Karma

The air was still cool on the first morning of Tết. Tết is the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. A grandmother stood at the edge of the village pond, holding a clear plastic bag. Inside, a few dozen small carp thrashed about.

Her grandchild ran out, voice still thick with sleep. "Grandmother, where did all these fish come from?"

"They are not our fish. We bought them to let them go."

"Why let them go?"

She sat down on the grassy bank and pulled the child down beside her. The bag lay in her lap, and the little carp slapped their tails against the plastic. "I will tell the story. But listen closely."

Then she said, "Have you heard the saying 'Be kind and good things find you'?"

"Yes. My teacher says it at school."

"Why do kind people meet good things?"

The child was quiet and did not know.

She took the child's hand and pointed at the bag. "Because everything we do leaves a mark. Not a mark on the ground or on the water."

"A mark in what we call nghiệp. Nghiệp is what we make with our own actions."

In Sanskrit, the old language of the people of India, the word is karma. Its root is "kri," which means to do, to make. Karma is what one has done, and what comes back from the doing.

That is all it is.

She went on. "Our elders say, 'Whatever seed is sown, that fruit is reaped.' Plant a squash seed and a squash vine grows. Plant a gourd seed and a gourd comes up."

"When we do good, the good grows little by little. When we practice a bad habit, that habit grows too. So we choose the good early."

The child looked down at the bag. "So if we let these fish go, good things will find us?"

She smiled. "Not exactly."

"We do not release fish and then wait for heaven to pay us back. We release them because we choose not to harm. That matters more."

Karma is not fate. It does not mean everything that happens to us is already decided. Karma is about what we choose to do, right now, in this very moment.

Choice. Not fate.

She said, "The Buddha's teaching came to the Bắc Ninh region almost two thousand years ago, through a center called Luy Lâu. Since then, the Vietnamese have learned that every action has its consequence."

The idea of nghiệp soaked slowly into daily life. Not through books, but through sayings, and through rituals like the one this morning.

"But even before that," she said, her voice softer, "in the middle of our country, there were people who understood this way of thinking long ago."

"Think of Mỹ Sơn."

"I know it. My book has a picture of old towers in Quảng Nam."

"Those are Cham towers. The Cham are a people of south-central Vietnam whose ancestors lived in the ancient kingdom of Champa. Deep in the mountains of old Quảng Nam, now part of Da Nang, those red brick towers still stand today."

"The Cham followed Hinduism, an old spiritual tradition. In that tradition, karma is the most basic idea of all."

"From the 7th century, the Cham carved Sanskrit letters into the stone at Mỹ Sơn."

The child looked up at her. "So the Cham knew about karma back then?"

"They did. They lived it, in every temple and every line cut into stone."

"Those letters speak of duty, of action, of what each person must answer for."

Over many centuries, the thinking in those stone towers mingled with Buddhism. It found its way into what a grandmother teaches her grandchild on a morning of Tết.

The child looked up again. "So if we do something bad, will karma punish us?"

She shook her head, her voice firm. "Not at all. Karma is not a cage to lock us in."

"Karma is what we build ourselves, with our own hands, every day."

We cannot choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we act.

That is what truly belongs to us.

She picked up the bag and stepped to the edge of the pond. "This morning we release the fish, not because we fear being punished if we do not."

"We release them because we choose to. We choose not to harm. We choose to begin the new year with an action we feel is right."

She tipped the bag. The carp shot out, water splashed up, and then they vanished into the green of the pond.

The child watched them go. Rings spread across the surface and then went flat.

"Grandmother, has the seed just been sown?"

She nodded and laughed. "The seed has just sprouted. And you have just seen it."

The pond went flat again. The new year began.