This question arose directly out of discussions I had with my friend about the nature of karma. His take is that you can't escape karma so accept it and try to accumulate good karma. In other words, do good and good things will happen to you. On the contrary, I've always felt that's too simplistic an idea and karma is definitely subtler than that. Since the topic was vague enough to be pondered upon, I decided to devote some time writing about it.
In broad terms, karma can be defined as: every action has an equal reaction, perhaps not necessarily opposite. Or, any action you take will generate its own associated karma. However, good and bad are at best pretty subjective concepts. They depend largely upon context. Change the context, and the good karma that you were happily accumulating, might just turn into something else. Which is where the subtlety of karma kicks in. Every action will have a reaction, and it will find its way back to you. It doesn't have to be black-or-white good and bad. It'll usually be a grey mixture of both, just like any action you take.
While pondering over this, I was struck by a sudden idea : what if you could figure out how to outwit karma? What if you managed to figure out what actions to take to get a certain result? Wouldn't that actually be a simplified form of karma at work? People do it all the time without consciously thinking about it as such. Want good grades? Study harder. Simple karma at work.Except that there are no guarantees in life. The consequences of your actions might be completely different from what you expected. Probably because trying to base your actions on their possible karmic outcome is like trying to play chess against...say, God? No matter how far ahead you calculate, you can never be sure of the outcome, which, annoyingly enough, karma has already calculated. Karma is subtle, and it'll always win. You might calculate for 5 years ahead and then find that 10 years in the future karma outwits you. Or that you lost 5 years running after something you never really wanted at the end of it.What if you spend all your time calculating future outcomes in an effort to beat karma. Through inaction, you would try to accumulate as little karma as possible by acting as little as possible and only when you're pretty sure of the outcome. Well, karma wins again. You wouldn't have much of a life right? Karma at work again, no matter how subtly, simply because even inaction would come with its own karma…
