The "Excuse Karma" Problem

I don't really like talking about kamma (Sanskrit: karma) because it's a difficult subject. It's extremely complex and having a truly proper understanding of it also requires a solid understanding of other concepts such as anatta (non-self, having no soul or permanent self) and anicca (impermanence). Therefore it's very difficult explain it both accurately and in a way that doesn't cause people to walk away with a completely false understanding of it. I personally don't feel like I can do a proper job of explaining it to people claiming to be Buddhist, much less non-Buddhists, and as you can imagine there seems to be a good bit of disagreement even among Buddhists on how kamma is suppose to work.

Recently though, Ven. S. Dhammika mentioned something that has been bugging me for some time, namely the corrupt idea that kamma is an excuse for not doing anything to help people because if they fall on bad times then it's obviously due to their bad kamma and thus they deserve whatever happens to them. He says:

The four most common misunderstandings are these.
...
(2) We can never escape from the consequences of our past actions. If this were true then we would be completely determined by our past and be unable to change and attain enlightenment (A.I,249). The Buddha spoke of two types of determinism (niyativada); theistic determinism (issaranimmana hetu) which says that God knows and controls everything and thus has determined everything before it has happened and (2) kammic determinism (pubbekata hetu) which says that everything we experience, pleasant, painful or neutral, is due to our kamma, that is, how we have acted in the past. The Buddha said that both these ideas are not only false but also pernicious (A.I,173). Determinism means that the individual cannot choose one course of action over another, cannot make an effort to change anything and is not responsible for anything he or she does. Such a belief can only lead to irresponsibility and inactivity - ‘What can I do? It’s my past kamma.’ As the Buddha very correctly said, ‘If anyone were to say that we experience (the results of) a deed exactly as we have done it then it would be impossible to cultivate the spiritual life’ (A.I,248).

In much of Buddhist Asia the widely held belief that everything is due to kamma is used as an excuse for peoples’ lack of social concern.

This idea does seem to be disturbingly popular in Asia. I'm not sure if it's to be blamed on the influence of Taoism or maybe Hinduism (in East Asia I'd tend to assume Taoism, while Hinduism has had a good bit of influence in Southeast Asia) but it doesn't come from Buddhism. Unfortunately Buddhism suffers from reuse of the words kamma (Pali) and karma (Sanskrit) from other philosophies like Hinduism, but it's a difficult word to avoid because it's very fundamental to the language since it literally means action. Misunderstandings then arise because people who don't speak Pali or Sanskrit then think it's some magic opaque word that only refers to this philosophical idea and thus the idea must be the same across the board, but kamma and karma are in fact extremely generic words.

This "excuse karma" problem especially disturbs me because it's constantly cited to me by non-Buddhists in the west as an example of why Buddhism is a bad influence and why Buddhist countries are in such bad shape. Unfortunately I don't know that there's much that westerners can do to change this sort of attitude in Asia. So what I want to know is, what are people in Asia, especially Buddhists, going to do about this attitude and improve the state of their countries?

As long as this degenerate phenomena of "excuse karma" persists it's going to continue to cause social problems and make Buddhism look bad. People are going to keep attributing it to Buddhism whether it truly comes from Buddhism or not. (Similarly, people in the west are probably going to keep attributing things that actually come from American Transcendentalism to Buddhism whether they come from Buddhism or not. Though thats less serious, it still demonstrates how easily people confuse Buddhism with other ideas.)

So karma/kamma is clearly not an excuse for inaction for anyone who is the least bit educated in Dhamma (Buddhist doctrine). The Buddha's refutations of doctrines of inaction are repeated constantly throughout the Pali Canon and are very consistent.