Why Some People Can’t Succeed?
Some people seem to consistently fail to do well in life, and this (you may say) has to do with kamma. But what does that mean? Does it mean that there’s nothing they can do about it, and so they’re doomed to be like that for the rest of their lives? When people speak of kamma, often they mean it like it’s fate. And that is not how the Buddha meant it. We need to bear in mind that kamma means action. Of course it can mean past action that is causing present results. But viewing it that way alone can be quite disempowering. Technically, when people speak of kamma like it’s fate, they are speaking of only the result of kamma, or what the Suttas sometimes call “old kamma”. When meeting old kamma, what we normally do is to respond badly, i.e. create new bad (unskilful or unwholesome) kamma. On the issue of consistently failing to do well in life, the old kamma here is the belief or perception (saññā) of being a failure, formed based on one’s repeated past experience of failure. Regardle...