This past Tuesday we had the great pleasure to welcome Bita Asakura, a UCLA alumni from the Class of 1999, to give a Dharma talk for us. Bita has quite an interesting background. Born and raised in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, as a child she witnessed the horrors that often times accompany war. Searching for answers that would explain why violence occurred, she majored in Psychology at UCLA and founded an Eastern Philosophy club on campus. It was not until she learned about Buddhism on campus, however, when she got her questions answered. After she graduated, she went to Japan to delve more into Buddhism and that is where she received her training from. During the talk, she brought her husband, Yuichi, as well as her teacher from Japan, Nobu, and they helped facilitate her discussion.
But enough about how cool Bita is. Bita’s main topic was about the law of cause and effect, or otherwise known as karma, in Buddhism. The Buddha taught that every event has a cause and every action has a consequence. Even the fall of a hair strand did not fall out of nowhere; there was a cause that made the hair fall. Every person a man meets in a lifetime is the result of karmic energy he has accumulated with that person in another lifetime. There is no coincidence according to Buddhism, and as a result, a person is totally responsible for his actions.
Bita also talked about the concept of non-self in Buddhism. The Buddha taught that there is no fixed constant soul. As a result, the permanent self does not exist. Humans constantly have different thoughts and their personalities change throughout their lifetime. Their karmic energy also changes throughout their lifetime based on the thoughts and actions that the humans take. Nobu compared this idea of the non-self to a waterfall. From far away, a waterfall looks like a constant blanket of cloth. However, when one looks closer, he realizes that the waterfall is actually made out of an infinite number of droplets and each droplet is not the same. Thus, there is never one moment in time when the consistency of the waterfall stays constant. Like a human being, even if he looks the same from the outside, he is actually perpetually changing.
Finally, Bita spoke about the six realms in Buddhism. The six realms are the animal realm, human realm, the realm of hungry ghosts, the realm of perpetual combat (hell), the realm of celestial beings, and the realm of the demi-gods. These are not physical realms; rather they represent the perceptions that members of the realm have. For example, someone from the hungry ghost realm has infinitely insatiable desires. Nothing can satisfy him. The human realm is the only realm one can attain enlightenment, which is the goal of Buddhism, and to be reborn as a human is very rare. Thus, being reborn as a human is a gift that should be deeply treasured.
