What is karma?

Sharon Stone’s comments on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival that the earthquake in China was a result of ‘bad karma’ kicked off a storm that eventually had the actress issue an apology. But what is karma, and more specifically, what is bad karma? The BBC Magazine digs deep.

Sharon Stone claims the earthquake in China is the result of bad karma for its treatment of Tibetans. Is her definition - “when you are not nice, bad things happen to you” - correct?

Radiohead sings of the “karma police”, called in to arrest those who upset Thom Yorke: “This is what you get when you mess with us.” And Boy George warbles about a “karma chameleon”, in a toxic relationship because he’s not “so sweet” anymore.

Cause and effect, see. Actions have consequences.

And Sharon Stone, a convert to Buddhism, has claimed - to much criticism - that the earthquake that killed at least 68,000 people in China was bad karma for Beijing policy in Tibet. “I thought, is that karma - when you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?” she mused at the Cannes Film Festival.

Karma is an important concept for Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs. Translated from the Sanskrit, it means simply “action”. Because karma is used in a number of ways and contexts - even among different branches of Buddhism - this can be confusing.

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[Pic: Sharon Stone with the Dalai Lama]

Previously on AW:

Video of Sharon Stone’s ‘bad karma’

Tibetan Buddhism’s next leader?

In the IHT, former New York Times Asia correspondent and author of So Close to Heaven, Barbara Crossette profiles the Karmapa, the man who could succeed the Dalai Lama, on the eve of his first trip to the United States

The recent outburst of Tibetan rage against the Chinese government not only demonstrated once again the fear and anger among Himalayan Buddhists living under the cultural insensitivity of Beijing, it also illuminated the crucial role of the Dalai Lama, navigating skillfully between restive Tibetan exiles and an Indian government under Chinese pressures to stifle their protests. What will happen when he is gone?

The West is about to get its first glimpse of that possible future.

In mid-May, a serious young man of 22 who is revered as the 17th Karmapa - now the second-most-important figure in Tibetan Buddhism - will make his first visit to the United States. The trip comes eight years after his dramatic flight to India from a monastery near Lhasa at the end of 1999, when he was just 14 years old. This is the first time that a skittish India has allowed him permission to travel abroad. His flight from Tibet was a considerable embarrassment to China.

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Holy man

What does the Dalai Lama stand for, really, wonders Pankaj Mishra in New Yorker

Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.

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A Monk’s Struggle

In Time magazine, Pico Iyer’s startlingly intimate account of the Dalai Lama and what he stands for

“Since China wants to join the world community,” the 14th Dalai Lama said as I was traveling across Japan with him for a week last November, “the world community has a real responsibility to bring China into the mainstream.” The whole world stands to gain, he pointed out, from a peaceful and unified China—not least the 6 million Tibetans in China and Chinese-occupied Tibet. “But,” he added, “genuine harmony must come from the heart. It cannot come from the barrel of a gun.”

I thought of those measured and forgiving words—the Dalai Lama still prays for his “Chinese brothers and sisters” every morning and urges Tibetans to learn Chinese so they can talk with their new rulers, not fight with them—as reports trickled out of Tibet of freedom demonstrations that have led to some of the bloodiest confrontations in the region since similar protests preceded a brutal crackdown in the late 1980s. The violence has left 99 people dead, according to Tibetan exile groups; the Chinese government says 13 “innocents” were killed in the riots. Soon after monks began demonstrating in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, Chinese forces moved to contain the marchers, but the disturbances spread to other Tibetan cities, and their causes clearly remain unresolved. Working out how best to avoid further embarrassment as they prepare for the start of the Olympic-torch relay on March 25 will be a tricky challenge for China’s rulers. As a diplomat told TIME, “They need to get this under control, but to do so without a lot of brutality.”

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On being, and not being, a Buddhist

Dustin Eaton is a PhD student studying South Asian religion at the University of Iowa. Here he blogs in Newsweek/Washington Post’s Faithbook on his evangelical Protestant upbringing and his journey through Muhammad and Moses to a new belief

I am not a Buddhist. I’ve never told anyone that I am a Buddhist and have in fact denied the title on more than one occasion. Even though I have been circling around the stupa for the last ten years, I have never made any formal or official commitment to the Buddha sāsana. I’ve never sown a rakusu or received a “dharma name.” I am, as of this moment, a freelance wanderer through the six realms of samsara.

I was raised in West Michigan to a small family of born-again evangelical protestants. As early as a few weeks after my birth I was sitting on my mom’s lap in one of the world’s first mega-churches. (Although at the time I’m sure it wasn’t as mega as it is now). I loved felt-boards and summer bible camp. I memorized the books of the Old and New Testaments. I attended Awana and filled up my little plastic crown pin with little plastic jewels. This cheap trinket that I wore on a bright red vest represented the authentic crown that I would wear when I finally entered into the presence of God, my dead grandparents and all my recently expired turtles. I anticipated the rapture and feared the Devil. I sang “Jesus loves me this I know” and I did know it. I believed in the literal truth of the Bible before I knew what a metaphor was, and I can remember feeling guilty because I loved my heavenly father more than my earthly one. Over the years I was baptized and rebaptized, committed and recommitted. If there was an alter call, I was answering.

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Scandal gnaws at Buddha’s holy tree in India

A Reuters report by Simon Denyer:

Tales of corruption, looting and religious rivalry are swirling around the spot where Buddha is said to have gained enlightenment in eastern India some 2,500 years ago, sullying one of Buddhism’s holiest sites.

Buddhist scriptures describe it as the “Navel of the Earth”, and 100,000 pilgrims and tourists visit every year, packing the town of Bodh Gaya in Bihar state and its Mahabodhi Temple.

An ancient pipal tree, Ficus religiosa or sacred fig, grows at the back of the temple, said to be a descendent of the one Buddha sat under for three days and nights in the sixth century BC, before finding the answers he sought under a full moon.

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