What you’re hoping is that your help represents the point at which the person’s past good actions are beginning to bear fruit, and the past bad actions are beginning to end their influence. This is perfectly praiseworthy.
"First, kamma: When someone is suffering, you have to reflect on the reasons why people suffer.
Here
we have to correct a common misunderstanding about kamma. The Buddha
didn’t say that our present suffering comes entirely from our past
actions. In fact, he actually said that to believe that what you
experience now depends solely on past actions is an extreme form of
wrong view. He took this point so seriously that — even though he wasn’t
the sort of person to look for fights — when he heard that other people
were teaching this view, he sought them out to argue with them. If you
teach that everything depends on past kamma, he said, it leaves your
students unprotected and bewildered, for it leaves them with no way of
escaping from suffering in the present.
One case involved some
Jain ascetics: They claimed that by engaging in extreme asceticism, they
were burning off the pains caused by their past bad kamma. So he asked
them: “Have you noticed that when you don’t engage in asceticism, you don’t feel those intense pains?”
They answered, “Yes.”
“So how can you say that the pain comes from past action? It comes from what you’re doing right now.”
The
Buddha’s actual teaching on kamma is that the pleasures and pains you
experience come from a combination of two things: your past actions and
your present actions. In fact, your present actions are the more
important of the two. Past actions provide the raw material from which
your present actions shape what you actually experience right now as
pleasure or pain.
So when people are suffering in the present
moment, the causes come down to two: unskillful actions in the past, or
unskillful actions in the present. They either did something harmful in
the past, or they’re doing something harmful now — either to others, in
mistreating them, or to themselves, in how they engage in the three
types of fabrication in the present: bodily, verbal, and mental.
If
a person is suffering from the results of past bad actions, and you
would like to help the person in an external way, what you’re hoping is
that your help represents the point at which the person’s past good
actions are beginning to bear fruit, and the past bad actions are
beginning to end their influence. This is perfectly praiseworthy, and if
you can succeed in helping to improve the external situation, it’s all
to the good. But there are times when the person’s past bad kamma is
still strong. That’s when you have to focus on the person’s present
kamma, and in particular, on the way the person fabricates his or her
own experience."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sublime Determinations: a Retreat on the Brahmavihāras with the Sociedade Vipassana de Meditação BrasÍlia"
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