Interconnection and Karma: Whose Actions Shape Your Life?

Rain is hammering the roof, and the teacher is genuinely surprised that anyone made the trip. "I didn't think anybody would come cuz it was raining so much. So, so well done," the speaker says, before a good-humoured exchange about whether the nuns should be giving the talk instead. It is a small, unhurried opening, the kind you would expect from a community that meets in a centre in East Malvern, and it sets the tone for an hour-long talk published by BSV Dhamma Talks in October 2026 under the title "Interconnection: What does it mean for karma and responsibility?" The talk takes an idea now repeated everywhere in mindfulness and wellbeing circles, that all beings are interconnected, and presses it against one of the Buddha's most quoted teachings on karma. The question it keeps returning to is blunt: how much of what happens to us is the result of our own karma, and how much is the result of other people's? Rather than settle the matter with a slogan, the teacher builds the argument through an intuition pump, a worked example from the audience, and a string of hard cases, including theft, sickness and guilt.

Why did "interconnectedness" sound too easy to this teacher?

The talk begins with a report from abroad. The teacher had just returned from nearly seven days in Korea, visiting Buddhist sites and attending a conference that brought together Buddhist scholars, contemplative scientists, clinical psychologists and mindfulness researchers. The conference theme was practical: how mindfulness and Buddhist thought might make society better, and how they might contribute to environmental change. Across the sessions, one word kept surfacing. Interconnectedness. Mindfulness, the speakers suggested, helps us become interconnected with other people.

The teacher's reaction was not enthusiasm but suspicion. "There's something about when everybody agrees on everything that I don't really like," the speaker says in the recording (BSV Dhamma Talks, around 3:49). That instinct is the engine of the whole talk. Interconnection is not wrong, the teacher implies, but a phrase that can be repeated by everyone has stopped doing any thinking. The useful move is to ask what it would mean to take it seriously, both in ordinary common sense and in the Buddhist frame of cause and effect.

What does the Buddha's teaching on karma actually claim?

The teacher anchors the discussion in a passage from the Anguttara Nikaya that most Buddhist students will recognise: "I am the owner of my karma, heir of my karma, born of my karma, related to my karma, and supported by my karma. Whatever karma I do, for good or for ill, I will be the heir of that." The teacher says this is a teaching "we all kind of know," and reads its practical core plainly. Personal intentions and personal actions matter, and they have consequences.

The difficulty comes from the other side of ordinary experience. Look at your life honestly, the teacher suggests, and it is clearly shaped by other people's decisions and actions. Then add the Buddhist idea of rebirth, which holds that present conditions are shaped by past karma. A familiar assumption follows: if someone wrongs you now, it must be the result of something you did before, and if something good comes your way, it must be the fruit of past generosity. The teacher calls this "sometimes an oversimplification," but notes that many people take it quite seriously. That tension, between a teaching that puts the ownership of action in the individual and a lived reality of thick interdependence, is the one the talk wants to explore.

Is everything that happens to you your own doing?

The teacher names two errors that mirror each other. The first is the interconnection fallacy, the vague sense that everything is shared so nothing is really anyone's responsibility. The second is quieter and, the teacher suggests, more common among sincere practitioners: the belief that we are the instigators of all action, that everything happening in our life is because of us and our karma. That view makes us "the centre of the universe," in the teacher's phrase. The talk asks listeners to land somewhere between these poles, and does not pretend the middle is comfortable.

The question is put precisely. If we are the heirs and owners of our karma, and our lives are also deeply interrelated with others, is our karma individual, shared, both, or neither? Each of those options has a different implication for how we would respond to suffering, and that is the point. A theory of karma is never only a theory. It shapes how we blame, how we forgive, and how we treat people in trouble.

How does an intuition pump work in a dhamma talk?

An intuition pump is a thought experiment designed to draw out the answer you already hold before you have examined it. The teacher uses one deliberately. Who has had something bad happen to them? Who believes that when something goes wrong there is a reason for it? Who has heard the phrase "everything happens for a reason"? Hands and voices come up from the room, and one member offers a counter-view: some things happen without any reason, simply because the conditions were bad.

The teacher pushes gently toward the more uncomfortable question. When something bad happens, do we take responsibility and think, this is because of something I did? That leads to the centrepiece of the early part of the talk: a real case from the audience. A listener recounts a previous business in which an employee stole a large sum of money. Looking back, the listener realised the theft was probably connected to their own shortcomings. They were not keeping close enough track of the business, and they were trying to grow it too fast, driven by insecurities they were compensating for.

The teacher's reaction is warm and specific. "That's actually the example that I had in my head," the speaker says, and it becomes the test case for everything that follows. Notice what the example does. It does not say the employee was innocent, and it does not say the business owner was to blame for the theft. It locates a chain of causes in the owner's own mind, and in the owner's own choices, while leaving the thief's intention in view. That is the kind of honest mapping that makes karma useful rather than punitive.

What happens when karma meets theft, sickness and guilt?

From the employee case the talk widens. The teacher poses theft from the other direction: when someone steals something from you, what is the karma here? Is it yours, the thief's, or a shared web in which both are caught? The question is taken up in the context of the causal interconnection that the teacher sees everywhere, in which one event pulls on many others. The talk then tests the framework against sickness. Is your illness simply the result of your own past karma, or does it also involve the biological functioning of other people and the wider conditions of life? The teacher's question hangs in the room rather than being answered neatly.

Later, the talk turns toward the emotional life of karma. A listener asks whether guilt is an innately negative state, and the teacher treats it as a serious topic rather than a side remark. Guilt is often the emotional signature of the "I caused everything" view. If you believe all suffering is your fault, guilt becomes a constant companion. Yet the talk's larger aim seems to be practical: knowing what is skillful, and knowing which actions lead to suffering, rather than building a ledger of blame. Near the close of the excerpt, the teacher's remarks circle back to how we view a situation, and what kind of view we bring to it.

"There's something about when everybody agrees on everything that I don't really like."

(The speaker, in the BSV Dhamma Talks recording "Interconnection: What does it mean for karma and responsibility?", around 3:49)

Why does this question matter for responsibility?

The talk is useful precisely because it resists two comfortable positions. If everything is interconnected, responsibility dissolves into the crowd. If everything is my karma, responsibility swells into self-blame and a false sense of control. The teacher's framework, as the material suggests, asks for something harder: an honest tracing of causes that includes oneself without erasing everyone else. In the employee story, the owner did not need to conclude that the theft was entirely their fault in order to see what they could change. They needed to see the insecurity and the haste, which were theirs to work on.

This is also why the talk's opening frame, a conference about society and environmental impact, is not a digression. The same logic scales. A world that believes it is merely interconnected can disclaim its part in harm. A world that believes each person's karma is solely their own can ignore structures that shape lives. The teacher's question, individual or shared or both, is a question about where to look when something goes wrong.

It is worth saying plainly what this excerpt does and does not give you. The transcript provided covers the setup and many of the examples, but not every conclusion the teacher reaches across the full hour. Watching the complete talk will show how each case resolves. What the early hour makes clear is the method: state the common view, test it with a real story, and refuse to let a good-sounding idea stand in for thought.

Where to go from here

Watch the full talk, "Interconnection: What does it mean for karma and responsibility?", on the BSV Dhamma Talks channel, paying attention to how each example is tested against the two extremes the teacher names. Then read the passage from the Anguttara Nikaya that the teacher quotes, and sit with the phrase "heir of my karma" as a statement about responsibility rather than fate. For a personal exercise, follow the teacher's own method: think of a recent setback, and write down the causes you can honestly see in your own intentions and choices, and the causes that clearly lie with others. Keep the two lists separate for a while. The aim is not to decide once and for all whether karma is individual or shared, but to notice which answer you reach for first, and why. The Buddhist Society of Victoria's website and its East Malvern centre are good places to find further teachings in this tradition.