Store Consciousness - Verse Five

Whether transmitted by family, friends,
society or education,
all our seeds are, by nature,
both individual and collective.

According to the teachings of the Prajñapāramita sutras, there is no individual or phenomena that exists by itself, then how can our seeds or actions be individual? They are both individual and collective. If we teach our children to be destructive, we too are responsible for their actions.

Killing is a crime but our soldiers fight terrorists to protect us. Same action-karma performed under differing conditions can produce different karmic results. This is so because the result is always determined with respect to both, the intent and the collective impact of the action. The intent may be to feed the poor but if the impact on another sentient being is that it is being killed to produce that food then the result may not be as positive as we expect.

Our education, society, family and friends are also responsible for what we are, so they benefit when we do the right things like practicing the five mindfulness trainings and they pay the price when we do the wrong things like engage in acts of violence.

Stock prices depend on collective behavior. Someone may buy the shares of a company X in good faith after thorough analysis but some insurgency in Iraq may lead to a stock market crash and he may lose money. The analysis that he carried out too was based on methods he learned from others. He may feel that it is unfair that he loses money despite doing everything right.

When an individual in the USA applies for a home loan, he needs to provide information and documents about himself and the property so the lender can complete underwriting activities. The lender will check if the individual fulfills the income requirement among other criteria and will get an an appraiser to value the property. The lender may then advance a part of the appraised value of the home as a loan to the applicant. The individual may feel very upset when the home value crashes, he loses income due to recessionary economic conditions and his loan modification request is denied. He may be even more upset if the loan is foreclosed upon.

All schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism understand this collective nature of our experiences. Our happiness is the result of collective effort. Without a teacher we may not be proficient in what we learn. Without someone taking care of us as a child, we may not survive. A human baby only cries when he needs something. He cannot walk or crawl to get something to feed himself until after many weeks of birth.

However, we too are responsible in part for our joys and misfortunes. While we may not become enlightened without a teacher, our own efforts too are important. If we do not create awareness about the five mindfulness trainings the we may someday end up a victim of the predatory economic system.

People who help lenders foreclose homes, work for companies that makes guns or non-vegan products may think that they are only doing their job but if that was the case then Buddha would not have taught right livelihood.

It is always both individual and collective, every seed, every action, every result, a collective effort. From this the Mahāyānist understands that she cannot be happy until others are happy. So she works towards the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

We may know the intent but not the impact of our actions. We may gift someone a book but that person may become very unhappy after reading it. We may only be using a cosmetic but we may not know the torture a rabbit might have had to undergo while the cosmetic was being tested on the rabbit.

Developing the right understanding of the nature of reality is necessary to be free from suffering. Emptiness is understood as 'interbeing' by Vijñaptimātrins. It is for this reason that we learn, practice and promote the five mindfulness trainings, so we perform actions that produce good results for everyone.

(Basedon the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh.) 

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