Karma is about being rewarded for your good deeds and punished for your wrongdoings.
With Thorns, you kind of get that. You’re hitting the thorn target, you’re getting punished and you suffer damage equal to the damage you caused.
With ToK however, you can target someone who’s done absolutely nothing to you, who isn’t hitting you at all, and they’ll still take damage if someone else hits you - meanwhile, the person hitting you won’t take any damage if they’re not the target of Touch of Karma.
I’m not interested in friends, even imaginary ones.
But yes, the forums must have been dull in my absence. Enough for you to notice that I was gone anyway.
Karma is about cause and effect, it is known as the law of consequence. It is not about retaliation or “reflections” and this is a popular misunderstanding of the term.
Karma is about how actions have consequences, sometimes you see them, sometimes you experience them, sometimes you don’t. The whole point of Indic philosophy around it is to understand that just because you didn’t “get a return” it doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t.
In this respect someone attacking the monk and causing another party to experience damage, who may or may not be them, is an accurate reflection of the term.
If I could slap a child and be told I’d get bad karma or slap a bramble of thorns, I’m slapping the child.
IMO the logic is perfect.
Anyways, as for the main point:
This is the where you’re going wrong, every enemy has done something to you.
If I stand by and let someone attack you without assisting you I am harming you by association.
Everyone you can target is your enemy, your enemies are out to hurt you, regardless if they’re the one throwing the punches.
You always experience the consquences - it’s just a question of ‘when’. Karma is never ‘sometimes you don’t’. You ALWAYS do. Every and each action you put to motion, will have inevitable consequences sooner or later - maybe in another incarnation, but it will come back to you eventually.
There’s never a ‘sometimes you don’t’ - you don’t get free passes from Karma. Karma will ALWAYS get you - that’s the beauty of it, and that’s why people call it a female canine.
You can’t absolve karma or be forgiven your karma any more than you can be forgiven for jumping off a cliff or putting your hand against a hot plate; an inevitable law will make sure that action will have a consequence. Law of gravity will make sure your body will get crushes, law of thermodynamics will make sure your hand will be badly burned.
No one can ‘forgive’ your karma or remove it - and that’s a good thing.
Think how miserable it would be if you had to live a whole eternity with ALL your bad deeds on your conscience! You’d wish you could stop existing sooner or later. But Karma lets you redeem yourself by taking on the consequences of your actions, so you will learn what it’s like, you can get rid of your bad deeds so you are liberated, you will be free, and you can live and breathe again once you’ve paid your karmic debts.
So when a monk uses ‘Touch of Karma’, it doesn’t mean the player that experiences the consequences is innocent. After all, they’re in a war, they’re trying to hurt someone, even if that someone is not you. And even if not, they sure HAVE done that at some point, now they’re given opportunity to pay for that deed.
It may not be directly obvious, but they deserved it, so ‘Touch of Karma’, even philosophically, IS the better ‘Touch of Karma’ than ‘Thorns’ can ever be.
You cannot escape the karma, correct (the karma is the generation of the consequence) so to act is to generate karma, you can escape the fruits of your karma however.
It is not the fruits of karma that the one is judged for however (if one is taking an indic philosophy system) it is the karma itself. Someone who undertakes an action that causes negative consequences will generate negative karma, and that is their burden, even if they never face the consequences of the action.
The karma is not the consequence, it is the law that sets the consequence in motion.
The idea of “deserve” doesn’t come into it. It’s a law of nature. If I undertake actions that generate negative consequences, then those negative consequences are likely to cause further negative consequences, and so on, rippling further and further. So if (and it is an if) I experience negative consequences one day, it may well be someone else’s or indeed my own negative action that set up that to take place. It’s not a question of me deserving it, it’s simply a recognition that if people behave in such a way, they they shouldn’t be surprised if hardship is what they experience at some point because they are contributing to a climate of negative consequences. It doesn’t mean though that “my car breaking down is payment for me kicking the cat that one time”.
The karma is a female dog line is a recognition of this, that like breeds like. It is not an expression that karma is a conscious force that revenges upon people for wrongdoing. Importantly that line is a line of western origin, not Indic, so it fails to capture the pure understanding of the term. Like many Indic terms taken into western canon (like enlightenment, tantra) it is a bastardised understanding of the term.
The idea that “your karma, in terms of the negative consequences, WILL affect you, no matter what” in Indic philosophy arises from the recognition of many philosophical systems alluding to the idea of Atman, or the idea that “truly, there are no selfs, only a cosmic self” when understood this way, then because the fruits of karma always land at someone’s door (even if not yours) it is that same cosmic self as you that is being sabotaged, even if you don’t see it that way. So in this case yes, the fruits of karma always “get you” in the purest sense.
Im not sure why you talked about absolving or forgiving karma, because I never mentioned anything about absolving it at all. Once karma is made it is made. The only thing one can do is be mindful of their karma and be responsible for all karma from that point onwards, but as I understand it, you cannot “erase” the bad karma of the past by doing good, because that bad karma is “out in the world” being further rippled etc. It is done. All you can do is generate future positive karma to try and mitigate it or possibly cause to halt the consequences of that first act, but it does not erase what it caused.
I’m not entirely sure we fundementally disagree here which is why I’m a tad confused, maybe except on the “karma will always get you” bit. I agree if you mean karma the law, I disagree if you mean the fruits in an individual sense.
