saying any more about that, I should clear up some possible confusions about the doctrine ofkarnla and rebirth. The
first point to make is that as Buddhists understand it, kam1a is not divine retribution fo r one's sins. The laws of karma basically have to do with receiving pleasant results fo r acting out of morally good motives, and receiving painful results for acting with evil intentions. This prompts some to ask who detem1ines what is good and what is evil. For Buddhists the answer is that no one does. Kam1a is not a set of rules that are decreed by a cosmic ruler and enforced by the cosmic moral police. Kam1a is understood instead as a set of impersonal causal laws that simply describe how the world happens to work. In this respect the karmic laws are just like the so-called natural laws that science investigates. It is a causal law that when I let go of a rock while standing on a bridge, it will fa ll toward the water below with a certain acceleration. No one passed this law, and no one enforces it. The laws of physics are not like the laws passed by legislative bodies. There are no gravity police. And if something were to behave contrary to what we take to be the law of gravity, that would be evidence that we were wrong to think it was a law. A true causal law has no exceptions. Likewise, the laws of karma are understood not as rules that can be either obeyed or broken, but as exception less.. generalizations about what always fo llows what. If we could keep track of enough persons over enough successive lives, we could find out what the laws of karma are in the same way that science discovers what the laws of nature are: our observations would disclose the patterns of regular succession that show causation at work.6