After a natural disaster strikes in the United States, the question almost immediately arises: Where was God? Or, did God allow this to happen?
Half a world away, as Myanmar digs out from a devastating cyclone that experts say could claim 100,000 lives or more, the question – and answer – are quite different.
About 80 percent of Myanmar's estimated 52 million people are Buddhist, and many there rely on the principle of karma to explain the storm, scholars say.
Specifically, many Myanmar people believe Cyclone Nargis is a karmic consequence of military rulers' brutal crackdown on Buddhist monks last fall, said Ingrid Jordt, an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who was a Buddhist nun in Myanmar.
“The immediate explanation was: This is retribution for killing monks,” Jordt said. “In any cataclysm, human beings seek to make sense of something that completely destroys the continuity of life. It's an attempt to bring the world back into harmony.”
The word “karma” is often misunderstood by Westerners as one's inescapable destiny, scholars say. In Sanskrit, the word means “action” and refers to the act that creates one's fate, not fate itself. For Buddhists, particularly those in Southeast Asia, karma regulates morality as firmly as Newton's law rules motion: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
