There’s a teaching that you sometimes hear, that to know a person’s past actions, look at that person’s present condition; to know a person’s future condition, look at his present actions. This, though, is much too simplistic. It assumes that we have a single kamma account, like a single bank account, and what you see in the present moment is the running balance.
Actually what you see in the present moment is only one small piece of a person’s past kamma. For instance, you may see someone who seems to be happy, with lots of good fortune in life, but that person has many seeds of kamma in his background and some of those seeds can be very bad. In the same way, you may see someone who seems very unfortunate right now — in other words, some bad seeds are sprouting right now — but they may also have some very good seeds in their background that are either ready to sprout or may sprout sometime in the future.
The image that the Buddha uses to help us understand our past kamma is not a bank account. It’s a field full of seeds. In some of his explanations of this image, the soil in the field represents your past kamma. In other words, your field has some good soil and some bad soil. In some of the other ways he explains this image, the seeds represent the kamma, but the message is the same: You can have good seeds and bad seeds in your field. In either case, he says that in the present moment you can add water to the seeds in some parts of the field and you will encourage some of them to grow, which means that you have to be very careful about what you water.
Now in some cases, the seeds are not ready to sprout no matter how much water you add. Some are ready to sprout only if you add water, and some will sprout whether you add water or not. In any case, the “water” stands for your attention and your delight in things. So that’s what you have to watch out for: //what// you’re paying attention to, //how// you’re paying attention to it, and what kind of delight you find in it.
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