Does karma make things our fault? No. It’s not the self of this life that’s primarily at fault for the bad stuff that happens to us, but the negative actions springing from our distorted thoughts in past lives. We did these negative actions under the influence of delusion and ignorance, not because we were – or are – evil or unworthy.
Carrying on from here: What goes around comes around.
Whose fault is all this?
When we develop the power of regret in Buddhism – the wish to clean up our bad karma before it ripens on us – it is not in order to blame ourselves or feel bad. It is understanding that we don’t have to feel guilty about the pile of dirty dishes in the sink, but we do have to clean it up. Here’s a bit more on purification: Karma and us.
People cannot be blamed, surely, for something that’s not their fault? I’m going to quote a relevant Facebook conversation:
Jan Jemsen: ‘I just listened to a meditation class and the teacher said, ‘From the point of view of karma there isn’t any unfairness in the world.’
When you contemplate that, you discover it is true. Everything we experience is the effect of our previous actions – in this sense everything is perfectly balanced, completely ‘fair.’ Cause and effect.
I found when I let that sink in it that it freed my mind from the chains of perceived injustice to myself and others.
Imagine if you put that on a poster or a Tee shirt, how enraged some people would feel because they think they are the victim of injustice. Imagine how peaceful the world would be if they understood and accepted this truth.
It’s deeply beautiful. Knowing this, we can immediately start to create a happier future for ourselves and others. Knowing that I am responsible for my own future happiness and freedom is very motivating. I am not buried under the weight of other people’s choices and their actions towards me. I am free to create my own reality as I want it to be by choosing how I act now. Ultimate freedom from injustice.
Carolyn Kay: Our self-grasping has a hard time with karma because we can’t help but mix our understanding of it with our familiarity with blame, retribution, guilt, justice, superiority, reward, etc. We keep trying to figure it out in that contaminated context. A deep realization of cause and effect should give rise to compassion (not pity) and renunciation (not blame or retribution). Simple, and yet our ignorance keeps us in confusion.
JJ: I understand it’s really hard to think that what seems so unfair could be caused by our ‘self’ in a previous life. For me, though, that makes more sense and is easier to accept than random injustice.
Living in a world of consequences
It is not just a case of “I had a karmic thing happen once; I took someone’s parking spot and later that day someone took mine!” Karma is not occasional but dictates our entire life. All our lives. Everything is mere karmic appearance of mind.
Everything you’ve done today will have not just one but four effects – the ripened effect, the experience similar to the cause, the tendency similar to the cause, and the environmental effect. For example, if we kill a sentient being, ie, someone with a mind, including spiders, the fully ripened effect is rebirth in a lower realm – this will happen if that karmic potential ripens at our deathtime. The experience similar to the cause is that, back in a human rebirth, our life is short and full of sickness. The tendency is a compulsion to keep killing. Our environment is hostile, dangerous, or uncomfortable.
On the other hand, if we save someone’s life today, such as rescue a spider from drowning or even feed our dog, the ripened effect is a higher rebirth. Back in a human rebirth, our experience is one of good health and a long life; we have a tendency to save others; and we live in an environment with the necessities for good health and a long life. 
You can read about the four effects of all ten non-virtuous and virtuous actions in Joyful Path of Good Fortune. And we can get a sense from this of the four effects of every action we perform, every seed we sow in our consciousness – too many to count even today.
As you can see, these four effects amount to our entire existence, meaning that karma influences and creates every minute and every detail of our lives and even ourselves. As that original article says:
Those details were so instrumental in determining the course of his life that changing them would require a cascade of other changes. If he’d been born in a different country, or to a different set of parents, or into a different class, would he even be himself?
Think about today: you’re in a human realm thanks to a good seed that ripened at the end of your previous life. What happens to you today, what your tendencies are, and what environment you are sitting in is all arising from previous actions. As in a dream. And everything you do today is setting up these four effects, over and over again, for sometime in your future.
One sociologist quoted in the article decided to write a thesis on luck because he read a BBC article about the Monopoly World Championships and thought:
That sounds like complete BS. Yes, there may be strategies to help win, but the whole game depends on the rolling of the dice.
But it turns out that the whole game of “real” life is not that different – we employ daily strategies to win, but the die is cast by karma.
Random example: with 8 billion human beings on this planet, what are the odds of running into people we know in countries neither of us have visited before?! Yet I have had that happen to me more than once. Why? Because I had the karma to meet those people, and when it ripened I was going to meet them wherever we happened to be. Why not? 
To fully understand why karma works we need to understand the dreamlike nature of reality, how there’s no thing going on out there from its own side. Everything is the nature of mind, projected by mind. More on that here: What’s karma got to do with it?
Close calls
Luck is a description, not an explanation. Nothing other than karma fully explains why things happen to us or why we are who we are. As Venerable Geshe-la says in Joyful Path:
We cannot find any two people who have created exactly the same history of action throughout their past lives and so we cannot find two people with identical states of mind, identical experiences, and identical physical appearances.
Modern society has come a very long way in the external science of cause and effect, but it seems no closer to understanding the internal science of cause and effect that produces our entire existence. As the article says:
We live in an era of boundless data, an empiricist’s fantasy. Apps count our steps and track our breaths. Websites watch our scrolls and clicks. We recognize the structural forces at play in our lives, the long tail of history and policy swishing around in the everyday. Our world should be at its most analyzable, explicable — but still it can feel like sorcery. That a hurricane’s path was plotted by satellite and big-data modeling doesn’t dull the eeriness of one house destroyed and its neighbor still standing.
In explaining one of the four laws or karma, that if an action is not performed its result cannot be experienced, Ven Geshe-la gives another example:
When there is an airplane crash or a volcanic eruption some people are killed and others escape, although their survival seems like a miracle. In many accidents the survivors themselves are astonished by their escape and feel it is strange that others died who were so close to them when the disaster occurred.
Until we get our karma under control, how fragile we are! How easily things could have taken a more sinister turn?! Life is a series of “If’s” — if I hadn’t decided to take a walk at that exact time, if the person hadn’t gotten mad at their dishwasher … And, most pertinently, if I hadn’t done that action in the past …
We need protection
This is one reason why we rely on the Dharma Protector Dorje Shugden. In samsara, bound in “the chains of karma so hard to release”, we are always a few razor-thin “Ifs” away from disaster; and this wisdom Buddha helps to manage our karma.
Also, he blesses us with the insights to transform adverse conditions once our karma has already ripened. This means that situations that could be construed as “unlucky’, such as losing our job or getting sick, can now be construed as “lucky” because we can use them to develop renunciation, say, or compassion – stepping stones to liberation and enlightenment.
Good luck and bad luck do not exist from their own side, and in this human life we have an opportunity to re-contextualize. Whether we are a lucky person or an unlucky person depends largely on the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we want to achieve. From that point of view, also, we really do create our own luck.
Conscious luck
In other words luck depends, amongst other things, upon perspective; it is empty of inherent existence like everything else. As the article says:
The Guinness World Record holder for being struck by lightning? It turns out it’s a park ranger, and the guy’s been hit by lightning seven times,” he said. “So is he a super-unlucky man or is he very lucky to have survived seven lightning strikes?
With respect to the federal worker mentioned in this last article, the same karma for being given the choice of “take the money or wait to be fired” is ripening for many, but whether it is experienced as lucky or unlucky also depends on karma. For this federal worker, uncertainties aside, he is nonetheless looking forward to six months’ paid leave in which he can “do more Dharma”; whereas another colleague in the same situation is terrified because he has dependent kids and parents.
Another example from the article: “One dimension of personal luck is to have been born in a highly developed country”. But of course that depends. People in less developed countries can regularly be happier.
Also, what is lucky for one person may be simultaneously unlucky for another, eg, if you get promoted to the position I was hoping for. Luck doesn’t just drift around, it demands a protagonist. Karma ripens on people, as it says in the scriptures, not on inanimate objects like stones.
What about you, are you lucky?
Talking about luck being a matter of the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, that article gives the example of Holly and her husband. They had been relating to themselves as unlucky, but in the course of their ill-fated journey conceived a daughter whom they adore. Without the string of supposed bad luck, their daughter would not have been born, so they decided to re-label their lives as lucky instead. Whereupon their karma seems to have improved.
This evening I walked as I often do to the nearby Sloan’s lake, and, as I also often do, I felt really happy to be in this beautiful place and therefore grateful to Ven Geshe Kelsang and numerous others who make it possible. To feel lucky is to feel supported. I sometimes feel like the luckiest person in the world. But that’s not because I actually am the luckiest person in the world, if you see what I mean?!
Is there any way you can construe what’s going on in our world at the moment as lucky? What do you think?
In general the first Lamrim meditation, called “Precious human life,” is an encouragement to see ourselves as unusually lucky. Why? Because despite the sufferings we cannot help but encounter, right now we have some liberty and choice to break free from our mental chains, journey to the lasting inner peace of enlightenment and its ability to help everyone, and transform adverse conditions along the way.
Over to you.
