Is karma real or fake?

Answer 1

From the perspective of Buddhism, cause and effect really existed. Buddhism believed that all things had natural causes and karma, and all actions were governed by the law of cause and effect. There were three types of past karma, present karma, and future karma. Good karma was rewarded with good karma, and bad karma was rewarded with evil karma. The karma might appear in this life or the next life.

From a psychological point of view, there was also a cause-and-effect relationship, but it was different from the cause and effect of Buddhism. In psychology, the consequences of a behavior will affect a person's mental state. For example, doing good will generate happiness and satisfaction to promote positive emotions, and doing bad things will cause negative emotions. This forms a cause-and-effect cycle. The consequences will affect the formation of behavior.(Do good deeds only after they are rewarded) and negative reinforcement (avoid doing bad deeds after being punished) form a stable behavior model; Internal attributions affect the perception of consequences and promote the understanding of the consequences of one's own actions; Memory affects the continuation of causality, and the consequences of past actions can affect the current psychology and behavior through recollection; social learning also plays a role in forming the concept of causality. However, the causality in psychology was mainly limited to the present life form, emphasizing the direct connection between behavior and consequence, and most of them had time continuity.

However, Buddhism was not scientific. Karma contained supernatural elements. Spiritual entities such as karma could work across existences, including past, present, and future lives. Psychology was a science. The causality was the natural law formed in the body of the living through psychological mechanisms such as learning, memory, and emotions. Therefore, the truth of cause and effect depended on the perspective one viewed it from, and there were different explanations in different systems of thought.