If a person barged into your house, surroundings, clearly with the intention to kill either you or someone near you, would you have let him do it and just console yourself with the thought that karma will deal with him?
Let him do it.
Well, there's some leeway there, but okay, that's assuming that the only options were kill this person or be killed, or let him kill someone near you.
I mean, if it's going to be someone else, then you might try to sacrifice yourself instead.
But again, how do you know what the result is going to be?
The funny thing about these situations is they are karmic.
Most of the time they're based on very strong past karma.
So you have cases where the perfectly plotted murder is unsuccessful, or you have cases where the perfectly plotted rescue is botched and people die, the person dies no matter what people try to do.
So because you can't know the outcome it's quite dangerous to play God and to think that you're going to rule the situation and try to fix things in any situation.
So it's important, this is why as Buddhists we're very careful to go to the root and to stick to our guns in regards to the idea that wholesomeness leads to happiness and unwholesomeness leads to suffering.
And so we're very careful that our actions, our speech and our thoughts are wholesome.
And we take that as a refuge that we are not to blame for bad things if our minds are pure.
And so we let the world, sometimes the world can barge in on us like this.
We take it to be other people's business or our past business, not our present business.
Nothing that we want to be involved in now.
So that's what I would console myself in, not the thought that karma will deal with him.
The fact that karma will deal with the person who does harm to others should be a cause for remorse, if anything, although remorse is unwholesome, but compassion and the belief that no one deserves to suffer, even those people who have done bad.
Not that no one deserves to suffer,
Suffering is never a good thing, no matter who it is.
There's no gloating over people who have done bad things.
That would be unwholesome.
It would be unwholesome to gloat.
And so we would feel compassion and wish for that person to find a way to become free from their suffering as well.
So we don't ever take consolation in other people's suffering.
He'll get his.
Karma will get him back, that kind of thing.
It's not a Buddhist thing to do.
Nor is it a Buddhist thing to pass judgment on people because bad things have happened to them.
So if someone's born with a disability, for example, it's not a Buddhist thing to dismiss them, thinking that they've done bad things in their past life.
We have this kind of
general belief and understanding that most likely there's some reason for why they're that way, but it certainly doesn't turn us to think of them as a bad person.
So some people have criticized Buddhism as having this potential, having the potential
for abuse, whereby we judge people who have disabilities and so on, who have a hard life.
We say, well, it's just their bad karma, and so we look down upon them, which is not a Buddhist thing to do.
It's just not a Buddhist thing to look down on people.
Right, anyway, so that's that.