- They have joy or sorrow for their fruit according as their cause is virtue
or vice.
Upon what depends the nature of the experiences we have to go through in life?
Since everything in the universe works according to a hidden and immutable law it
cannot be due to mere chance that some of these experiences are joyful and others are
sorrowful. What determines this pleasurable or painful quality of the experiences? II-
14 gives an answer to this question. The pleasurable or painful quality of experiences
which come in our life is determined by the nature of the causes which have produced
them. The effect is always naturally related to the cause and its nature is determined by
the cause. Now, those thoughts, feelings and actions which are ‘virtuous’ give rise to
experiences which are pleasant while those which are ‘vicious’ give rise to experiences
which are unpleasant. But we must not take the words ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ in their
narrow, orthodox religious sense but in the wider and scientific sense of living in con-
formity with the great Moral Law which is universal in its action and mathematical in
its expression. In Nature the effect is always related to the cause and corresponds ex-
actly to the cause which has set it in motion. If we cause a little purely physical pain to
somebody it is reasonable to suppose that the fruit of our action will be some experi-
ence causing a corresponding physical pain to us. It cannot be a dreadful calamity
causing terrible mental agony. This will be unjust and the Law of Karma is the expres-
sion of the most perfect justice that we can conceive of. Since Karma is a natural law
and natural laws work with mathematical precision we can to a certain extent predict
the Karmic results of our actions and thoughts by imagining their consequences. The
Karmic result, or ‘fruit’ as it is generally called, of an action is related to the action as
a photographic copy is related to its negative, though the compounding of several ef-
fects in one experience may make it difficult to trace the effects to their respective
causes. The orthodox religious conceptions of hell and heaven, in which are provided
rewards and punishments without any regard for the natural relationship of causes and
effects, are sometimes absurd in the extreme though they do, in a general way, relate
virtue to pleasure and vice to pain.