After Returning to Sahā to Liberate Beings, Will Past Karmic Consequences Still Manifest?

Question: Amitabha Buddha. I prostrate to the Master. This disciple wishes to ask: if one returns to Sahā by the power of vows to liberate sentient beings, will they still undergo karmic consequences from their past?

Master Honghai's answer: The pattern of cause, condition, and karmic result is still in place. What does karmic result consist of? Suffering and joy. Have you all carefully experienced this for yourselves? Because the causes we create are wholesome and unwholesome, the effects still fall upon this very person to undergo suffering or joy, right? But is suffering and joy fixed in nature? Take any single event—some people find it painful, others find it delightful. An apple—before you've had any, eating one is pleasant. But eat a whole plate, and are you still happy? You'd be stuffed to death.

So suffering and joy have no fixed nature. What does this tell us? When a karmic seed is planted, it carries the moral quality of wholesome or unwholesome, but the resulting experience itself is morally neutral, carrying no ethical valence. It's simply that when the action was performed, the byproduct it generates produces either suffering or joy for that person.

Now, after rebirth in the Pure Land, when one returns by the power of vows to liberate sentient beings, the structure of cause, condition, and karmic result still operates, right? It's possible that those who were close to you in the past become favorable conditions for your teaching, and it's possible that those who were adversaries press back against you, using adverse conditions as the means of deliverance—the goal is always to liberate. But within cause, condition, and karmic result, there is absolutely no experience of suffering or joy. There is only a single thought: awakening oneself and awakening others.

So from this perspective, would you say it exists or not? If we say it exists, how can it be called existence when there is no experience of suffering or joy? If we say it doesn't, this working of cause and effect is still vividly present. This is precisely what is meant by the Middle Way, the true suchness: it cannot be said to exist, it cannot be said to not exist; it is simultaneously existent and nonexistent, neither existent nor nonexistent. Buddhism constantly makes such statements, but only these statements capture the true state of affairs in the Land of Ultimate Bliss.