For example, take the common words of wisdom, “you reap what you sow”. All three religious traditions warn us that what happens to us is often a result of the way we treat other people.
JEWISH SCRIPTURE
“Give freely and you will become more wealthy; be stingy and you will lose everything” (Proverbs 11:24).
CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE
“Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. We reap what we sow” (Galatians 6:7).
MUSLIM SCRIPTURE
“If you do good, you do good to yourselves. Likewise, if you do evil, you do evil to yourselves” (Qur’an 17:7).
Three expressions of the same truth.
All three of these great religions originated in agricultural societies, so it’s not surprising that they often express profound truth in terms of the routine of rural life. This makes it even harder to apply some of their truth to today’s challenges. It’s bad enough that our sacred scriptures were written in another culture, in another time, in another language, and we have to translate the message into today’s urban Western culture. We often just don’t get it!
Most of us live in cities. More and more of us are living in the inner city, where farms are unknown and we have to fight to preserve open space against the greed of developers, and sometimes of local councils and state governments.
The sowing and reaping we do may be limited to the veggie patches and flowerbeds in our small yards or on our balconies or in our window boxes. But we do know that if we plant lily bulbs we are likely to get lilies, not freesias; if we plant seed potatoes we will get potatoes, not parsnips; and if farmers plant wheat, they are most likely to get wheat, not oats or barley. In the same way, if we smile at others, we are more likely to get a smile back; if we help people when they need it, we are more likely to find help when we need it; if we are grumpy or rude to others, we are more likely to find other people are grumpy and rude, too.
This is what Buddhists call karma: what we see as “good luck” and “bad luck” may often result from what we have said and done in the past. “According to the seed that’s sown, so is the fruit you reap therefrom, Doers of good will gather good, doers of evil, evil reap; Sown is the seed and you shall taste the fruit thereof (from the Samyutta Nikaya).
There’s another lesson we can learn from the farmer, too. He plants perhaps a hundred seeds but expects to harvest thousands. By being generous to others we may find people are even more generous to us; if we are mean with our time or our money we may find people are even meaner to us.
Here, as in many other ways, we can learn from the accumulated wisdom of the past, as taught by our great religious traditions. We can help ourselves, as well as others, through random acts of kindness – perhaps a phone call when someone is in hospital, a visit when they come home, with a ready-to-heat homemade meal …
A friend of mine went to India recently and met a taxi driver who was upset by the number of beggars who would crowd around his cab pointing to their mouths. He did not want to give them money, so he began to hand out little packets of biscuits to help ease their hunger. Their gratitude makes him happier than anything they could ever give him in return. He is making his own good luck.
