No opposites, only relationships

What is meant by non-duality, Mahamati? It means that light and shade, long and short, black and white, can only be experienced in relation to each other; light is not independent of shade, nor black of white. There are no opposites, only relationships. In the same way, nirvana and the ordinary world of suffering are not two things but related to each other. There is no nirvana except where the world of suffering is; there is no world of suffering apart from nirvana. For existence is not mutually exclusive.

-Lankavatara Sutra (From "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000)

Non-duality purports that good and evil, light and darkness, sound and silence, are experienced in relationship to each other; silence is not independent of of sound, nor darkness of light.

Thus good and evil are not opposites but complements of each other with a relationship that is binding. For example. I cannot define good solely in terms of itself.

Eventually, the word "good" would be defined as "not bad, corrupt, evil, noxious, offensive, or troublesome, etc." Thus good is empty of evil, while evil is empty of good. In this way, they share emptiness.

Although the disciple is obliged by the rules of society to choose good actions over evil ones, such acts are done according to convention. For good action result in merit, while evil actions result in demerits.

According to some schools, only good karma may be transfered. Since evil karma is due to wrong action i.e. acting out of ignorance or in a willful manner, it cannot be transfered but will take root as a seed stored in alaya-consciousness.

All actions will ripen according to the situation, where evil karma arising from great evil usually ripens in the present life, even though some karma from lesser evil karma might ripen in the next life.

However, the Buddhist concept of karma is not the same as the Santanadharma concept of karma, as the latter consists of karma which due to birth, actions in this life, and actions in both past and future lives.

Since everyone is subject to the laws of karma, it is not deterministic in Buddhism i.e. transgressions resulting in my immediate past as a human being only affect me and anyone with whom I interacted.

Santanadharma determinism states that a person who dies poor will not be reborn in wealth, unless his time line in earlier incarnation were filled with good karma he performed which would yield fruitful results in this life and the next.

Since there are no opposites, only relationships, in Buddhism good karma might not have solely good effects; this may be due to past good karma in a previous life before I was born.

Returning to the present, karma is karma in my eyes. For I feel that good and evil, being relative and not being opposites, imply that one cannot perform a good act without the potential for an evil act to rise, despite a good result at the moment. If it does rise, then it is due to the previous incarnation having had committed an act giving rise to evil karma in this life as a result.

Since there is a strong causal relationship between good and evil, it follows that an absence of relatively good karma has a high chance of evil karma to replace it. Yet good karma may result for the person who obeyed the rules of karma, as best as he could.

Overall, karma itself is neutral; it is the internalized sense of right and wrong of a disciple which determines the situation's outcome.

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Karma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_in_Buddhism