Annapurna wrote:
ok, in short since I need to get to work:
If you look at the passengers in an airplane, you will have old people, young people, babies, rich, old, and so forth.
If you look at airplane crashes, you often have survivors, and some get away nearly unscathed.
This has to do with individual karmic workings that we can't analyse.
Unsubstantiated claim #1.
A Supreme Buddha could view them, though.
Unsubstantiated assumption.
So, that said, each person that died in a plane crash had it in their kamma, and that it is a death with others also has to do with their individual kamma, but we can't really tell why they die together.
Unsubstantiated claim #2.
I propose an intermission here for educational purposes only.
Warning: Those who cannot confront the truth need not read any further! To paraphrase a famous Jack Nicholson line from the film
A Few Good Men: "If you can't
handle the truth, you don't need to be reading this."
The preceding unsubstantiated claims (quoted above) are an example of wrong view.
Sometimes the most expedient and best way to correct wrong thinking is to directly confront the person with their wrong thought and slap them (figuratively speaking, that is) upside the head and ask them: "What in hell were you thinking when you bought into this wrong view?" Admittedly, this could be viewed as being a Zen method of teaching, but sometimes I like to change things up a bit in order to shake things up in the hope of a
satori moment for the listener.
By asking the person to examine their own thought processes, you are (to use a tennis analogy) putting the ball back into their court and challenging them to make sense of
the origin of their thought. Once they are able too correctly discern that origin, they may perhaps see the error of their thinking, and exclaim: "Yes. What
was I thinking. Thank you for waking me up!"
The propounder of the wrong views quoted above is asking the reader to "believe" (meaning without any substantiation) that
somehow, a person's "bad karma" is responsible for the fact of their misfortune in physical events. In other words, that their "good" or "bad" karma
is responsible for whether the person "gets away unscathed" or not. It does not take into consideration that the person might have been in the right place at the wrong time, or the wrong place at the wrong time. Simply, that one must suspend all rational thought and buy into the wrong view that "your karma"
is responsible for whether a completely haphazard event results in a good outcome or a bad outcome in any given circumstance. Such thinking, even on its surface, is completely irrational. It is therefore wrong view.
The speaker further compounds her error in wrong view by making a feeble attempt at providing authority for her previous wrong view: "A Supreme Buddha could view them, though." How would she KNOW that this may be true if she has never met and conversed with a Buddha herself? Now, granted, I am assuming that she has never met with or conversed with a Buddha; however, since there are no proclaimed Buddhas extant in the world today, it is not an irrational assumption. It is, however, a fact that is inescapably true.
To proclaim that "each person that died in a plane crash had it in their
kamma" is to propose that the outcome was somehow fixed or predetermined from the beginning, and is stretching the concept of
kamma beyond the capacity as taught by the Buddha. There is simply no evidence that has ever been presented for accepting this view or the stretching of the concept of
kamma. Therefore, this view, also, is wrong view.
Now, if you
fully comprehend the concept of
papanca (one example of this may be described as "proliferation of thought or ideation" based upon unfounded "assumptions" — or, for the present example, otherwise characterized as "fears") and how this phenomenon can come about, then you have a rational explanation for the arising (meaning the origin) of the wrong view mentioned in the previous paragraph.
To read anything more into the concept of
kamma beyond what the Buddha has already proposed is to misrepresent the Buddha's words.
Intermission over. You may return to your delusion if you so choose.
"The gift of truth exceeds all other gifts" — Dhammapada, v. 354 Craving XXIV
Kind of a shame to have to point the obvious. 
