Question

Concerning Kamma - without me or mine what is Kamma attached to, if there is no-self - whose Kamma is it?

Answer

Once the Buddha was being asked about all sorts of far reaching questions, like the beginning of time, the ending of time, where would the Buddha go after he dies, all sorts of these questions. The Buddha basically said, "Before you get the answers to those questions, you are going to get insane." And he gave an analogy - this is like someone who is waking along a path and is just been shot in the back with a poisoned arrow. They fall over and are bleeding to death. Then it happens that a doctor comes walking by and sees this person bleeding to death with the arrow in the back, and the doctor says, "Oh, let me help you. I can pull out the arrow, I can fix this up, I have done this before." And the person lying on the ground says, "No, no, wait a minute. I want to know who shot the arrow. Was it a man or a woman, where they tall or short, did they have children, did they have a family?", and before the person gets answers to these questions they die.

Now some questions are like that, Kamma questions - "if there is no self, whose Kamma is it?" I can't answer that. And the person asking the question actually comes to Dukkha, because we can't get the answer. This is where we have to be careful when we ask our questions. I can't actually say there is no me and mine. Buddhism says that in the books, but I can't say that. So, I can't answer a question that relates to "if there is no-self, whose Kamma is it?"

To a certain extent we know that we are riding on some sort of wave. We know that what we have done in the past often comes back to us today in this life, we know that. We know that the things we do today may affect our future. This type of Kamma, this type of actions and results of actions, this is what we can see. So this is what we want to work with. We are going to work with the fact that there is something here which is kind of existing and changing for 30, 40, 50 years. So we are not going to say there is nobody here for now. But what we are going to work on is watching our intentions, our actions, speech and thoughts and try to make them better, more pure, so that more happiness will come in the future.

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.