Talk:Objections to the Doctrine of Karma and Responses:Karma and Human Apathy

By Vishal Agarwal

Objection: Believing in the Law of Karma promotes apathy towards those who are suffering. If I see someone in pain, why should I help him? After all, he is suffering the fruit of his own Karma. And I do not want to interfere in the Divinely upheld Law of Karma by helping him alleviate his pain.

Response: The same sacred Hindu tradition which expounds the Law of Karma also exhorts us to show compassion, serve others and to be humble. Believing that the person suffering must have performed evil actions whereas you have not done so overlooks the fact that actions fructify with an indeterminate time lag. It is possible that you have performed worse actions than the person you see suffering, but his lesser evil Karma has fructified before yours! It is not therefore for us to judge, which is properly Divine responsibility. Our responsibility is to help those who are suffering and alleviate their pain in whichever way we can. Ignoring and overlooking the suffering of another is bad Karma in itself and will surely beget us suffering in the future. For the sake of those we love, we forget even our own happiness for the sake of theirs. Likewise, we ought to love others and see the Divine in them without getting concerned with the false idea that “I will violate the Divine Law of Karma and interfere with Divine Will if I help others.”

“When we see a beggar, we can be certain that he is experiencing the effect of a cause he has instigated in a previous life. Probably he refused charity to someone who was desperately in need of it and now a compassionate Nature is giving him a chance to be on the receiving end and thus balance his debts. Of course this does not mean that you should not help him. Your duty if you have the money and the means is to help him to your fullest capacity. It is not your duty to judge his worth or otherwise. If you refuse to help him, you will be starting another cycle of cause and effect, which you will have to experience. Instead of trying to balance the pros and cons yourself, all you have to do is to help the beggar if you have the means to do it without questioning his worth or his past karma. This is not your problem. Your problem is to make sure that you do not intake more negative karma by refusing to help a person who appears to be in need. Whether or not he actually deserves to be helped is not your problem.

Naturally, we are bound to see a selfish person as a selfish person and a murderer as a murderer, but we are not the ones to judge them. We cannot see the karmic debt that is being paid off by the selfishness and the murder. This does not mean that we should not act in the way that is appropriate to the situation. We can and must call the murderer to task and hand him over to the police, but that is all that we are called upon to do. The moment we start judging him from the human point of view, we become involved in the process of cause and effect. In every situation you can either look at it from the angle of your higher Self or your personality, your lower human self.”