Critical
Questions Towards a Naturalized Concept of Karma in Buddhism
By Dale S. Wright
Department of Religious
Studies, Occidental College, Los
Angeles, California
wrightd@oxy.edu
ISSN 1076-9005; Volume 11, 2004
Abstract
Abstract: In an effort to
articulate a naturalized concept of karma for the purposes of contemporary
ethical reflection, this paper raises four critical questions about the
Buddhist doctrine of karma. The paper asks (1) about the advisability of linking
the concept of karma to assurance of ultimate cosmic justice through the
doctrine of rebirth; (2) about the effects of this link on the quest for human
justice in the social, economic, and political spheres of culture; (3) about
the kinds of rewards that the doctrine of karma attaches to virtuous action,
whether they tend to be necessary or contingent consequences; and (4) about the
extent to which karma is best conceived individually or collectively. The paper
ends with suggestions for how a non-metaphysical concept of karma might
function and what role it might play in contemporary ethics.
The Buddha warned1 that karma
is so mysterious a process that it is essentially unfathomable, declaring it
one of the four topics not suited to healthy philosophical meditation because
it leads to “vexation and madness. Nevertheless, it is essential that we engage
in the processes of critical thinking about the concept of karma, thereby
taking the same risks that many Asian Buddhists have also taken. It is important
for us to do so because Buddhist (and Hindu) teachings on karma and moral life
have now entered contemporary currents of Western thought and culture, and
deserve to be scrutinized for their potential value and weaknesses. The risk is
serious, of course, because in Asia karma is
the primary concept governing the moral sphere of culture. Westerners have
faced doubts about critical thinking in this same sphere of culture, when early
modern thinkers wondered whether moral conduct would survive critical reflection
on the concepts of theistic judgment and heavenly reward. Most have concluded
that the benefits of critical thinking about morality outweigh the risks, and
that the possibility of further development and refinement in the sphere of
human morality warrants energetic effort.
The primary reason that karma
is a promising ethical concept for us today is that it appears to propose a
natural connection between a human act and its appropriate consequence, or, in
traditional terms, between sin and suffering, virtue and reward. The connection
requires no supernatural intervention: we suffer or succeed because of the
natural outcome of our actions themselves, rather than through the subsequent
intervention of divine punishment or reward. Moral errors contain their own
penalties as natural consequences, and every virtue encompasses its own reward.
Although some dimensions of Western culture presuppose such an arrangement
today, it is instructive to recall that this kind of understanding wasn’t
articulated in the West until Rousseau in the eighteenth century.2
Throughout Asia,
karma defines the ethical dimension of culture and remains the key to
understanding Buddhist morality. Karma is the teaching that tells practitioners
that it matters what they do throughout their lives, and how they do it. It
articulates a close relationship between what one chooses to do and who or what
that person becomes over time. The extraordinary sophistication of this early
concept should, in fact, be counted as one of the most significant achievements
of south Asian culture, and an impressive gift to contemporary ethical thinking
globally.
A number of scholars3 have
claimed that one of the primary contributions of Buddhism to Indian culture was
that it “ethicized” an earlier pre-ethical concept of karma in extending it
beyond the sphere of religious ritual by applying it not just to ritual
behaviors that pleased the gods but to all good acts.4
The domain of “all good acts”
is, of course, the sphere of ethics as we know it today, and the applicability
of the concept of karma to this sphere is the primary issue of this essay. The
essay is based on the thesis that a naturalistic concept of karma, inherent in
the concept as articulated in the many Buddhist versions of it, can and should
be developed, and that with further cultivation for the emerging context of
contemporary global culture, the concept of karma could constitute a major
element in the ethical thinking of the future. Doing that, however, requires
critical thinking. This essay, therefore, raises questions about four
dimensions of the concept of karma as it has been understood in the history of
Buddhism. Each area of questioning is offered as a way to begin to hone the
concept, to separate it from elements of supernatural thinking, and to work
towards locating those elements that might be most effective today in the
domain of ethics. Following these four exercises in critical thinking, a few
suggestions are offered about the emergence of a naturalized concept of karma.
The first dimension of the
Buddhist doctrine of karma that warrants reflective scrutiny is its assertion
of ultimate cosmic justice. All of the world’s major religions have
longstanding traditions of promise that, at some point, good and evil lives
will be rewarded with good and evil consequences, and that everyone will
receive exactly what they deserve. But all of these religions are also forced
to admit that this doctrine contradicts what we sometimes experience in our
lives. Good people may just as readily be severely injured or die from an
accident, or die early of disease, as anyone else, and people who have lived
unjustly and unfairly will not necessarily experience any deprivation in their
lives. Some people seem to receive rewards in proportion to the merit of their lives,
while others do not. Among those who don’t appear to get what they deserve,
some seem to receive more than merit would dictate, and others, less.
That all of these outcomes are
common and unsurprising to us should lead us to question the kind of relationship
that exists between merit and reward. One way to face this realization is to
conclude, at least provisionally, that the cosmos is largely indifferent to the
sphere of human merit as well as to our expectations of justice. If a morally
sound person is no more or no less likely to die early of a disease than anyone
else, then maturity and honesty of vision on this matter may require that we
question traditional assumptions that cosmic justice must prevail. Although we
certainly care about matters of justice, it may be that beyond the human sphere
we will not be able to find evidence of that kind of concern.
The religious claim that there
is a supernatural connection between moral merit and ultimate destiny may
derive from our intuitive sense that there ought to be such a connection. We
all sense that there ought to be justice, even in settings where it seems to be
lacking. That the corporate criminal ought to be punished, that the innocent
child ought to live well rather than to suffer from a devastating disease, and
that some things ought to be different from what they appear to be, are all
manifestations of our deep seated sense of justice. Virtue and reward, vice and
punishment, ought to be systematically related, and where they are not, we all
feel a sense of impropriety. But whether that now intuitive internal sense is
sufficient reason to postulate a supernatural scheme of cosmic justice beyond
our understanding and experience is an open question that has remained as
closed in Buddhism as it has in other religions. The form that this closure
takes in Buddhism is the doctrine of rebirth, which plays the same role that
heaven does in theistic traditions as ultimate guarantor of justice. As it is
traditionally conceived in Asia, karma
requires the metaphysical doctrine of rebirth to support its often
counter-experiential claims about the ultimate triumph of cosmic justice for
the individual.
The second question about the
doctrine of karma follows from the first, and is, in fact, the primary critique
that has been leveled against the idea since it has been introduced to the
West. This is that the idea of karma may be socially and politically
disempowering in its cultural effect, that without intending to do this, karma
may in fact support social passivity or acquiescence in the face of oppression
of various kinds. This possible negative effect derives again from the link
formed between karma and rebirth in order to posit large-scale cosmic justice
over long and invisible stretches of time where other more immediate forms of
justice appear not to exist. If one assumes that cosmic justice prevails over
numerous lifetimes, and that therefore the situations of inequality that people
find themselves in are essentially of their own making through moral effort or
lack of it in previous lives, then it may not seem either necessary or even
fair to attempt to equalize opportunities among people or to help those in
desperate circumstances. For example, if you believe that a child being
severely abused by his family is now receiving just reward for his past sins,
you may find insufficient reason to intervene even when that abuse appears to
be destructive to the individual child and to the society.
Now, of course, it is an open
question, an historical and social-psychological question, whether or to what
extent the doctrines of karma and rebirth have ever really had this effect. We
know very well that Buddhist concepts of compassion have prominent places in
the various traditions, and we can all point to Buddhist examples of
compassionate social effort on behalf of the poor and the needy. Nevertheless,
we can see where the logic of this belief easily leads, in the minds of some
people at least, and we can suspect that it may have unjustifiably diminished
or undermined concern for the poor and the suffering in all Buddhist cultures.
The link between karma and rebirth can reasonably be taken to justify nonaction
in the socio-economic and political spheres, and may help provide rational
support for acquiescence to oppressive neighbors, laws, and regimes. If and
when this does occur, then the Buddhist teaching of nonviolence can be
distorted into a teaching of nonaction and passivity, and be subject to
criticism as a failure of courage and justice.
If the truth is that the
cosmos is simply indifferent to human questions of merit and justice, that
truth makes it all the more important that human beings attend to these matters
themselves. If justice is a human concept, invented and evolving in human minds
and culture, and no where else, then it is up to us alone to see that we follow
through on it. If justice is not structured into the universe itself, then it
will have been a substantial mistake to leave it up to the universe to see that
justice is done. Although, given our finitude, human justice will always be
imperfect, it may be all the justice we have. Moreover, the fact that religious
traditions, including Buddhism, have claimed otherwise may be insufficient
reason to accept the assertion of a cosmic justice beyond the human as the
basis for our actions in the world.
A third area of inquiry in
which to engage the concept of karma concerns the nature of the reward or
consequence that might be expected to follow from morally relevant actions. In
pursuing this line of questioning, I will be employing a distinction borrowed
from Alasdair MacIntyre that is now common to contemporary ethics between goods
that are externally or contingently related to a given practice, and goods that
are internal to a practice and that cannot be acquired in any other way.5
Because the practice under consideration here is any morally relevant action,
we want to distinguish between goods or rewards that may accompany that moral
act, but which are only contingently and externally related to it, and rewards
that are directly linked to the practice, available through no other means, and
therefore internal to that specific practice.
If we look at a single act,
say an act of extraordinary generosity or kindness, such as when someone goes
far out of her way to help someone else through a problem that he has brought
upon himself, we can see many possibilities for rewards that might accrue
through some contingency entailed in that relation. The person helped may in
fact be wealthy, and offer a large sum of money in grateful reciprocity.
Members of his family may honor the practitioner of kindness, and her
reputation in the community for compassion and character might grow. She may
become known as a citizen of extraordinary integrity, which could lead to all
kinds of indirect rewards. These are all good consequences, and all deserved,
but also all contingent outcomes, all goods that are external to the moral act
itself. They may or may not be forthcoming. Indeed, on occasion contingent
misunderstanding may give rise to exactly the opposite outcome -- the same act
of generosity may be misunderstood, resented, reviled, or lead to a denigrated
reputation that the person never overcomes.
The rewards or goods internal
to that act of kindness are directly related to the act, and aren’t contingent
on anything but the act. When we act generously, we do something incremental to
our character -- we shape ourselves slightly further into a person who
understands how to act generously, is inclined to do so, and does so with
increasing ease. We etch that way of behaving just a little more firmly into
our character, into who we are. That is true whether the act is positive or
negative in character.6 Generosity, when it becomes an acquired feature of our
character, becomes a virtue, in fact one of the central Buddhist virtues, the
first of the six perfections, for example. “A virtue is an acquired human
quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve
those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively
prevents us from achieving any such goods.”7 This is to say that acts of
generosity may or may not give rise to external goods like rewards of money or
prestige, but they do give rise to a transformation in character that makes us
generous, kind, and concerned about the well-being of others. Internal goods
derive naturally from the practice as cause.
Our question, then, is what
kinds of rewards, or goods, does the doctrine of karma correlate to virtuous or
nonvirtuous acts, and how should we assess that dimension of the doctrine?
Familiarity with the tradition prevents us from giving a univocal answer to
this question: different texts and different teachers promise many different
kinds of rewards for karmically significant acts, depending on who they are and
who they happen to be addressing. Both internal and external goods are commonly
brought into play. From acts of generosity we get everything from the virtue of
generosity as an internal good to great wealth, an external good, with a variety
of specific alternatives in between. Teachers often lean heavily one way or the
other, from emphasis on external goods such as health and wealth to a strict
focus on the internal goods of character, the development of virtues like
wisdom and compassion. Consider this example from the Dalai Lama, where he is
primarily interested in external goods. “As a result of stealing,” he writes,
“one will lack material wealth.”8 Because we all know that successful thieves
and corporate criminals may or may not live their lives lacking in material
wealth, we can only agree with this claim insofar as we assume that the author
is here referring to an afterlife, some life beyond the end of this one. That
is to say that only the metaphysics of rebirth can make this statement
plausible. Otherwise, the doctrine of karma cannot truthfully guarantee such an
outcome of external rewards.
Had he been focused on
internal goods, he might have said that, as a result of stealing, one will have
deeply troubled relations to other people, as well as a distorted relation to
material goods. As a result of stealing one will find compassion and intimacy
more difficult, be further estranged from the society in which one lives, and
feel isolated and unable to trust others. As a result of stealing, one will
become even more likely to commit other unhealthy acts, and may ultimately find
oneself in an unfulfilled and diminished existence. These results of the act of
stealing have a direct relation to the act; every act pushes one further in
some direction of character formation or another, and further instantiates us
in some particular relationship to the world. External goods, while certainly
important, cannot be so easily guaranteed, except insofar as one offers that
guarantee metaphysically by referring to lives beyond the current one.
Although, promises of personal
rebirth aside, there would appear to be no necessary connection between moral
achievement and external rewards, there is a sense in which moral achievement
does often make external rewards more likely, even if this is never a relation
of necessity. This is true because the more human beings enter the equation,
the more likely it is that a human sense of justice will intervene, drawing
some connection between virtue and reward, or sin and suffering. People who
characteristically treat others with kindness and just consideration are often
treated kindly themselves, although not always. Those who are frequently mean
spirited and selfish are often treated with distain. Honesty in business often
pays off in the form of trusting, faithful customers, while the habit of
cheating customers will often come back to haunt the merchant. These dimensions
of karma and of ethical relations are clear to us, and we are thankful that
they exist. But it would seem that their existence is human and social, rather
than structured into the cosmos.
Therefore, all we can say is
that things often work this way, not that they always do, or that they must.
Sometimes unscrupulous businessmen thrive; on occasion, kindness and honesty go
completely unrewarded. These occurrences make it impossible for us to claim a
necessary relation between moral merit and external forms of reward. Although
it is clearly true that to some extent virtue is its own reward, what we cannot
claim is that other kinds of reward are meted out in the same way. Evidence
shows us that they are not, even if the human exercise of justice often directs
external rewards towards those who are deserving.
Let me summarize the forgoing
by saying: how you comport yourself ethically has at least three ramifications:
(1) it shapes your character and helps determine who or what you become; (2) it
helps shape others and the society in which you live, now and into the future;
and (3) it encourages others to treat you in ways that correspond to your
character -- they will often do onto you as you have done onto them, although
not always. The first and second outcomes can be counted as goods internal to
ethical action; our actions do shape us and they do have an effect on the
world. The third is external, that is, contingent, in that it may or may not
follow from the ethical act. The more human justice there is, the more the
distribution of external goods is likely to match the extent of our merit.
Thus, insofar as we can gather
evidence on this matter, some dissociation between merit and external goods is
important to maintain. Although good acts do lead to the development of good
character, being good does not always or necessarily lead to a life of good
fortune. Therefore, if there is a contingent relation between external goods as
rewards and merit, it would be wise to articulate a system of ethics and a
doctrine of karma that do not rely heavily on this relation in spite of the
longstanding Buddhist tradition of doing so for purposes of moral motivation.
The fourth and final dimension
of the concept of karma that I want to examine is the extent to which karma can
be adequately conceived as a consequence or destiny that is individual, as
opposed to one that is social or collective. Although there are a few
interesting places in Buddhist philosophy where a collective dimension to karma
is broached, in Asanga and Vasubandhu for example, I think that it is true to
say that this concept has been overwhelmingly understood in individual terms,
that is, that the karma produced by my acts is mine primarily, rather than ours
collectively.9 For the most part, references to karma in contemporary Buddhist
literature follow the same individualized pattern. From my point of view, there
are serious philosophical difficulties with this way of understanding the
impact of our lives, however. Perhaps most strikingly, the view that my acts
and their repercussions remain enclosed in a personal continuum that never
dissipates into the larger society and continues to be forever “mine”
reinforces a picture of the world as composed of a large number of discreet and
isolated souls, a view that a great deal of Buddhist thought has sought to
undermine. The articulation of this view among the Jains, in Samkhya, and
others, however, clearly shows the powerful impact of the concern for ultimate
individual destiny in the Indian intellectual/religious world around the time
that Buddhism was developing its vision.
Although the primary direction
of Buddhist thinking may have been to undercut the entire question of ultimate
individual destiny through the alternative possibility of no self, the question
has continued to surface and to demand an answer. It may very well be, however,
that Buddhist attempts to satisfy the desire behind the question by offering
the concept of rebirth to allay fears about the continuation of individual
existence has the additional and unwanted effect of blocking further
development along the alternative paths clearly laid out in the early
teachings. It stands in the way of the achievement of a broader vision of the
meanings of no self, and a more effective and mature understanding of the ways
each of us continue to affect the future beyond our personal lives. Personal
anxieties about death are a powerful force in the mind, so strong that they can
prevent other impersonal and trans-individual conceptions from rising to the
cultural surface.
The line of thinking that
began to develop most explicitly in early Mahayana texts, which imagined
complex interrelations among individuals, recognized that the consequences of
any act in the world could not be easily localized and isolated, and that
effects radiate out from causes in an ultimately uncontainable fashion,
rendering lines of partition between selves and between all entities in the
world significantly more porous and malleable than we tend to assume. Expanding
the image of the Bodhisattva, Buddhists began to see how lines of influence and
outcome co-mingle, along family lines and among friends, co-workers, and
co-citizens, such that the future for others arises dependent in part upon my
acts, and I arise dependent in part upon the shaping powers of the accumulating
culture around me. This type of thinking, based heavily on the expanding meaning
of dependent origination, was forcefully present in several dimensions of
Buddhist ethics. My suspicion, however, is that we have yet to see the
development of this aspect of Buddhism to the extent of its potential, and that
it has been continually redirected by what must have seemed more pressing
questions about individual destiny.
As an example of a possible
pattern of redirection, consider the development of merit transfer, the idea
that one might give the rewards from one of your own good acts to another
person whose karmic status might be in greater jeopardy. Mahayana Buddhists
were, of course, particularly attracted to this idea; they sought ways to
develop an unselfish concern for the spiritual welfare of all sentient beings,
and focused intently on methods enabling them to get out from under the
self-centered implications of a personal spiritual quest. The idea that they
could pursue the good in their own quest, and then in a compassionate and
unselfish meditative gesture, contemplate giving to others whatever good had
resulted from that act, seemed an excellent middle path between selfish
personal quests and compassion for others. But one effect of this teaching was
that it tended to picture the karma or the goodness of an act as a self-enclosed
package that was theirs alone, and that could be generously given away at some
later point if circumstances warranted. As a meditative device used to prevent
individuals from coveting and hoarding their own spiritual merit, this may on
occasion have been effective. But a problem looms when a skillful meditative
device is taken out of that contemplative setting of mental self-cultivation
and treated as a picture of what really does happen when we do good things.
It is important to remember
that many Buddhist moral teachings are not first of all prescriptions about how
to treat others, but rather prescriptions for how to treat your own mind in
meditation so that you become the kind of moral person that the tradition
envisioned. While it may be very good for you, having done a good deed, to
humble yourself in meditation on it by picturing yourself giving the merit of
that act to others, it is not good for you to misunderstand the moral
enterprise by reifying the terms and processes operative within it. What kind
of magical or supernatural entity would karma have to be to make such a gift of
merit make sense? Focusing so intently on your own moral merit, it is also
inevitable that you come to realize that donating your merit to another is
itself a really good and generous act, one that can’t help but win you lots of
good merit.
What began as a way to drop
the meritorious self from consideration, ends up slipping it in through the
back door in such a way that the entire specter of merit transfer becomes yet
another way to picture yourself as deserving of merit. When seen from the
outside, this is doubly problematic, because the one to whom you are supposedly
being generous, in fact, gets nothing because, after all, this is mental
exercise, while you picture yourself doubling your own merit, thereby
cultivating exactly the pride and self-satisfaction that you wanted to
overcome. If the end pursued is understood in terms of humility and
unselfishness, entangling yourself in a mental economy of merit calculation and
exchange is not likely to be effective. The practices of merit transfer just
fit too smoothly into old habits of self-concern, and all too readily block the
development of kinds of selflessness envisioned in the bodhisattva ideal. The
literal and highly reified conception of karma often presupposed in the
practices of merit transfer are philosophically problematic, as well as
counterproductive to the effort to understand karma as a viable possibility for
contemporary ethics.
There are a variety of ways in
which an individualized concept of karma continues to perpetuate itself in
spite of a wealth of ideas in the Buddhist tradition that would mitigate
against it. The basic ideas of impermanence, dependent origination, no self,
and later extensions of these ideas such as emptiness are prominent among them.
But all of these ideas run aground on the concept of rebirth, and it is there
that karma is most problematic. All four critical questions raised in this
paper about karma derive their impact from the association that karma has with
rebirth.
The question of rebirth and
afterlife is as complicated as it is interesting, and therefore not one that
I’ll take up in this setting. But let me simply indicate the direction
philosophical questioning on this issue might take -- just two points. First,
if this really is an open question about what happens to people after they die,
then we would expect that evidence will need to play at least some role, and we
would assume that scientific investigation is the best way to gather and assess
it. But here we encounter an unsurprising division between pious Hindus and
Buddhists who write books gathering what seems to them the incontrovertible
evidence for reincarnation, and Western scientists who, seeing no evidence
whatsoever, don’t even raise the question. This is to say that, constrained by
a variety of traditional and modern doctrines, this question hasn’t been asked
in a serious way, both out of deference to religious belief and because the
question itself eludes conclusive response because what it pursues is by
definition beyond the world in which we live, that is, fully metaphysical. That
leaves most of us in the position of needing to sort out the possibilities
ourselves, but in the meantime the most honest and therefore spiritually and
intellectually compelling response is to admit that we simply don’t know what
happens to us after we die. Better, it would seem, to allow the mystery and
gravity of human mortality to press upon us, and to stimulate our asking the
kinds of questions that reflect our deepest human concerns, rather than to leap
in one direction or the other on the question of afterlife.
The second point, however, is
the difficulty that Buddhists have had historically in getting a doctrine of
rebirth to cohere with their other central values. Those of us who have read
through Abhidharma literature are familiar with the contortions that Buddhist
intellectuals went through in the process of explaining what rebirth might mean
in view of the Buddhist claim that there is no permanent or substantial self
because all things are both impermanent and dependent on other impermanent
conditions. Wherever in Buddhist thought rebirth is given a strong and
substantial role, no self and other dimensions of the teachings are reduced in
significance. Wherever the teaching of no self and related doctrinal elements
are given strong and consistent application, very little is left that rebirth
could mean. Philosophers in the future will continue to raise questions about
the tension between these two early and important dimensions in Buddhist
thought, and to examine what possibilities for thought were left unexplored in
the Buddhist tradition due to logical difficulties on this one issue. For some,
it has already been tempting to suspect that the idea of rebirth in Buddhism is
an intellectual relapse, a place within the teachings where practitioners were
simply unable or unwilling to consider the radical consequences of their
teachings, and where they may have fallen prey to the dangers of grasping for
the immortal self, or for the kinds of permanence and security that Buddhist
psychology warned against so perceptively. These two areas, I suspect, will be
the places where the debate about rebirth and its role in the workings of karma
will tend to focus. But we’ll see; these are questions that require cautious,
delicate treatment because they are located close to the life force that
motivates human beings. But that’s exactly why they need to be raised as real
questions
In several respects, rebirth
stands in the way of our understanding karma in purely ethical terms. Rebirth
encourages us (1) to assume a concept of cosmic justice for which we have
insufficient evidence; (2) to ignore issues of justice in this life on the
grounds of speculation about future lives; (3) to focus our hopes on external
rewards for our actions, like wealth and status in a future life rather than on
the construction of character in this one; and (4) to conceive of our lives in
strictly individual terms, as a personal continuum through many lives, rather
than collectively, where individuals share in a communal destiny, contributing
their lives and efforts to that collective destiny. Although at the time when
Buddhism first emerged, karma and rebirth continued to be linked together in
order to make the newly emerging domain of ethics viable, today, ironically,
given the cultural evolution of ethical understanding, karma may need to be
disconnected from the metaphysics of rebirth in order to continue the
development of Buddhist ethics.10 If the early Buddhists did ethicize the
concept of karma by lifting it out of the sphere of religious ritual by
applying it to all of our morally relevant actions, then carrying through on
that ethicization will require that the link between karma and rebirth be
questioned, perhaps altered. Among Buddhists today, educated in a world of
science and favorably disposed to contemporary standards for the articulation
of truth, a naturalized concept of karma without supernatural preconditions
will more likely be both persuasive and motivationally functional.11
How would we develop such a
concept? Here are just a few suggestions. A naturalistic theory of karma would
treat choice and character as mutually determining -- each arising dependent on
the other. It would show how the choices you make, one by one, shape your
character, and how the character that you have constructed, choice by choice,
sets limits on the range of possibilities that you will be able to consider in
each future decision. Karma implies that once you have made a choice and acted
on it, it will always be with you, and you will always be the one who at that
moment and under those conditions embraced that path of action. The past, on
this view, is never something that once happened to you and is now over;
instead, it is the network of causes and conditions that has already shaped you
and that is right now setting conditions for every choice and move you make.
From the very moment of an act on, you are that choice, which has been
appropriated into your character along with countless others. In this light
human freedom becomes highly visible, and awesome in its gravity, but is
noticeable only to one who has realized the far-reaching and irreversible
impact on oneself and others of choices made, of karma.
The concept of karma brings
this pattern of freedom in self-cultivation clearly to the fore, and does so
with great insight and natural subtly. It highlights a structure of personal
accountability in which every act contains its own internal, natural rewards or
consequences, even if Buddhists sometimes succumbed to the temptation to offer
a variety of external rewards as well. Although money does talk, promising it
when it may or may not be forthcoming is a questionable strategy of motivation.
Better to teach, as Buddhists have, that the best things in life are free, and
that the very best of these is the freedom to cultivate oneself into someone
who is wise, insightful, compassionate, and magnanimous.12 This freedom,
however, operates under strict and always fluctuating conditions. A mature
concept of karma would encourage people to recognize the finitude of freedom
and choice, and all of the ways we are shaped by forces far beyond our control.
Although always attempting to extend our ethical imaginations, and therefore
our freedom, failure simultaneously to recognize the encompassing forces of
nature, society, and history places us in a precarious position, and renders
our choices naive. Our choices and our lives originate dependent on these larger
forces, and in view of them, mindfulness and reverence are appropriate
responses.
If the solitary ethical
decisions we have been focusing on so far have the power to move us in the
direction of greater forms of human excellence, then how much more so the
unconscious “non-choices” that we make every day in the form of habits and
customs that deepen over time and engrave their mark into our character. Some
accounts of karma are exceptionally insightful in that their understanding of
character development takes full account of the enormous importance of ordinary
daily practice or customs of behavior, what we habitually do during the day
often without reflection or choice -- the ways we do our work and manage our
time, the ways we daydream, or cultivate resentment, or lose ourselves in
distractions, down to the very way we eat and breathe.
This is clearly a strong point
in Buddhist ethics. On this understanding of karma, which was closely related
to the development of meditation, ethics is largely a matter of daily practice,
understood as the self-conscious cultivation of ordinary life and mentality
towards the approximation of an ideal defined by images of human excellence,
the awakened arhats and bodhisattvas.13 To an extent not found in other
religious and philosophical traditions, Buddhists saw that ethics is only
rarely about difficult and monumental decisions, and that, in preparing
yourself for life, it is much more important to focus on what you do with
yourself moment by moment than it is to attempt to imagine how you will solve
the major moral crises when they arrive. They seem to have realized that it is
only through disciplined practices of daily self-cultivation that you would be
in a mental position to handle the big issues when they do come up. They also
claimed, insightfully, that the self is malleable and open to this kind of
ethical transformation, and here we see the impact of the concept of no-self as
it was developed in various dimensions of the tradition.
Moreover, the Buddhist
doctrine of no-self is one of the best among several places in the teachings
where we can begin to see beyond the individual interpretation of karma that
has dominated the tradition so far. If karma is to be a truly comprehensive
teaching about human actions and their effects, extensive development of all of
the ways in which the effects of our acts radiate into other selves and into
social structures will need to be grafted onto the doctrine of karma as it
currently stands. This extension of the doctrine has already begun, however,
and will not be difficult to pursue because it can be grounded on the
extraordinary Mahayana teaching of emptiness, the Buddhist vision of the
interpenetration of all beings. Following this vision, we can imagine a
collective understanding of karma that overcomes limitations deriving from the
concept’s original foundation in the individualized spirituality of early
Buddhist monasticism.
A naturalized philosophical
account of the Buddhist idea of karma can, it seems to me, insightfully reflect
these and other dimensions of our human situation. Separated from elements of
supernatural thinking that have been associated with karma since its inception,
its basic tenets of freedom, decision, and accountability are impressive, and
clearly show us something important about the human situation, including the
project of self-construction, both individually and collectively conceived. I
conclude, therefore, imagining elements in the doctrine of karma having the
potential to be truly effective in the effort to design concepts of ethical
education that are both honest to the requirements of thinking in our time, and
profoundly enabling in the quest for human excellence.
Notes
1Aṅguttara Nikāya: iv, 77. Return to text
2See Susan Neiman, Evil in
Modern Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Return to text
3Richard Gombrich and Gananath
Obeyesekere among them. Return to text
4Although not a historian of
early Indian culture, I suspect that the ethicization of the concept of karma
was occurring not just in Buddhist monastic circles but more widely in other
avant-garde segments of Indian culture at the same time. Return to text
5Alaisdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 188. Return to
text
6The first thing that accrues
from an act of this sort is that someone is helped, something good has been
done to the world out beyond the practitioner. But my focus here is on the
rewards that come to the agent. Return to text
7Alaisdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue, p. 191. Return to text
8Dalai Lama, The Way to
Freedom: Core Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. San Francisco: Harper, 1994. p.
100. Return to text
9See William Waldron, The
Buddhist Unconscious, London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003, pp. 160-169. Return to
text
10In a book just released as
this essay came to completion, Robert Thurman articulates exactly the opposite
point on the concept of rebirth: that without a belief in individual
immortality -- a theory of the soul -- a fully ethical life is not possible.
While respecting the motivation and sincerity of those who do consider the idea
of rebirth to be essential both to Buddhism and to enlightened life, I disagree
with the arguments provided, and find adherence to contemporary standards of
critical thinking the most compelling consideration. See Infinite Life: Seven
Virtues for Living Well, New York:
Riverhead Books, 2004. Return to text
11Winston L. King explores the
question of the separability of karma and rebirth, concluding that “a doctrine
of karmic rebirth is not essential to a viable and authentic Buddhist ethic in
the West,” in “A Buddhist Ethic Without Karmic Rebirth,” in the Journal of
Buddhist Ethics, Volume 1, 1994. Return to text
12The question of what to do
about people who can only be motivated by promises of external rewards is an
important social question, but not one within the scope of a philosophical
effort to reflect on the truth of the matter or on what the rest of us should
believe for motivational purposes. Return to text
13For the connection between
meditation and Buddhist ethics, see Georges Dreyfus,“Meditation as Ethical
Activity,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Vol. 2, 1995. Return to text
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Source: http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/