The law of cause and effect pertains to the operations of all phenomena in the universe—not just to good and evil. It is taught in relation to what is called the Law of Causation, but there is a difference between the two. The law of cause and effect deals with the individual in terms of a temporal chain extending from past into present and then into the future. The Law of Causation, however, deals not merely with the individual but also with spatial and temporal relations among individuals and everything in their environment: family, local society, school, regional society, national society, international society, the natural environment, politics, economy, culture, spiritual fields, natural phenomena, and so on. An accurate interpretation of the world and of human life, this law is extremely extensive. It is the basis on which Buddhism teaches the impossibility of true happiness for an individual without development in the direction of happiness for all the other people in that individual’s environment. (Page 96)