We are
faced with
a totally ill-balanced world. We perceive the inequalities
and manifold
destinies of men and the numerous grades of beings that
exist in the
universe. We see one born into a condition of affluence,
endowed with
fine mental, moral and physical qualities and another into a
condition
of abject poverty and wretchedness. Here is a man virtuous
and holy,
but, contrary to his expectation, ill-luck is ever ready to
greet
him. The wicked world runs counter to his ambitions and
desires. He
is poor and miserable in spite of his honest dealings and
piety. There
is another vicious and foolish, but accounted to be
fortune's darling.
He is rewarded with all forms of favors, despite his
shortcomings
and evil modes of life.
Why, it
may be
questioned, should one be an inferior and another a
superior? Why
should one be wrested from the hands of a fond mother when
he has
scarcely seen a few summers, and another should perish in
the flower
of manhood, or at the ripe age of eighty or hundred? Why
should one
be sick and infirm, and another strong and healthy? Why
should one
be handsome, and another ugly and hideous, repulsive to all?
Why should
one be brought up in the lap of luxury, and another in
absolute poverty,
steeped in misery? Why should one be born a millionaire and
another
a pauper? Why should one be born with saintly
characteristics, and
another with criminal tendencies? Why should some be
linguists, artists,
mathematicians or musicians from the very cradle? Why should
some
be congenitally blind, deaf and deformed? Why should some be
blessed
and others cursed from their birth?
These
are some
problems that perplex the minds of all thinking men. How are
we to
account for all this unevenness of the world, this
inequality of mankind?
Is
it due
to the work of blind chance or accident?
There is
nothing
in this world that happens by blind chance or accident. To
say that
anything happens by chance, is no more true than that this
book has
come here of itself. Strictly speaking, nothing happens to
man that
he does not deserve for some reason or another.
Could
this be
the fiat of an irresponsible Creator?
Huxley
writes:
"If we are to assume that anybody has designedly set this
wonderful
universe going, it is perfectly clear to me that he is no
more entirely
benevolent and just in any intelligible sense of the words,
than that
he is malevolent and unjust."
According
to Einstein:
"If this being (God) is omnipotent, then every occurrence,
including
every human action, every human thought, and every human
feeling and
aspiration is also his work; how is it possible to think of
holding
men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an
Almighty
Being.
"In
giving
out punishments and rewards, he would to a certain extent be
passing
judgement on himself. How can this be combined with the
goodness and
righteousness ascribed to him."
"According
to the theological principles man is created arbitrarily and
without
his desire and at the moment of his creation is either
blessed or
damned eternally. Hence man is either good or evil,
fortunate or unfortunate,
noble or depraved, from the first step in the process of his
physical
creation to the moment of his last breath, regardless of his
individual
desires, hopes, ambitions, struggles or devoted prayers.
Such is theological
fatalism." - Spencer Lewis
As
Charles Bradlaugh
says: "The existence of evil is a terrible stumbling block
to
the theist. Pain, misery, crime, poverty confront the
advocate of
eternal goodness and challenge with unanswerable potency his
declaration
of Deity as all-good, all-wise, and all-powerful."
In the
words of
Schopenhauer: "Whoever regards himself as having become out
of
nothing must also think that he will again become nothing;
for an
eternity has passed before he was, and then a second
eternity had
begun, through which he will never cease to be, is a
monstrous thought.
"If
birth
is the absolute beginning, then death must be his absolute
end; and
the assumption that man is made out of nothing leads
necessarily to
the assumption that death is his absolute end."
Commenting
on
human sufferings and God, Prof. J.B.S. Haldane writes:
"Either
suffering is needed to perfect human character, or God is
not Almighty.
The former theory is disproved by the fact that some people
who have
suffered very little but have been fortunate in their
ancestry and
education have very fine characters. The objection to the
second is
that it is only in connection with the universe as a whole
that there
is any intellectual gap to be filled by the postulation of a
deity.
And a creator could presumably create whatever he or it
wanted."
Lord
Russell states:
"The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both
good
and omnipotent. Before he created the world he foresaw all
the pain
and misery that it would contain. He is therefore
responsible for
all of it. it is useless to argue that the pain in the world
is due
to sin. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would
be guilty,
he was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those
sins
when he decided to create man."
In
"Despair,"
a poem of his old age, Lord Tennyson thus boldly attacks
God, who,
as recorded in Isaiah, says, "I make peace and create evil."
(Isaiah, xiv. 7.)
"What! I
should call on that infinite love that has served us so
well?/ Infinite
cruelty, rather, that made everlasting hell./ Made us,
foreknew us,
foredoomed us, and does what he will with his own./ Better
our dead
brute mother who never has heard us groan."
Surely
"the
doctrine that all men are sinners and have the essential sin
of Adam
is a challenge to justice, mercy, love and omnipotent
fairness."
Some
writers of
old authoritatively declared that God created man in his own
image.
Some modern thinkers state, on the contrary, that man
created God
in his own image. With the growth of civilization man's
concept of
God also became more and more refined.
It is,
however,
impossible to conceive of such a being either in or outside
the universe.
Could
this variation
in human beings then be due to heredity and environment? One
must
admit that all such chemico-physical phenomena revealed by
scientists,
are partly instrumental, but they cannot be solely
responsible for
the subtle distinctions and vast differences that exist
amongst individuals.
Yet why should identical twins who are physically alike,
inheriting
like genes, enjoying the same privilege of upbringing, be
very often
temperamentally, morally and intellectually totally
different?
Heredity
alone
cannot account for these vast differences. Strictly
speaking, it accounts
more plausibly for their similarities than for most of the
differences.
The infinitesimally minute chemico-physical germ, which is
about 30
millionth part of an inch across, inherited from parents,
explains
only a portion of man, his physical foundation. With regard
to the
more complex and subtle mental, intellectual and moral
differences
we need more enlightenment. The theory of heredity cannot
give a satisfactory
explanation for the birth of a criminal in a long line of
honourable
ancestors, the birth of a saint or a noble man in a family
of evil
repute, for the arising of infant prodigies, men of genius
and great
religious teachers.
According
to Buddhism
this variation is due not only to heredity, environment,
"nature
and nurture," but also to our own kamma, or in other words,
to
the result of our own inherited past actions and our present
deeds.
We ourselves are responsible for our own deeds, happiness
and misery.
We build our own hells. We create our own heavens. We are
the architects
of our own fate. In short we ourselves are our own kamma.
On one
occasion[9]
a certain young man named Subha approached the Buddha, and
questioned
why and wherefore it was that among human beings there are
the low
and high states.
"For,"
said he, "we find amongst mankind those of brief life and
those
of long life, the hale and the ailing, the good looking and
the ill-looking,
the powerful and the powerless, the poor and the rich, the
low-born
and the high-born, the ignorant and the intelligent."
The
Buddha briefly
replied: "Every living being has kamma as its own, its
inheritance,
its cause, its kinsman, its refuge. Kamma is that which
differentiates
all living beings into low and high states."
He then
explained
the cause of such differences in accordance with the law of
moral
causation.
Thus
from a Buddhist
standpoint, our present mental, intellectual, moral and
temperamental
differences are mainly due to our own actions and
tendencies, both
past the present.
Kamma,
literally,
means action; but, in its ultimate sense, it means the
meritorious
and demeritorious volition (kusala akusala cetana).
Kamma constitutes
both good and evil. Good gets good. Evil gets evil. Like
attracts
like. This is the law of Kamma.
As some
Westerners
prefer to say Kamma is "action-influence."
We reap
what we
have sown. What we sow we reap somewhere or some when. In
one sense
we are the result of what we were; we will be the result of
what we
are. In another sense, we are not totally the result of what
we were
and we will not absolutely be the result of what we are. For
instance,
a criminal today may be a saint tomorrow.
Buddhism
attributes
this variation to kamma, but it does not assert that
everything is
due to kamma.
If
everything
were due to kamma, a man must ever be bad, for it is his
kamma to
be bad. One need not consult a physician to be cured of a
disease,
for if one's kamma is such one will be cured.
According
to Buddhism,
there are five orders or processes (niyamas) which
operate
in the physical and mental realms:
i. Kamma
niyama, order of act and result, e.g., desirable and
undesirable
acts produce corresponding good and bad results.
ii. Utu niyama, physical (inorganic) order, e.g.,
seasonal
phenomena of winds and rains.
iii. Bija niyama, order of germs or seeds (physical
organic
order); e.g., rice produced from rice-seed, sugary taste
from sugar
cane or honey, etc. The scientific theory of cells and
genes and
the physical similarity of twins may be ascribed to this
order.
iv. Citta niyama, order of mind or psychic law,
e.g., processes
of consciousness (citta vithi), power of mind, etc.
v. Dhamma niyama, order of the norm, e.g., the
natural phenomena
occurring at the advent of a Bodhisatta in his last birth,
gravitation,
etc.
Every
mental or
physical phenomenon could be explained by these
all-embracing five
orders or processes which are laws in themselves. Kamma is,
therefore,
only one of the five orders that prevail in the universe. It
is a
law in itself, but it does not thereby follow that there
should be
a law-giver. Ordinary laws of nature, like gravitation, need
no law-giver.
It operates in its own field without the intervention of an
external
independent ruling agency.
Nobody,
for instance,
has decreed that fire should burn. Nobody has commanded that
water
should seek its own level. No scientist has ordered that
water should
consist of H2O, and that coldness
should be
one of its properties. These are their intrinsic
characteristics.
Kamma is neither fate nor predestination imposed upon us by
some mysterious
unknown power to which we must helplessly submit ourselves.
It is
one's own doing reacting on oneself, and so one has the
possibility
to divert the course of kamma to some extent. How far one
diverts
it depends on oneself.
It must
also be
said that such phraseology as rewards and punishments should
not be
allowed to enter into discussions concerning the problem of
kamma.
For Buddhism does not recognize an Almighty Being who rules
his subjects
and rewards and punishes them accordingly. Buddhists, on the
contrary,
believe that sorrow and happiness one experiences are the
natural
outcome of one's own good and bad actions. It should be
stated that
kamma has both the continuative and the retributive
principle.
Inherent
in kamma
is the potentiality of producing its due effect. The cause
produces
the effect; the effect explains the cause. Seed produces the
fruit;
the fruit explains the seed as both are inter-related. Even
so kamma
and its effect are inter-related; "the effect already blooms
in the cause."
A
Buddhist who
is fully convinced of the doctrine of kamma does not pray to
another
to be saved but confidently relies on himself for his
purification
because it teaches individual responsibility.
It is
this doctrine
of kamma that gives him consolation, hope, self reliance and
moral
courage. It is this belief in kamma "that validates his
effort,
kindles his enthusiasm," makes him ever kind, tolerant and
considerate.
It is also this firm belief in kamma that prompts him to
refrain from
evil, do good and be good without being frightened of any
punishment
or tempted by any reward.
It is
this doctrine
of kamma that can explain the problem of suffering, the
mystery of
so-called fate or predestination of other religions, and
above all
the inequality of mankind.
Kamma
and rebirth
are accepted as axiomatic.