is there that we carry karma with us from one lifetime to the next?

After my first Buddhist Advice Column last year, I received this query from a reader. It’s a wonderful question, and an important one. Each of us comes up against it at some time on our inner journey.

I’ve heard teachers reply to it in two different, complementary ways. Before they do, they usually stress that karma is a very subtle subject or a ‘hidden’ one, in the same way that shunyata is a concept that requires considerable time and effort to understand fully. We need to work on our minds if we are to penetrate the truth.

Caveats and qualifications aside, the evidence we have of karma is based on the following.

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The direct experience of more advanced practitioners

If we follow Dharma practice diligently, which requires us to purify our negative impulses, cultivate virtue and train our minds in subtle states of consciousness, then the causality between an action undertaken in one lifetime, and the result experienced in the next will become as clear to us as watching a TV drama series. We see it directly. This applies both to ourselves as well as to others.

Such a level of inner attainment may seem impossible But let’s consider cultural context. How often, in our society, do we hear famous singers, actors, businesspeople, political or other influencers of any kind exhorting us to purify our negativities and cultivate virtue? In my experience, almost never. These priorities are not mainstream. And unless we are fortunate enough to have a highly realised teacher, chances are we do not personally know anyone who has the capacity to see karma.

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This has not always been so. When reading even brief biographies of Indian and Tibetan lineage masters of the past, what becomes evident is that they practiced in a culture that placed great importance on such values. There were also a great many practitioners with advanced capabilities who lived in centuries gone by. Because we don’t know about them, doesn’t mean they haven’t existed, and in large numbers.

That there are far fewer of such people today is no surprise. Buddha himself predicted the degeneration of Dharma on earth. As I wrote in a previous post, the Abidharmakosa sets out in some detail how, in the first 1,500 years after the time of the Buddha, there would be many practitioners who would experience the results of their practice. In the second 1,500 years – our era now – there would not be so many seeing results within their lifetime, but there would at least still be some people practicing. In the final 1,500 years there will be only books remaining but no practitioners – before the next appearance of a Buddha to ‘turn the wheel’ of the Dharma. You can read the full post here.

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Even today, if you hang around Buddhist groups for long enough, you will hear many stories of unusual advice offered by lamas and yogis, followed by ‘unforeseen’ actions benefiting those who took the advice. Experiences that give credence to the idea that it is possible to develop a capacity to see karma. And that there are a rare few people among us who still do.

It is they and others of our lineage teachers who inform our understanding of karma. Not the teachings of a single individual, but the collective experience of numberless humans more enlightened than us, who arrived at the same consensus. Teachers, yogis and practitioners from a great variety of backgrounds, who attained states of consciousness far more subtle than the vast majority of us have ever experienced, who compared notes and arrived at similar conclusions.

They all assert that karma plays out in the ways that are codified. That the exhaustion of negative karma is a key goal in our inner development. We may not have the capacity to see the big picture ourselves right now, but if we have confidence in those who do, we may regard this as a form of evidence.

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Indirectly, based on our own experience

None of us has any trouble accepting that childhood experiences still influence us decades later. Only last weekend I was chuckling with a friend about the insistent voice that keeps telling us to strive diligently, push forward and never stop working hard – a voice that we both still hear, forty years after having left our Presbyterian childhood homes. Conditioning colours how we experience reality even much later in life. Repetitive messages and actions have the most powerful impact on what defines our personal ‘normal,’ our world view.

Buddhism says that such conditioning, karma, carries over from one lifetime to another.  Our treatment of ourselves and others is constantly imprinting our consciousness, shaping how we perceive reality. Others perceive the very same reality differently because of their different karmic imprints.

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Why are we born into such a variety of different circumstances? During our lives, why do we experience what appears to be random good and bad luck? Inferring karma can help make sense of an otherwise incoherent roller-coaster of experiences. Importantly, this is not about making judgements about others. Each one of us has created limitless positive and negative karmas since beginningless time, and we would be wise to assume that we have created the causes for the very same suffering we see around us, only not yet the conditions for those karmas to ripen.

Within the same family, we use nature and nurture to account for individual differences between siblings, but are they enough? They are influences, to be sure, but couldn’t a more elegant explanation be that it is the karma of a child to be born to particular parents, with all that entails, and for that karma to become manifest as the child develops?

Karma provides a helpful explanation for more subtle but nevertheless profound differences. Whether it’s the way that the pandemic was managed, warfare in Ukraine or Gaza, up-coming elections or any other current affairs, the variety of people’s convictions, and the strength of those convictions, even among people who believe that they share the same essential values, is extraordinary.

I know marriages which have broken up over such issues. Intelligent, well-adjusted, good-hearted people who loved each other and had built happy lives together, were presented with the same information and yet their reactions were so irreconcilably different that it got to the point that they couldn’t stand the sight of each other.

Karma seems to offer an explanation in cases like these. Nothing in a person’s present life may suggest why they respond so strongly to particular information, ideas, people, art, animals, cultures, places or periods of history. But if we could see their past lives, might it be obvious? This is the inferential, the deductive, the indirect evidence for karma.

In support of the direct and indirect evidence for karma, are those curious cases of children who vividly remember elements of former lives which they couldn’t possibly have known – some of these appear in the Netflix series, Surviving Death. And there is a wealth of other research on this subject elsewhere. It would seem that, under the age of seven, some children have the capacity to tune into past experiences, even if in our culture it is unusual to question them about this.

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Ultimately, it is up to each one of us to weigh up the likelihood of different models of reality. Whether we opt for the karmic, theistic or ‘random universe’ model, I am sometimes struck by the recognition that the Buddha’s prescription for happiness remains true: abandon harmfulness, cultivate goodness, subdue your mind.

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