When Karma Starts to Sound Like Victim Blaming

I have been reading Śāntideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva, and while much of the book has challenged and inspired me, I recently came across a passage that made me consider putting it down altogether.

In Chapter 6, Śāntideva discusses patience, anger, and how we should respond when others cause us harm. In verse 47, he argues that our past karma is responsible for bringing those who harm us into our lives.

I had to read that a few times.

Does that mean someone who experiences rape, abuse, or violence is suffering because of something they did in a previous life? Does it mean a child who is abused has some karmic responsibility for what happened to them?

Because if that's the argument, I find it deeply troubling.

I have spent much of my adult life criticizing religious explanations for suffering. One reason I rejected Christianity was the idea of an all-powerful, loving God who could intervene in unimaginable suffering but chooses not to.

Buddhism doesn't have that problem in quite the same way. There is no creator God overseeing the universe, handing out rewards and punishments. Karma is not supposed to be cosmic justice. It is a natural process of cause and effect.

But what happens when that process starts sounding like punishment anyway?

Is suffering our own fault?

In the Sīvaka Sutta (SN 36.21), the Buddha addresses the claim that everything we experience is the result of past actions.

He rejects it.

The Buddha explains that suffering can arise from illness, changes in climate, physical injury, our behavior, and karma, among other conditions. In other words, not everything that happens to us is the result of something we did in a previous life.

That distinction matters enormously to me.

Imagine someone born into a poor family in a country that later descends into war. Political leaders make decisions, armies mobilize, and eventually a bomb falls on a neighborhood, seriously injuring someone who happens to live there.

Did that person's karma cause the bomb to fall?

Or did countless other causes and conditions come together to create a tragedy that had nothing to do with their previous actions?

The second explanation makes considerably more sense to me.

We know that our lives are interconnected. Our actions affect others, and their actions affect us. The decisions of people we will never meet can change our lives forever.

This is hardly an exclusively Buddhist observation. We can see it happening around us every day.

But Śāntideva seems to go further. He suggests that our past karma has contributed to our encounters with those who harm us.

And I struggle with that.

What exactly does karma do?

I am increasingly drawn toward traditional Chan Buddhism, and part of that journey has involved trying to understand karma and rebirth as they are actually taught, rather than immediately reducing them to psychological metaphors.

I remain skeptical, but I am also willing to admit that I don't know everything.

One approach that makes sense to me is that the karma accumulated across lifetimes helps condition our rebirth. We may be born into particular circumstances because of past actions, while continuing to create new karma through our intentions and choices.

But what happens after birth?

If karma ripens at forty years old when a bomb falls on my house, what exactly did karma do? Did it somehow arrange the circumstances that placed me in the bomb's path?

Obviously, karma isn't a conscious being making decisions. Traditional Buddhist teachings don't describe it that way. Karmic results are said to arise when the appropriate conditions come together.

But that still leaves me asking how we distinguish a karmic result from all the other causes and conditions operating around us.

In the Mahākammavibhaṅga Sutta (MN 136), the Buddha explains that karma is more complicated than simply watching good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Actions can produce results in this life, the next, or later lives.

I can appreciate that explanation without pretending I fully understand it.

What I cannot accept is looking at someone who has experienced a horrific act of violence and concluding that their previous karma must have played a role.

There is a difference between saying karma could contribute to our circumstances and saying that suffering itself is evidence of past wrongdoing.

Where does compassion fit?

This is where my difficulty with Śāntideva becomes more than philosophical.

Śāntideva's broader argument is about developing patience and overcoming anger. He wants us to recognize that those who harm others are themselves acting from ignorance and destructive mental states, creating further suffering.

I can appreciate that.

But I cannot ignore the implications of suggesting that someone who experiences abuse brought that person into their life through past karma.

Even if we say the victim does not deserve what happened, we have still connected their suffering to something morally significant they supposedly did before.

And I am not sure that distinction resolves the problem.

I also recognize that Śāntideva was an Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosopher, not the final authority on every Buddhist tradition. Chan and Zen inherit teachings about karma and rebirth, but that doesn't mean every teacher approaches these questions in exactly the same way.

Dōgen, for example, strongly affirmed karmic consequences across lifetimes in his writings on cause and effect. Yet that doesn't establish that every instance of suffering is the result of an individual's past wrongdoing.

I want to understand these differences rather than simply accept or reject a teaching because it makes me uncomfortable.

Still, I keep returning to one question.

When we encounter someone who is suffering, should our first concern be what karma might have brought them there, or what we can do to alleviate that suffering?

For me, we reduce their suffering.

And I would like to think that answer is consistent with the bodhisattva path.

Learning to live with the question

I haven't resolved this.

I don't want to dismiss Śāntideva because I find one of his arguments repulsive. At the same time, I don't want my desire to understand and embrace Buddhism to lead me into accepting claims that I would otherwise challenge.

That would be replacing one form of attachment with another.

I've found tremendous value in the Four Noble Truths, impermanence, emptiness, and the teachings on compassion. That growing confidence has made me more willing to approach the teachings on karma and rebirth with an open mind.

But an open mind doesn't mean an unquestioning one.

Perhaps part of this practice is learning to hold both respect and disagreement at the same time.

I can take traditional karma seriously without claiming to understand its precise workings. I can acknowledge that past actions may have consequences beyond this lifetime without assuming every tragedy is the result of those actions.

And I can question Śāntideva without dismissing the wisdom of everything else he has written.

For now, I'm left thinking about the difference between a universe in which suffering simply arises through countless causes and conditions, and one in which our past moral actions help determine which suffering we experience.

The Buddha rejected the idea that everything we experience results from past karma. Śāntideva seems willing to assign a more direct karmic role to the people who harm us.

How do we reconcile those teachings?

And perhaps more importantly, how do we make sure our understanding of karma never becomes an excuse to blame the people who most need our compassion?

I don't have an answer yet.

But I think these questions are worth asking.