Tara and Karma redux

An excerpt from a prayer to Tara:

From the ripening of karma caused by delusion, grant the blessing that shields, protects and conceals.

Here is some commentary by Chagdud Khadro:

"[This] reminds us that all karma is caused by delusion. For one completely beyond delusion, remaining within the mind's natural awareness, phenomena arise and subside in and of themselves without karmic traces---as Chagdud Rinpoche sometimes says, like `writing on water.'

"A question often asked is why one should pray for the blessing that conceals one from one's own karma. Consider the fact that we have experienced countless cycles of existence, that we cannot remember them (most people cannot even clearly remember their childhood) and cannot know what kind of karma we have created until it ripens. When we begin spiritual practice and the purification of negative karma, we pray that past karma does not suddenly ripen and create massive obstacles that we cannot overcome at our level of practice.

"For example, one of the karmic results of killing is a short life. Who of us can say that in past lives we have never been a soldier caught in the violence of war, or a hunter, or a bird of prey? If the full force of the karma of such a rebirth were to intervene, we might die before our connection to spiritual practice could become well established. Death's interruption of life would then represent a lost or greatly delayed oppurtunity and much more suffering. We request protection and concealment until karmic obstacles are within the reach of our ability to purify them and can become a source of realization rather than of samsaric suffering.

"We should not make this request in th expectation that obstacles will never appear. The very nature of human rebirth is that of sickness, old age and death, and even great bodhisattvas are subject to these conditions. However, their experience of illness is very different from that of an ordinary person or even a less realized practitioner. For them obstacles arise and subside within the sphere of nondual awareness; their ability to purify obstacles benefits all living beings."

---

This passage means a lot more to me now than it did a couple of weeks ago. I think that through my Red Tara practice, I have been able to see the karma ripening in my life. Surely this karma has been ripening all the time, but I have not had the wisdom to see the karmic source in my own actions. I also think that by clearly perceiving the connection between the karmic fruit and the karmic seed, I am thereby purifying the karma. There are a couple of very specific events in my life I am thinking about, but for various reasons I won't go in to detail. However, the events coming from the ripened karma are not events that I can't handle, so I believe that Tara is helping me to purify my karma by causing it to ripen fairly quickly (which allows me on the one hand to more easily see it's source, and on the other hand to make more rapid spiritual progress), but also preventing the karmic consequences from erupting in an intense conflagration.