Vipassana Meditation Master
Acharavadee Wongsakon
This is a story about the Buddha’s old Karma. It wasquite heart-wrenching.
In that long-ago era, the Buddha was born as the son of a goldsmith. A young man of striking beauty and extraordinary skill in the craft of gold. One day, a wealthy merchant noticed how handsome this young man was, and grew worried that his daughter, who was soon to be married, might fall for him. So the merchant did everything he could to keep the two apart.
Yet before the wedding, his daughter Kanchanavadi had already caught a glimpse of the goldsmith’s son. Captivated, she tried to arrange a meeting, but fate kept them from each other until she was wed to another man.
Later, when the young man finally saw her face, he too was smitten. Consumed by desire for her, he hatched a scheme. He brought a gift of exquisite gold ornaments to a viceroy, and in exchange, the the viceroy agreed to help him.
Together they devised a plan: the young man would disguise himself as a woman and pose as the his younger sister, allowing him to enter the inner chambers of Kanchanavadi’s household. He then used his authority to forbid the woman’s husband and all others from entering her room. When the two finally met, desire overwhelmed them, and for three months they conducted their affair in secret, undetected by anyone. Then the Prince came to escort the young man away.
This deliberate, carefully plotted violation of the third precept – sexual misconduct – generated a heavy Karma. Upon death, the man descended into all four lower realms: the hells, the realm of hungry ghosts, the realm of demons, and the animal realm, for an almost incomprehensible span of fourteen cosmic eons (*kappas*).
Even after that, residual Karma remained. He was born as a cow, as a donkey, as a person born deaf and blind, as a transvestite, and as a woman – 500 lifetimes in each form. Even as a woman, the karmic debt continued: some lives were spent in prostitution; in others she suffered violation. It was an extraordinarily long time before those lives brought good fortune, and longer still before the Karma was finally exhausted.
Only when all of this had run its course and he was reborn as a human in the era of the Dipankara Buddha did he ordain as an ascetic, taking the name Sumedha. Dipankara Buddha then prophesied that this ascetic would, after a further four incalculable eons and 100,000 great cosmic cycles, attain supreme and perfect enlightenment, and be known as Shakyamuni Gautama, the Awakened One of this present age.
Even the Buddha himself, in a past life, created causes that locked him into an additional fourteen eons of karmic repayment, enduring immeasurable suffering, all because he failed to restrain himself, kept bad company, and acted to satisfy craving. That single lapse vastly extended his lifetimes, bringing untold hardship in return.
In today’s hyper-connected world, the pull toward transgression has only grown stronger. Many people break the precepts without hesitation. Some break all five. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the pace of modern life has somehow made the law of Karma obsolete. Everything that arises in this world has a cause. We see the difference in people’s circumstances all around us: some were born into comfort and ease, others into suffering they did nothing to deserve. The ripening of past Karma shapes the conditions of a life from the very beginning.
The Five Precepts are the foundation of our destiny.
Those who consider themselves advanced in Dhamma knowledge sometimes look down on the Five Precepts teachings as something like a beginner’s material, and prefer to discuss lofty topics like Dependent Origination (Paṭicca-samuppāda). But if one cannot even maintain the Five Precepts, what does that say about one’s practice?
Many meditators strive for extraordinary psychic powers or extraordinary attainments, keeping their eyes fixed on the heights while neglecting the ethical ground beneath their feet. Some who practice mindfulness have in fact turned it into wrong mindfulness – a sharpened awareness in the service of scheming, deception, or tearing others down. And there are those who, armed with scriptural knowledge, form alliances to harm good people through false accusation, apparently unafraid of the consequences. When Karma finally ripens in such cases, the result is beyond description. Truly sad, and truly sobering.
Life does not end at death.
What dies in each existence is the body, the minddoes not die.
It continues, carrying its Karma forward.
Reorient yourself. Don’t only look ahead,
while leaving the problem of broken precepts unaddressed.
In the end, you are the one who receives
the result of everything you do.
Don’t live to create Karma.
Live to walk the path beyond it.
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