Four Kinds of Kamma

There is a rather humorous text in the Middle Length Discourses called the Kukkuravatika Sutta, or The Dog-Duty Ascetic (M 57).

In the Buddha’s time, the so-called spiritual scene was full of people who did extreme ascetic practices. In this text, we’re told of an ascetic who likes to practice like he’s a dog. He walks around on all fours, traipsing in and out of puddles, and will only eat food that is thrown on the ground. And he has an ascetic friend who likes to practice like he’s an ox. This one stands around and lies down in straw. They both have been doing their ascetic practice for many years.

They come across the Buddha and the dog-duty ascetic asks him something like, “What is the result of my practice as a dog ascetic? Have I burned off a lot of bad kamma [action]?” And the Buddha says “Don’t ask me.” The dog ascetic says, “No, tell me.” And the Buddha says, “Don’t ask me.”

This goes on for three times, until the Buddha finally says, “Okay, you’ve asked me three times. Having been asked three times, I cannot refuse; so I’ll tell you. Since you’ve been practicing like a dog and have developed the dog-mind fully and without interruption, your destiny is to be either reborn as a dog if you’ve done it well or to be reborn in hell if you have messed up.”

Maybe the Buddha is being slightly humorous here, but he says that rather than do all these silly things and think you’re wearing out kamma, there’s a better way to do it.

At this point the Buddha goes into a brief exposition on four kinds of kamma.

The first of these kamma is called “dark action with dark result,” which is to say it is negative action producing negative results. Here one takes life, abuses living beings, takes intoxicants, and so forth. The results of those actions are dark and negative – one is heir to one’s actions. It seems appropriate to call it “dark” rather than bad because it is more like a feeling tone. The mind feels dark when it does these things, and it leads to darker feelings in the future.

The language of the sutta may seem unnecessarily cluttered here, but it says, “one generates an afflictive bodily formation.” What it means is that in any action you’re creating a sankhāra, an intention, volition, or formation. It may seem like just one moment’s blip – you’ve had a naughty thought and it is gone – but there’s actually more to it than that. The process of Dhamma involves a transpersonal causality of conditions. It is not me doing it.

These formations add up over time and create a kammic tendency, a kind of habitual track down which one’s mind will run. This will determine the sort of person you become. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, then you are creating a current or a kammic pathway. Every time you go down that track you generate an afflictive formation, an afflictive sankhāra. This kamma then comes back to you because you have created a channel through bodily action for certain actions to lead to certain results.

The same thing happens with actions of speech and with actions of the mind. If you think in certain ways, you foster particular emotions, and you then get programmed into particular habits and tendencies, like jealousies or grudges or things of this nature.

The second kind of kamma is called “bright action with bright result.” Here one generates an unafflictive bodily sankhāra through a skillful action, such as abstaining from taking life, generosity, harmlessness, or an unafflictive verbal or mental sankhāra. This leads to a bright destination or result, in the sense that wholesome things will result from wholesome actions.

The third kind of kamma is when it is mixed. There’s a bit of a muddle here: a bit of dark and a bit of bright. Perhaps you’re running out in order to do someone a favor but kick the dog that’s getting in your way – some good, some bad.

The last kind of kamma is neither dark nor bright action, with neither dark nor bright result, and this is the idea the Buddha is introducing to the dog ascetic. It is a kind of action that leads to the destruction of action because it is the action undertaken with an attitude of letting go, of detachment, of dispassion.

When one abandons the volition of acting to obtain particular kammic results, there is no habitual track, no program to follow, no becoming a being, no constructing a self.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the article “Dhamma as Skillful Kamma.”