The writer wonders about karma and destiny, those eternal, metaphysical concepts that hold sway over our lives

Once in a small village lived a mother and her son. The son moved to the city to earn, promising to return after earning enough money for both of them. Days turned into months and months into years. The mother waited for the son to return.

Meanwhile in the village lived a beggar who was fortunate enough to be readily fed by the villagers out of compassion, who helped him in whatever way they could. The beggar would come to the woman’s house every day, asking for a roti. The woman never let him go back disappointed. Every day when she cooked for herself, she kept one roti aside for the beggar. Every evening the beggar appeared and graciously accepted the roti. This went on for years.

Seema Saxena

The woman had now grown very anxious about her son. She could think of no way to contact her son, and prayed for his safe return. Over a period of time, she lost all appetite, worrying about her son.  

But she had to cook for the beggar daily. She started getting irritated, wondering why she was helping the beggar when she herself was in such misery. So one day, she lost her patience and was rude to him, hoping that he would never return. But the beggar appeared at her doorstep, every single day. After a while, the woman lost her patience and decided to kill him by poisoning the next roti that she would give him. So she baked the roti, poisoned it and waited for the beggar. When the beggar came, she nonchalantly picked up the roti to hand it over to him. But suddenly a picture of the beggar dying by the poisoned roti flashed in her mind. She  was alarmed and threw the poisoned roti and baked a fresh one for him. 

She felt relieved she had saved herself from a sin and went to sleep peacefully. At midnight, she heard a knock on her door. When she opened the door, she was shocked. Her son in tattered clothes, looking bedraggled, was standing in front of her. He fell unconscious at her feet. Being weak herself, she picked him up with great difficulty. She bathed him and fed him. At last, she felt happy.

When he regained strength, he told her that his life in the city was not good. So he decided to return one fine day with some money. But as he arrived near the village, some robbers snatched away his precious money and almost beat him to death, since he tried to put up a fight against them. He was in a dazed state, but remembered a beggar taking care of him and feeding him with a roti every day. Last evening after the beggar had fed him and he felt better, he decided to gather courage and walked to his home. But before he left, he thanked the beggar for taking care of him.

His mother’s eyes were filled with tears. She recognised who the beggar was. Had she given him the poisoned roti, it would have been her son who would be dead. 

She thanked her stars for changing her decision at the last moment. 

Her good karma had saved her son’s life. 

There are many such incidents which keep happening around us. Some good and some very unpleasant, which make us wonder whether we really could have saved ourselves from a catastrophe.

Sometimes, we are left wondering whether just not going out could have saved a relative’s death in a horrifying accident. And sometimes we feel lucky that we had somehow missed the bus by a fraction of a second, after we learnt that the same bus had fallen into a gorge, killing several passengers.  

Some toil hard day and night to get good results and others get good results without effort. We call it destiny. Or is destiny a term coined by humans as an excuse to overlook their failures?

But what is destiny? Destiny is defined as events that will necessarily happen to a particular person in future. Would it be wrong to say that we all are destined to die one day? Nature is the womb which nurtures life. There are a series of events which are happening every moment in nature. The sun rises and sets; there are high and low tides in the oceans and the trees continue to grow naturally in forests. Life may manifest as an ant in the Amazon rainforest or even as lichens in the Antarctica. Life makes no distinction and will proliferate in the most unlikely of all places. A peepul tree starts growing on the walls of a ruined fort.

 Numerous events are happening simultaneously at any particular moment. Once life gets manifested in human form, the person faces this ever changing world. Every second, a human being is faced with choices and a decision needs to be made.  Every being has the choice to choose from various options―some good, some bad, others, a mix of both good and bad. We all face difficult choices. But the joy of being human is that we have a free will―to choose wisely or foolishly.

It is our free will which is going to add to our karmic account; whether good or bad, depends on how wisely we have exercised our freedom. Some of the fruits of our karma will not be ripe yet, while others may instantaneously yield good effects. Over a period of time, we tend to forget our deeds.

But imagine that there is that ever-so-watchful Being, unseen, omniscient, tabulating, ticking the pluses and minuses in our account. And when see the fruits of our karma―delicious or bitter―we often tend to equate it with our destiny.

Our karma has followed us not only in this life, but has been following us from our past lives as well. This is our Sanchita Karma, the sum of our past karmas―all actions, good and bad, from our past lives that follow us through to the next life.

Prarabdha karma, part of Sanchita Karma, is experienced through the present body, whose results we are enjoying in our present lifetime. According to Sri Swami Sivananda: “Prarabdha is that portion of the past karma which is responsible for the present body. That portion of the sanchita karma which influences human life in the present incarnation is called prarabdha. It is ripe for reaping. It cannot be avoided or changed. It is only exhausted by being experienced. You pay your past debts. Prarabdha karma is that which has begun and is actually bearing fruit. It is selected out of the mass of the sanchita karma.”

But it is our choice now which is going to decide our course of life in future. We call this destiny. But destiny is only a set of preset events, which have to happen anyway. It was our choice which made the difference. Therefore, it is upon us how to make good choices and enjoy good luck, which is another word used for destiny.

Destiny is generally used for fruits of actions which have gone wrong. Most of us are disheartened by the conditions imposed upon us by events in nature. Some very talented people are born in poor families and it might seem that their talents have just been wasted. But it is the free will of these individuals, who opted out of the vicious cycle and created some very good karmas. Helen Keller, Beethoven, Stephen Hawking managed to do what they desired despite their handicaps or physical disabilities. There are other talented people who have wasted their talents because of the bad choices they made. So hard work, which is done consciously keeping in mind the factors which can make a change, is very essential for success and happiness in our life. 

We have to live in full awareness of our surroundings by putting to rest our inner turbulences and avoid adding further to the chaos in the environment. We are so involved with ourselves that we rarely take notice of things outside. We are self- obsessed oblivious to the world around.

In order to do good (karma), we must not get dismayed by the conditions or obstacles we face. Another important feature of the law of karma is what you give you get back. Sometimes even with interest. If you give love, you get back love. You spread hate and you will face hatred. A person who is in the habit of giving gifts himself gets a lot of gifts in return. That is why we are advised to follow the path of good morals or we get sucked into the fruits of bad karma.

We need to keep our life balanced with the fruits of good karma to avoid the negative effects of karma, which we did either unintentionally or because we were just ignorant.

We may have forgotten the many deeds we have done in our past lives, but we have this life to settle the issue. Let us acquire clarity in terms of our actions and how they are going to affect us. 

During these Covid times, we are all facing difficulties, which we had never imagined. Businesses have shut and people have lost their jobs. We have to be patient and wait for our good karma to take effect. The zero-defect karmic calculator of the Almighty is sure to settle all our accounts soon. And happy days will be here again on this beautiful blue planet.

Seema Saxena is a teacher with spiritual insight.