A Commentary On An
Article By David Loy, “Rethinking Karma”
By Gregory Wonderwheel
David Loy is a professor of Religion at Xavier University
and an authorized Zen teacher. This article is from his new book Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution
(Wisdom Publications).
David
Loy’s 2013 article “Rethinking Karma,” in Tricycle Magazine reveals how even well intentioned modern
Western Buddhists can have difficultly thinking about karma and rebirth from
within the frame of Western materialism. By not understanding the materialist
assumptions in one’s own worldview, one is generally unable to perceive the
Eastern contours of materialism and do not see the Easgtern worldview with the
same measuring stick of analysis. That
is, the Eastern materialist view of karma gets labeled as superstition, while ignoring
that the Western brand of materialism is equally superstitious. Loy makes the
best of emphasizing the worth of karma from a Western perspective while deliberately
leaving aside the question of rebirth as unaddressed and unanswered. To make karma relevant from this perspective,
Loy can only speak of karma from a perspective of social-psychology that
ignores the depth of the archetypal and transpersonal. But in doing so, he also
gives ammunition to the secularists who would exterminate both karma and
rebirth from the Buddha Dharma by relying on the materialistic worldview of a
physical reality that calls rebirth into question as a mere superstition. What follows is the complete article
presented in segments identified by blue italic with my commentary following
each segment.
How are we meant to understand this key Buddhist teaching?
The subtitle
acknowledges that karma is a key Buddhist teaching. However by asking “how are we meant to understand karma?” rather than “what
is the meaning of karma?” there is a subtle
preference placing “understanding” above “meaning” I propose that, ultimately, karma is not
about arriving at an intellectual understanding as much as it is about
practicing a spiritual meaning. One of
the main problems with Western modernists is that their desire to have an
intellectual understanding that is firmly fixed within their rationalist frame
of reference actually prevents the exploration of the question. But even more startling in the contemporary
Western hesitancy to deal with karma and rebirth is that the karma-naysayers
don’t even understand the depth of their ignorance. They are denouncing the idea of karma as a superstition
from the vantage point of a person who only knows basic arithmetic denouncing
calculus as gibberish or a person who only knows pool-table mechanics
denouncing quantum theory, quarks, and dark matter as superstition.
IN WRITING OF Sigmund Freud, one master diagnostician of
human suffering, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm observes:
The attempt to understand Freud's theoretical system, or
that of any creative systematic thinker, cannot be successful unless we
recognize that, and why, every system as it is developed and presented by its
author is necessarily erroneous.... The creative thinker must think in the
terms of the logic, the thought patterns, the expressible concepts of his
culture. That means he has not yet the proper words to express the creative,
the new, the liberating idea. He is forced to solve an insoluble problem: to
express the new thought in concepts and words that do not yet exist in his
language.... The consequence is that the new thought as he formulated it is a
blend of what is truly new and the conventional thought which it transcends.
The thinker, however, is not conscious of this contradiction.
The Buddha, of course, was himself a master diagnostician,
and while there are obviously great differences between him and Freud, I think
that we can apply Fromm's point to the Buddha's own "liberating
idea." Even the most creative, world-transforming individuals cannot stand
on their own shoulders. They too remain dependent upon their cultural context,
whether intellectual or spiritual—which is precisely what Buddhism's emphasis
on impermanence and causal interdependence implies. The Buddha also expressed
his new, liberating insight in the only way he could, using the religious
categories that his culture could understand. Inevitably, then, his way of
expressing the dharma was a blend of the truly new (for example, the teachings
about anatta, or
"not-self," and paticca-samuppada, or "dependent origination")
and the conventional religious thought of his time. Although the new transcends
the conventional, as Fromm puts it, the new cannot immediately and completely
escape the conventional wisdom it surpasses.
This general opening seems innocuous enough, yet there are
presumptions that could act as a poison. Of course, any reference to Freud is
compromised from the beginning. While
his initial advocacy of the unconscious was ground breaking, his psychology was
rigid and fixated and could not escape from the weight of its own cultural
conditioning and materialistic preconceptions. Also, the category of “creative systematic
thinker” is a Western style concept that shows how Fromm himself is being a
creative thinker caught within his own expressible concepts of his
culture. To call Buddha a “creative
systematic thinker” reduces Buddha’s awakening to the narrow horizons of a
modern philosophical framework based on thinking. Buddha’s enlightenment was
not simply the result of a creative thinker who thought new thoughts about
life.
Also the idea that Buddha taught a “blend” of the “truly
new” and the “conventional religious thought of his time” shows a hidden agenda
to assert one’s own criteria for judging the teaching over the Buddha’s. In other words, the “new” is not necessarily the
“true” and the “conventional” is not the “false.” There is no apparently conventional religious
thought presented by the Buddha that is not as equally valid as the apparently
new expression. In other words, the Buddha did not formulate a teaching blended
of what was “truly new” and the “conventional thought which it transcends”
because the conventional thought that was transcended was exactly transcended
and left out. The apparently conventional thought in the Buddha Dharma is neither
extraneous nor superfluous; it is the Buddha’s wisdom (Buddha-jnana) within the context of the Buddha’s expedient means (upaya) of teaching. It is not for those who do not understand why
the Buddha included the teaching to throw it out merely because we don’t know
what he meant for us to understand. The conventional ideas that were kept were kept
because they were relevant and beneficial and the new ideas that were added
were added because they were relevant and beneficial. The conventional ideas that
were not kept were discarded because they were not relevant or beneficial, and
the new ideas that were not added were not added because they were irrelevant,
misleading or unbeneficial.
By emphasizing the inevitable limitations of any cultural
innovator, Fromm implies the impermanence—the dynamic, developing nature—of all
spiritual teachings. As Buddhists, we tend to assume that the Buddha understood
everything, that his awakening and his way of expressing that awakening are
unsurpassable. But is that a fair expectation?
Yes, that is fair to see impermanence in cultural contexts,
however there is also a false dichotomy at work here. Yes, all spiritual
teachings are dynamic and developing. Yes, Buddha’s awakening was
unsurpassable. But it is the expression of that awakening within the clothing
of the language of culture that will change according to circumstances and
conditions, not the awakening itself.
This is why the Buddha Dharma says awakening has the one taste, the
single flavor, of liberation. The Buddha
Dharma recognizes an uncountable variation in circumstances in which a person
may awaken, yet the taste of that liberation is unified and singular. The “way of expressing” awakening may change
due to language and cultural frames of reference, but the awakening being
expressed can never be different or separate from the Buddha’s own
awakening.
Given how little we actually know about the historical
Buddha, perhaps our collective image of him reveals less about who he actually
was and more about our own need to discover or project a completely perfect
being to inspire our own spiritual practice.
Isn’t it both? Wasn’t
it both during the lifetime of the Buddha even without the haziness of history? The image of any person often reveals more
about our own projective desires than about who the person actually is. A
school teacher, a minister, a therapist, virtually any authority figure, calls
forth our own needs to encounter the “perfect being” in a projective capacity.
This projection of the “perfect being” is the archetypal Bodhisattva of our own
mind being projected onto others by the functioning outflows of our
consciousness. It is nearly invariable that we can only come to a realization
of the Bodhisattva Path by first encountering the possibility of the
Bodhisattva through our projection of the sense of the “perfect being” onto a
person of authority with whom we have an actual relationship.
Understanding this becomes especially helpful when we try to
understand Buddhist teachings about karma, which has become a problem for many
contemporary Buddhists.
From the beginning of our inquiry, we have to be especially
alert to the problems created by trying to “understand” the Buddhist teachings
about karma. Is the locus of the problem
to be found in the teaching of karma or in our fixation and attachment to the
cultural categories of our own bifurcated conceptualizations (vikalpa, parikalpita)? I posit the primary problem for contemporary
Buddhists is to be found in the very same contemporary conceptualizations that
have been dyed (raga) and scented (vasana) by the modern materialist
worldview, and not in the teaching of karma.
In the
Sutta on the
Simsapa Leaves http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.031.than.html
the Buddha says that what he knows from his direct knowledge is like the number
of leaves in the Simsapa forest, but what he teaches is like the number of
leaves held in his hand. This is because what he mostly taught to these monks
was for the cessation of unease (dukkha) so that they too could realize
liberation and see the leaves in the forest for themselves.
If we are honest with ourselves, most of us aren't sure how
literally it should be interpreted.
Uncertainty is good to honestly acknowledge. However, it seems the problem with
contemporary Buddhists is not primarily in their uncertainty with the Buddhist
teachings, but in the certainty with which they hold onto their non-Buddhist
beliefs. For example, why should karma
be taken any more or less literally than any other law of the universe? Do we
take gravity literally? People do in
their everyday lives, even though at the cutting edge of physics the nature of
gravity is not certain and can not be taken literally. Likewise, to take karma literally on an every
day basis is not so bad as long as we recognize that there is no such
literalness on the cutting edge of what karma means.
Karma is perhaps most often taken as an impersonal and
deterministic "moral law" of the universe, with a precise calculus of
cause and effect comparable to Newton's
laws of physics. This understanding, however, can lead to a severe case of
cognitive dissonance for modern Buddhists, since the physical causality that
science has discovered about the world seems to allow for no such mechanism.
Here we see the example of one’s certainty about their
“scientific” frame of reference becoming an obstruction to the meaning of karma
and rebirth. There are multiple
erroneous presumptions in the previous statement. First, the idea of an
“impersonal and deterministic” law is not compatible with the idea of a “moral”
law and to conflate the two is a fundamental error. Karma is not a “moral law” of any kind. When a person walks off a cliff and breaks
bones on the impact belw, we say that was “bad.” But there was nothing immoral about the cause
and effect, and the labeling of the effect as “bad” is not a moral judgment in
and of itself. Likewise, when people say there is “bad” karma, that simply
means the karma, i.e., the action of walking off the cliff, will result in a
fruit that will be conventionally labeled as “bad” by nearly everyone, as
everyone pretty much agrees that broken bones are “bad.” There is no morality involved in this karmic
analysis, because morality depends on an authority commanding what is right or
wrong. Buddhism has no such authority, and karma is not a human-made law of
right and wrong, but an observable law of nature, i.e., the nature of mind,
regarding actions and reactions.
Next, it is a false assumption that there is “a precise
calculus of cause and effect” within Newton’s
laws of motion and gravity. Newton’s three laws of
motion and law of gravity are stated as precisely as possible, but the
calculations that they lead to are only precise to the degree that the system
they refer to is closed and without any extraneous variables. It is the popular,
but mistaken, certainty in Newton’s
laws that creates the erroneous belief that those laws lead to precise
calculations of outcomes. Likewise, that
popular but mistaken certainty then gets turned toward understanding karma and
the disappointment in the recognition of uncertainty then leads to a “sour grapes”
complaint that karma must be wrong. But
do we come to the conclusion that Newton’s
laws of motion are wrong just because the “smart” bombs and missiles don’t
always fall where the military’s “precise calculus of cause and effect” say
they were supposed to strike? The Buddha
always taught that there is an uncertainty principle in karma because there is
no closed system and a person’s future action (karma) may effect the ripening
of previous karma. That is, if we do not change course when we are walking
toward a cliff, our karma will ripen in falling. But if we change our action at
any time before stepping off the cliff, then we have changed the course of the
outcome of our karma. This is as simple and straightforward as Newton’s laws of motion.
The concern about the “physical causality that science has
discovered about the world” not having such a mechanism for the causality of
karma, again, shows that the problem is in the attachment to “physical
causality” not to any problem with karma.
Before Newton
discovered the law of gravity, there was no “such mechanism” to explain why the
moon rotated around the earth or the earth around the sun. Did that make the moon’s rotation any less
real or actual or subject to the laws that were only discovered in an historical
context? Modernity certainly will
experience cognitive dissonance with the Buddha Dharma precisely because the
Buddha Dharma is not dependent on the cognitive framework of physical
materialism of science. The Buddha
Dharma’s law of karma is about the laws of the science of mind reality, not the
laws of the science of physical reality.
This is the primary cognitive dissonance for modern contemporary
Buddhists to understand. This is the
same cognitive dissonance encountered by modern psychologists, as scientists of
the mind, who can’t get out of their physicalist/materialist frames of
reference. This is the cognitive
dissonance that has led modern psychology to study the psyche using only
physical measuring devices, and thus actually dumping the mind as the subject
of their science becoming a physical science studying the brain. This is the
cognitive dissonance that led pseudo-psychological materialists to brand Carl
G. Jung as a “mystic” because he steadfastly maintained that psychology must stand
upon its own feet as a science of the psyche, not of the brain. Thus it is not dissonant to the cognition to
acknowledge that shortly before his death, Jung praised the Zen master Hsuyun
(Empty Cloud) as saying exactly what Jung was saying about the function of
consciousness.
In contrast, some key Buddhist teachings may well make more
sense to us today than they did to people living at the time of the Buddha.
And that includes the teaching of karma.
What Buddhism has to say about anatta, for example, is not
only profound but consistent with what modern psychologists such as George
Herbert Mead and Kurt Lewin have discovered about the constructed nature of the
ego-self.
This is exactly why karma may make more sense for moderns
who are able to understand the profound teachings such as no-self, no-soul (anatman, anatta) than for people in Buddha’s own day who were unable to see
that Buddha’s discovery of no-self/no-soul was exactly and precisely a
revolutionary understanding of how karma actually works, because if there were
a literal self or soul, then the law of karma would not be able to function for
the same reason that if there was a literal piece of firewood, it would not be
able to combust to give off heat and light.
Likewise, what Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna have said
about language—how it tends to mislead us into assuming that the categories
through which we describe the world are final and absolute—is consistent with
the work of linguists and philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques
Derrida.
Likewise, karma and rebirth are consistent and illuminated
by Nagajuna’s (and Vasubandhu’s) analysis of language, as well as the analysis
of language found in the Sutras, such as the Diamond Cutter Sutra and Lankavatara
Sutra, upon which the great Buddhist Bodhisattva scholars relied. The modernist’s categories raised in
opposition to the law of karma and rebirth are indeed the kinds of categories
dependent on language that mislead us into assuming that the categories
described by “physical causality” with its illusion of a “precise calculus of
cause and effect” are final and absolute.
In such ways, Buddhism dovetails nicely with some of the
best currents of contemporary thought. But such is not the case with
traditional views of karma.
There is a problem here that is a false analogy. Karma does
“dovetail nicely” with modern views. In addition to the modern views stated
about with which karma dovetails nicely, the whole realm of modern physics and
the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” dovetails nicely with karma and
rebirth. The physics of wave dynamics, of light, and of thermodynamics,
including the law of the conservation of energy, all dovetail nicely as
analogies to describe the law of karma and rebirth. It is only the mistaken and non-Buddhist interpretations
of karma that are not consistent with no-self (anatman), impermanence (anitya,
anicca), and imbalance (dukkha)
that do not dovetail nicely with modern views.
Of course, this by itself does not
refute karma or make it impossible to be included in a contemporary Buddhist
perspective. It does, however, encourage us to think more deeply about it.
Yes, just because a person who claims to be a Buddhist
interprets karma in a traditional non-Buddhist manner, does not make karma
invalid, it only invalidates the interpretation. We should always consider the Buddha Dharma
deeply, until we have no conflict with it in our mind.
THERE ARE AT LEAST two other major problems with the ways that
karma has traditionally been understood. One of them is its unfortunate implications
for many Asian Buddhist societies, where a self-defeating split has developed
between the sangha and the laity.
The split is between the view of sangha as the two-fold
assembly of home-leavers or as the all-inclusive four-fold assembly of followers
of the Buddha Dharma, including both home-leavers and home-keepers. I agree that it is unfortunate where the
home-leavers have usurped the meaning of sangha to themselves to exclude lay
people except in roles of supporting the sangha.
Although the Pali canon makes it quite clear that laypeople
too can attain liberation, the main spiritual responsibility of lay Buddhists,
as commonly understood, is not to follow the path themselves but to support the
monastics. In this way, lay men and women gain punna, or "merit," a concept
that commodifies karma. By accumulating merit, they hope to attain a favorable
rebirth or to gain material reward, which in turn redounds to the material
benefit of the monastic community.
This teaching of merit is the most elementary and
superficial teaching that Chinese Zen master Guifeng Zongmi called “the
teaching of humans and devas (heavenly beings).” Doing meritorious karma for
the result of better conditions in a future life is a universally human
perspective and is a common ground for all religions. In Buddha Dharna this appears as a basic
teaching not to be considered anything more than the most elementary addition
and subtraction in the calculus of the law of karma.
This approach reduces Buddhism, quite literally, to a form
of spiritual materialism.
The question is whether this is a true reduction or just a
beginner’s starting place to build upon.
With children it is better to teach counting first, then addition and
subtraction, before trying to teach algebra and calculus. Likewise with
materialists, is it better first to teach non-materialism or spiritual
materialism? Teaching spiritual
materialism is just a first step to weaning a confirmed materialist from their
physical materialist views before introducing them to non-materialism. It is as much of a mistake to think that a
teaching like this is all there is to the law of karma as to think that
addition and subtraction is all there is to mathematics.
The other problem is that karma has long been used to
rationalize racism, caste, economic oppression, birth handicaps, and so forth.
However, this has always been misuse and abuse by
those with a non-Buddhist belief in a self or soul (atman), and has never a real “use” as far as the Buddha Dharma is
concerned. It is similar to the “use” of
torture for redemption and salvation in the medieval Inquisitions that was
actually abuse in the name of Jesus Christ and never a real “use” of the
teachings of Jesus Christ. The fact is that the human mind has an
infinite capacity to rationalize, and abusive rationalization to justify one’s
selfishness does not thereby invalidate the principle being rationalized.
Taken literally, karma justifies both the authority of
political elites, who therefore must deserve their wealth and power, and the
subordination of those who have neither.
Taken literally, karma leads
to just the opposite of these false justifications. There is absolutely nothing in a literal
interpretation of karma that justifies the authority of political elites. A literal interpretation of karma tells those
with wealth and power that they will be among the poor and powerless in their
following rebirths unless they learn how to use and apply their wealth and
power for the benefit of others and all beings. These false justifications are
only possible because the teaching of karma is being ignored by a perverted
view and not taken either literally or metaphorically.
It provides the perfect theodicy: if there is an infallible
cause-and-effect relationship between one's actions and one's fate, there is no
need to work toward social justice, because it's already built into the moral
fabric of the universe.
In fact, if there is no undeserved suffering, there is really
no evil that we need to struggle against.
Again, karmic fruit is
not a matter of “deserved” or “undeserved.”
It is true that there is no “evil” that we need to struggle against in
the sense that externalized objectified evil is a construct of our own mind. There is no external separately individual “evil.”
And to struggle against such a projected
evil only supports an erroneous projection that continues the very injury, harm,
and hurt that is being “struggled against.”
To view “evil” as an entity is a materialist construction that obscured
the actual harm being done. To work
toward beneficial conditions for all beings does not require or necessitate the
hallucination of “evil” at work in the world. What is at work is the human
ignorance of the law of karma. When
people harm each other, it is done out of the many and varied ways of ignoring
our responsibility to each other which is the fundamental principle of karma.
You were born crippled, or to a
poor family? Well, who but you is responsible for that?
The valid karmic question is: when I see you are born
crippled, what am I to do about that?
What I choose to do then is what actualizes my responsibility as my
ability to respond. The law of karma
presents each of us with the question of our own response ability in each
moment, not with the question of someone else’s blame for their condition.
It is also extremely
important to recognize with this kind of example, that the law of karma is not an all inclusive explanatory
principle of cause and effect in the universe.
Karma is being abused when it is used as a catch-all explanation of the
cause of events. The Buddha Dharma
teaches us that there are five general sources for the causes of events of
which karma is only one. The five are: (1)
Physical inorganic laws (utuniyaama); (2) Physical
organic laws (biijaniyaama); (3) Laws of karma (kammaniyaama);
(4) Laws of the mind (cittaniyaama); and (5) Laws of dharma
(dhammaniyaama). That a person is
born crippled to a poor family also has the other four streams of causation to
explain the events. To ignore these other four casual fields and to consider
only the field of karma as involved is simply an act of ignorance.
I remember reading about a Tibetan
Buddhist teacher's reflections on the Holocaust in Nazi Germany during World
War II: "What terrible karma all those Jews must have had. …" And
what awful things did the Tibetan people do to deserve the Chinese invasion of
1950 and its horrible aftermath? This kind of superstition, which blames the
victims and rationalizes their horrific fate, is something we should no longer
tolerate quietly.
It is not superstition, per se. It is inadequate knowledge
of karma. The superstition is found only
in the ignorance of someone who thinks they know what is real. This is the ignorance of false
conceptualizations (parikalpita). To recognize that the Tibetans’ previous
karma ripened into the fruit to
contribute to the Chinese invasion is not necessarily an instance of blaming
the victims or rationalizing their suffering, but can merely point out that
what goes around comes around. In this perspective, it is now the Chinese
themselves are sowing the karmic seeds of their own karmic fruits because of
their intolerance and oppression. Tenzin
Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, has publicly recognized that karma has
played its part in the current circumstances of Tibet and his conduct as the
current Dalai Lama has been made with this recognition specifically in mind and
therefore he has encouraged the modernization of the Tibetan political system
to correct, in part, the “bad” karma of the Tibetan system in the past.
Yes we should not quietly tolerate blaming the victim, but
karma does not do that. Karma eats the
blame for oneself without assigning it to others. Likewise, we should not be
loudly intolerant of mistaken attempts to understand karma. We should loudly
clarify the actual functioning of karma and not pretend that karma is
superstitious just because people speak about it ignorantly. When people misunderstood genetics and
believed that the "blood" was the transmitter of inherited traits,
was that “superstition” or just a limited hypothesis based on incomplete
information?
It is, I think it is safe to say, time for modern Buddhists
to outgrow it and to accept one's social responsibility and find ways to
address such injustices.
To accept one’s social responsibility is exactly the
teaching of karma. This does not mean to accept one’s “social position,” or to
slavishly accept the “duties” of one’s social caste or class, which are equally
abuses of karma. To accept one’s social responsibility in light of the law of
karma means to be responsible for, and to act responsibility in the context of,
the society that one lives in. So what
is there to outgrow except for one’s own erroneous ideas about karma? The law of karma is the direct path to
teaching the way to address such social injustices.
In the Kalama Sutta, sometimes called "the Buddhist
charter of free inquiry," the Buddha emphasized the importance of
intelligent, probing doubt.
Such labels like “
free inquiry” need to be scrutinized.
So-called
“free” inquiry can be as irresponsible as the so-called “free” market or “free”
sex.
A fair and honest market is much
better than a free market and or honest and responsible sexual relations are
much better than free sex.
Likewise,
fair and honest inquiry is preferred to a wantonly undisciplined but so-called free
inquiry. The
Kalama Sutta actually does not call for an unrestrained,
anything goes, type of free inquiry, but sets out the course of a fair and
honest inquiry.
Too often the Kalama
Sutta is used as another rationalization to justify ignoring the Buddha Dharma
and the teaching of karma and rebirth because it is misused in exactly the
opposite way that is taught within it.
He said that we should not believe in something until we
have established its truth for ourselves.
That’s not exactly what he
said. As with all Suttas and Sutras, the
teaching is given in a specific context according to the diagnosis of the specific
person or group seeking guidance. Here,
the Kalamas were people who received many wandering teachers and preachers who
praised their own teaching and disparaged the teachings of others. The Kalamas
wanted to know how to make sense of the alternatives and how to know which
teaching to follow. What the Buddha
taught is this.
“So in this case, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions,
by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement
through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative
is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are
unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by
the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm &
to suffering' — then you should abandon them.
This suggests that accepting karma and rebirth literally,
without questioning what they really mean, simply because they have been part
of the Buddhist tradition, may actually be unfaithful to the best of the
tradition.
In Buddha Dharma, nothing is to be “accepted literally” and all
language is to be taken for the meaning, not for the words. Accepting karma “literally” would mean
accepting a “self” literally, which is exactly the opposite of the Buddha
Dharma. But even if one were to take
karma literally, it would not justify any harmful behavior. Karma and rebirth are part of what is the
very best of the Buddhist tradition, and what would be unfaithful to Buddhism
is to not question what karma and rebirth really mean by thinking that they could
not be true in the context of a literalist physical interpretation of reality.
This does not mean disparaging or dismissing Buddhist
teachings about karma and rebirth.
This is important to emphasize, since denial, dismissal, or
disparagement are exactly the kinds of negative karma that arise by labeling
karma and rebirth as superstitions.
Rather, it highlights the need for contemporary Buddhism to
question those teachings.
It is also important to remember that the context for that
questioning is highly determinative of the path the questioning will take, and
whether that questioning has the hidden agenda of dismissing something that one
does not really understand or is really a questioning with integrity and an
open mind as one approaches the most profound questions about the physical nature
of the universe such as string theory, dark matter, etc.
Given what is now known about human psychology, including
the social construction of the self, how might we today approach these
teachings in a way that is consistent with our own sense of how the world
works?
Whose sense? Since Jung’s depth psychology has mostly been
denigrated as “mysticism” by the academic circles dependent on corporate
funding that avoids investigation of the mind and instead pays for brain
research, most of “what is now known about human psychology” it is actually not psychology at all but is
neurophysiology. Also we must ask, does
the phrase “our own sense of how the world works,” mean the conventional
conformist materialist sense of modern scientism or the real sense of science
that is open minded and non-materialist, non-literal, not strictly linear, and
not deluded about its own flawed ability to precisely calculate cause and
effect? Scientism is one sense of
viewing the world that Buddha Dharma says is among the superstitions of the
ways of outsiders.
Unless we can do so, their emancipatory power will for us
remain unrealized.
Yes, the liberating power of the teachings of karma and
rebirth will remain unrealized as long as these teachings are not integrated and
approached in a way that is accommodating.
But we don’t need a way that is predetermined to be consistent with our
own sense of how the world works if that sense is a closed system approach, We need a way of approach that has all the
open minded inquiry of a physicist who is free to question the scientific
authorities that tell us how the world works.
Einstein did not develop his theories of relativity by looking for an
answer that was consistent with his sense of how the world worked, and instead
he kept asking how the world worked, because his sense that what was then
taught about how the world worked was lacking.
Today, we need to take karma and rebirth as working hypotheses and ask
how do they work, in the same way that physical phenomenon are investigated
even though we don’t understand how they work.
Buddhist emphasis on impermanence reminds us that Hindu and
Buddhist doctrines about karma and rebirth have a history, that they
have evolved over time.
All history has a history, and all human descriptions of
reality have evolved over time. It is
important to remember that karma and rebirth or not just stories from Hindu and
Buddhist culture. Some variation on
karma and rebirth appears in every culture as a human archetype. Many
contemporary Western Buddhists rationalize writing off the teaching of karma
and rebirth by saying that they are antiquated artifacts of the Hindu worldview
and culture of Buddha’s time that are present in the teaching only because he
could not dispense with them, but for our time we can dispense with them. However, this is a false view of history.
Every people in every culture have some kind of story
recognizing karma and rebirth (e.g., rebirth, reincarnation, or resurrection). Karma and rebirth are archetypal truths that
we ignore, deny, or dismiss only to our own psychic harm and at our peril, lest
they become submerged merely to reassert themselves through the hidden
influences of archetypal eruptions. In
Buddhist terminology, our denial of karma and rebirth may appear to “mow the
lawn,” but the seeds (bija) remain to
sprout when we least expect it. Christianity has the karma teaching of Jesus in
“you reap what you sow.” Rebirth appears
as resurrection. The early Christians accepted karma and rebirth in ways more
akin to the Hindu worldview, but the first crusades of 10th century
by the Roman Church were against the Albegensians who were an example of
Christian communities who taught karma and rebirth. This teaching therefore had
to go underground and continued in such hidden traditions as the Rosecrucians
until people were no longer burned at the stake for such “heresy.” So it is not at all the case that karma and
rebirth are culturally specific or limited to Hindu or Buddhist doctrinal
history.
We should note here, the term “doctrines” should be taken
with grains of salt when used in a Buddhist context. Doctrine usually implies a
belief system. Are Newton’s laws of motion to be considered
doctrines to be believed in?
Technically, in the Buddha Dharma, karma and rebirth are not doctrines
to be taken as a belief system, but, like the laws of physics, are descriptions
to be taken as working hypotheses about the functioning of reality, a reality
that is fundamentally a manifestation of mind-only (cittamatra), that is, a psychic not physical.
Earlier Brahmanical teachings tended to understand karma
mechanically and ritualistically. To perform a sacrifice in the proper fashion
would invariably lead to the desired consequences. If those consequences were
not forthcoming, then either there had been an error in procedure or the causal
effects were delayed, perhaps until your next lifetime (hence implying
reincarnation). The Buddha's spiritual revolution transformed this ritualistic
approach to getting what you want out of life into a moral principle by
focusing on cetana,
"motivations, intentions."
Buddha’s investigation of karma was a spiritual revolution
every bit as ground breaking as Einstein’s scientific revolution and Jung’s
psychological revolution. As Einstein’s
theories of relativity radically (i.e., at the root) changed how we can view
physical reality, the Buddha’s radical views of no-self, impermanence, and the
causes of psychic imbalance (dukkha)
fundamentally changed how we can view the realities of karma and rebirth. As Einstein’s radical views transformed the
mechanistic approach of physics, so did Buddha’s radical views transform the
mechanistic approach to karma. However, Buddha’s focus on intention (cetana) was not actually an addition of,
or change to, a “moral” principle, it was a change to an amoraal psychological
principle. The focus on intention has nothing to do with morals in the
conventional sense and everything to do with how mind works through the
structure and function of consciousness culminating in self-consciousness that
becomes the claimant of intention.
The Dhammapada, for example, begins by emphasizing the preeminent importance
of our mental attitude:
Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind,
and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering
follows even as the cart's wheel follows the hoof of the ox.
Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind,
and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows
like a shadow that never departs.
Here, the Sanskrit word translated as “mind” is “manas.” While this passage is one of the earliest
examples of what came to be known in Buddha Dharma as the teaching of
“mind-only” (citta-matra), in this
case, using “mind” is a somewhat loose or free translation, I think the flavor
of manas is more accurately conveyed
by the terms “mentation” or “cognition.”
There is a subtle but important distinction between manas and mind (citta). Manas
is the mental activity of the mind as it is expressed as consciousness. “A” citta is a quantum (i.e., an elementary
mind-moment) of mental activity, and “the” citta
is the holistic field of that activity with a principle of indeterminacy as to
distinguishing a citta as either a
particle or wave. It is this
indeterminacy that causes the confusion about the existence of a “self” and the
mistaken illusion that there is a soul or self that moves from life to life in
rebirth.
I translate the opening verses thus:
1. Mentation is the precursor of
things; mentation is the ringleader; mentation is the producer. If mentation is
corrupted, just so the voice, just so the will, Thereupon unease is enabled,
just as the wheel follows the transporter’s foot.
2. Mentation is the precursor of
things; mentation is the ringleader; mentation is the producer. If mentation is clear, just so the voice,
just so the will, Thereupon ease is enabled, just as the shadow follows and
does not depart.
(Note: unease = dukkha; ease = sukha. Also, the reference to
a cart’s wheel following the transporter’s foot and apply to both a cart being
pulled by an ox, another animal, or even a person.)
This is a subtle nuance because it is mentation that is “the
ringleader” directing the circus (or gang) of sensory consciousnesses and organizing
our conscious views of reality (dharma,
dhamma) and of things (dharmas, dhammas). (Dharma is loosly translated by Loy as “experiences.”) It is mentation as the “producer” that is the specific
source for forming the intentions that function as karma. This distinction between mentation (manas) and mind (citta) also becomes important in the subsequent historical
development of the Buddhist descriptions of consciousness as being eight-fold,
with manas as the 7th
consciousness and manovijnana as the
6th consciousness.
To understand the Buddha's innovation, it is helpful to
distinguish a moral act into three aspects: the results that I
seek; the moral rule or regulation I am following (for example, a
Buddhist precept or Christian commandment, and this also includes ritualistic
procedures); and my mental attitude or motivation when I do something.
Although these aspects cannot be separated from each other, we can emphasize
one more than the others—in fact, that is what we usually do. Not
coincidentally, contemporary moral philosophy also has three main types of
theories. Utilitarian theories focus on consequences, deontological theories
focus on general principles such as the Ten Commandments, and virtue theories
focus on one's character and motivations.
This view of karma as a “moral act” and using the framework
of contemporary Western moral philosophy is a greater cause of confusion than
clarity. It is Western philosophy that
must change to accommodate karma, not karma that must change to accommodate
Western philosophical moral categories. The
difficulty that Western philosophers, including Buddhist academics and
university Buddhologists, have with karma is that it is essentially an amoral
circular peg being crammed into a moral square hole.
To understand Buddha’s innovation we need to appreciate that
the consideration of the results (fruits, effects) of actions (karma) is a
teaching of responsibility, not morality. Next we need to distinguish that
precepts are not moral rules or regulations but are simply lists of the major
obstacles to the liberation of personal and social peace and happiness and of
the actions to be renounced if that liberation is the result that is aimed at.
And third, we need to be aware that it is the volitional intention of our
motivation that defines our identity, and it is our identity that determines
our karma.
Actually, holding onto the precepts as rules or regulations
is named as one of the three main knots or ties preventing the effective
practice of disciples (sravakas). For
example, the Lankavatara Sutra says the
three knots preventing disciples from advancing to nirvana are “views of the
body, doubts, and holding onto the precepts.”
THE SANSKRIT TERM karma (kamma in Pali)
literally means "action," which suggests the basic point that our
actions have consequences—more precisely, that our morally relevant actions
have morally relevant consequences that extend beyond their immediate effects.
Again, there is no need to insert the concept of “morality”
into the analysis of karmic-action any more than there is the need to insert
morality into the analysis of the laws of motion. Simply stating “our actions have
consequences” is sufficient as the premise to begin the analysis. Any idea or
notion of morality comes only as an after thought of the erroneous
conceptualizations in the self-deluded attempt to construct a moral edifice
that reinforces and justifies the self-image.
It may seem strange that I am harping on the morality issue.
To be clear, when I say that karma and rebirth are amoral laws of nature, I am
not advocating a kind of immorality or non-consequential system. It is just that the concept of morality
fundamentally has nothing to do with validating or verifying the consequential
system that is karma.
The actual “morality” of karma is the morality that
transcends the dualism of morality and immorality; that is why I call it an
amoral system. The problem is that karma, as an activity of suchness, partakes
of the natural polarizations such as “light” and “dark,” but karma does not
arise from the human polarizations such as “good” and “bad” or “right” and
“wrong.” That is why in Zen, the way to
personally verify the truth is presented by such koans as the Sixth Ancestor’s
“Don’t think good; don’t think evil. At that moment what is your original
face?” Before we understand or realize
the meaning of karma, we think dualistically in terms of reified and
objectified moralistic goods and evils.
When we realize the meaning of karma, we aren’t blind to the working of
karma and we don’t escape the function of karma any more than we escape the
function of gravity, but we are also no longer enchanted and deluded by our
previously held false conceptions of good and evil.
In most popular understanding, the law of karma and rebirth
is a way to get a handle on how the world will treat us in the future, which
also—more immediately—implies that we must accept our own causal responsibility
for whatever is happening to us now, as a consequence of what we must have done
earlier. This overlooks the revolutionary significance of the Buddha's
reinterpretation.
The popular pre-Buddhist or non-Buddhist (Eastern or
Western) understanding does overlook the truly revolutionary significance of
the Buddha’s discovery. However, that does not mean that there is no value to
be found in that view. Indeed, the view
of karma as a context for accepting our current circumstances is one of the
primary practices of Buddhism and a designated primary entrance to the
Mahayana. Bodhidharma’s Outline For Discerning
the Mahayana and
Entering the Way By Four Practices and Contemplation distinguishes two ways of entering:“entering by principle” and “entering
by four practices.” The first of the four is the practice of
retribution for wrongs.
“The practice of retribution for
wrongs” designates a person who is practicing cultivating the Way. If at the
time of receiving suffering, we face ourselves and recall the words, “I’ve gone
through past innumerable aeons (kalpas) abandoning the root and
following the tips, existing in the various currents and waves, hating the many
arising wrongs, and disregarding harms without limit. Now, although
I'm without offenses, indeed my former misfortunes have ripened as the fruit of
evil karma, and neither heavenly beings (devas) nor humans are actually
able to see where they are given out. With a willing mind I willingly
receive it, all without complaint of wrongs.”
A Sutra says, “On running into suffering do not grieve,"
Because, how can you use it? Because consciousness transcends it.
At the time this is born in the mind you take part in agreement with principle.
In their essence, wrongs are progress in the Way. Therefore I articulate the
words, "the practice of retribution for wrongs”
The problem arising with this practice is in the failure of
the popular understanding to understand the profound meaning of acceptance.
Acceptance does not mean, doing nothing or acting without the ability to
respond. The practice of acceptance means (1) to stop fighting against what is happening
by using denials or claims that one does not “deserve” this, (2) to accept what
is actually happening as what is happening, and then (3) to deal with it
directly. This practice means to stop
wasting your time whining and complaining about what is happening to you,
because that prevents finding the way to take part in the suchness of it and
then act accordingly. If the idea of
acceptance is used this way to enhance responsibility, then it is practice.
However, if the idea of acceptance is misused to reinforce a feeling of
helplessness, then that is not practice.
Karma is better understood as the key to spiritual
development: how our life situation can be transformed by transforming the
motivations of our actions right now.
When we add the Buddhist teaching about not-self—in
contemporary terms, that one's sense of self is a mental construct—we can see
that karma is not something the self has; rather, karma is what the
sense of self is, and what the
sense of self is changes according to one's conscious choices.
In one sense this
is a better understanding than a wrong understanding, in another sense it is
just the next understanding after the previous understanding done
correctly. This is the second of
Bodhidharma’s practices of moving forward with the ability to respond to our
life situation after we have accepted that our past karma has defined us up to
this moment.
Second, is that which is "the
practice of according with conditioned causes." The multitude
of beings are without self and are unified with the karma of the conditioned
causes that turn them.
We have the freedom
to continuously redefine ourselves by this kind of transformation of the
motivations of our actions in the present.
I (re)construct myself by what I intentionally do, because
my sense of self is a precipitate of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and
acting. Just as my body is composed of the food I have eaten, so my character
is composed of conscious choices: "I" am constructed by my
consistent, repeated mental attitudes.
Within the realm of our perception of conditioned causes, the
self is defined and constructed by identifying this as “my intention” and that
as “not my intention.” The precipitate of self is the ego-complex that is the
pattern of polarized identifications. “I
like this, I don’t like that,” “this is good, that is bad,” etc., are the
polarizations of the opposites, and the coherence of these polarizations create
the complex of associations we call “I, me, mine.” The patterns of complex associations, the
habitual mental attitudes expressing those associations, and the repeated
conscious choices manifesting those attitudes all follow one another in
circular succession to reinforce the apparent solidity of the notion, feeling,
and imagination of a self, a separate entity, and an I.
People are "punished" or "rewarded" not
for what they have done but for what they have become, and what we
intentionally do is what makes us what we are.
There is no actual moral judgment of “punishment” or
“reward” in karma. This is an example of
the anthropomorphism projected onto karma.
Reward and punishment only arise from how the self attempts to
incorporate what happens into the ego-complex as part of the narrative story that
aggrandizes “I, me, mine.” The ideas of “I’m being rewarded” or “I’m being
punished” are equally stories made up to reinforce the deluded idea of the
self. People are not punished or
rewarded for what they have done, and in terms of karma, neither are people
rewarded or punished for what they have become, except that the thought of
punishment or reward makes it so.
Defining our intention is the mental act (karma) of defining our
responsibility in relation to things and others. But what we do does not make us what we are,
it only makes what we believe we are. What have we ever become? We are the coming of being itself, the coming
of thusness, and that is never a stable or static thing that we “have
become.” The system of karma is the
description of the mental actions and effects arising from how we make believe
that we are something, have become something.
An anonymous verse expresses this well:
Sow a thought and reap a deed
Sow a deed and reap a habit
Sow a habit and reap a character
Sow a character and reap a destiny
What kind of thoughts do we need to sow? Buddhism traces
back our dukkha, "dissatisfaction," to the three
unwholesome roots of evil: greed, ill will, and delusion. These problematic
motivations need to be transformed into their positive counterparts:
generosity, lovingkindness, and the wisdom that realizes our interdependence
with others.
This is an example of the confusion caused by the
misperception of the bifurcated structure of consciousness overlying its moral
system on top of nature. Positive and
negative are useful polarized terms for working with the natural phenomenon of
polarized electricity. However, our
misperception of mistaken conceptualizations (vikalpa) then overlays this frame of naturally occurring positive
and negative to label human conduct as positive and negative in a moralistic
sense. This idea of transforming
negative motivations into their positive counterparts reveals the fundamental
mistake. Where we would never suggest
that it is even possible to have an electric field or current without both positive
and negative poles, we creatively imagine a whole fantasy system of a human
world in which we could have only positive motivations without their negative
counterparts.
This does not mean that transformation is impossible, or
that generosity, compassion, and wisdom
are unattainable, only that they are not the kind of transformations within the
dualistic field of consciousness that simply turn a negative into a
positive. This is as difficult to
explain in a few words as explaining higher math, physics, genetics,
meteorology, etc. are to a person with only an elementary school education. Much of what is in the Sutras and Suttas
describing how the Buddha taught karma and rebirth is the most elementary
teaching given to people who were firmly attached to the notion of a self or
soul. When greed, ill-will, and delusion
are transformed they become the Bodhisattvas Samantrabhadra, Avalokitesvara,
and Manjushri. The negatives are not simply extinguished and replaced by
positives. The three negative poisons
are exactly themselves in their nature the three positive Bodhisattvas. They
were perceived as objectified negative poisons exactly because we could not see
their natures since we were blinded by our polarized dualist views that turn
everything in to either a positive, negative, or neutral.
A good example in the Pali Canon of where Buddha did teach
karma is found in the
The Sutta of the Dog-duty Ascetic (Kukkuravatika Sutta). Karma is often taught in terms of good,
beneficial, or wholesome (kusala)
karma and bad, unbeneficial, or unwholesome (akusala) karma. This framing
of karma falls into the confusion of equating the positive with the good and
the negative with the bad. In the this
Sutta, the Buddha teaches karma in terms of bright and dark, not good or bad.
"Punna, there are four kinds of kamma proclaimed by
me after realization myself with direct knowledge. What are the four? There is
dark kamma with dark ripening, there is bright kamma with bright ripening,
there is dark-and-bright kamma with dark-and-bright ripening, and there is
kamma that is not dark and not bright with neither-dark-nor-bright ripening
that conduces to the exhaustion of kamma.”
Here
there is no moralizing. Dark karma has
dark ripening, bright karma has bright ripening, mixed dark-and-bright karma
has mixed dark-and-bright ripening, and neither-dark-nor-bright karma has
neither-dark-nor-bright ripening that leads to the exhaustion of karma. Thus, the popular teaching to put aside
unwholesome karmas with “problematic
motivation” and to transform one’s motivations “into their positive
counterparts” is an example of the “teaching of humans and heavenly beings” for
better conditions in this life and the next. The teaching of positive
intentions encourages the sowing of bright actions for the result of bright
ripening; it is not the teaching for the non-sowing of karma and the exhaustion
of karmic ripening. The karma that is
the karma of liberation is the “karma that is not dark and not bright.” Zen doesn’t use the didactic language of the
Sutras but points at this directly by saying, “Don’t think good; don’t think
evil. At that moment what is your original face?” Only when we see our original face, can we
understand in a practical and living way the Buddha’s meaning of “karma that is
not dark and not bright.”
The third and fourth practices for entering the Way listed
by Bodhidharma are “the practice of nothing to seek” and “the practice of
corresponding to Dharma.” The practice of nothing to seek is another way
of describing the karma “that is not dark and not bright.” When it is said that karma is based on
intention, that intention is based on the constructed identity that is built up
by dividing the world into dualistic categories of bright and dark, good and
bad, well intentioned and ill intentioned, etc.
When we have an intention, we are seeking something. Our intent is
identified by the something that we are seeking as it relates to our self-image
of having volitional actions, i.e., karma. We say, “I meant to do that.” or “I
didn’t mean to do that.” as a way of identifying or dis-identifying with our
actions. What we are seeking through any
particular action may be more or less identifiable because it will be more or
less conscious or unconscious. However, the unconscious aspects of our
intentions are just as much a part of our karma as the conscious intentions,
because the action is still expressing the characteristic of seeking something
even when what we are seeking is something we are hiding from ourselves.
hen we have integrated the first two practices of
“retribution for wrongs” by acknowledging the functioning of karma, and
“according with conditioned causes” acknowledging that our response to events
defines our karma, we are then in a position to advance to the knowledge that
our intention, regardless of whether it is dark or bright, will only perpetuate
karma. While each of us may seek to have only bright karma with only bright
ripening, this is still being bound to the wheel of karma and its ripening. It
is at this stage that we can appreciate what the Buddha meant by “karma that is
not dark and not bright.” Action without intention that is neither bright nor
dark (and not merely action with unconscious intention of which we are unaware
of the dark or bright aspect to the intention) is what is meant by the practice
of having nothing to seek.
Such an understanding of karma does not necessarily involve
another life after physical death.
This is why the Kalama
Sutta allows for understanding karma in the present life without believing
in another life. Buddha taught rebirth
based on karma, but did not teach that rebirth had to be believed as a dogma in
order for the teaching of karma to be understood. The Buddha said that karma works either way
and covers both bases, since for those who don’t believe in rebirth in a
subsequent physical life and still see that within this life bright karma has
bright ripening.
It is important to question the assumptions here, because to
think about what is before physical birth and after physical death requires a
frame of reference that is already resting on a materialistic view of the universe
as being “physical.” People often say
that we have no proof of another life after this one, but in fact this life is
as much proof of life after the previous one as it is proof that we only have
one life. We have this life, and so,
based on this life, we can not logically assert there is not another life after
this life, because we cannot determine there was no precious life before this
one either. This present life is at
least as much a proof of a past and future life as it is proof of no such lives.
As Spinoza expressed it, happiness is not the reward for
virtue; happiness is virtue itself.
Why complicate happiness with the concepts of virtue and
morality? Happiness is not a reward for
virtue, and neither is happiness virtue itself.
Happiness is happiness. Happiness is the bright ripening of its
precursor bright actions. There is no need to clothe happiness in the dualistic
language of virtue. In other words, is
there a person who does not have direct knowledge of their own of how happiness
feels? Everyone knows what happiness is and how it feels without having to label
it “good.” It is only our own craving desire and
discursive knowledge that hinder us from simply being in touch with happiness as
such, without having to add labels such as “virtue” to it. If we have forgotten what happiness is, then
the teaching of karma tells us that we can act brightly to recover the bright
ripening of happiness.
We are punished not for our "sins" but by
them.
With karma we are not “punished” at all, neither
for our “sins” nor
by them.
Of course the use
of the term “sins” in quotes reminds us that in Buddhism the doing of wrong is
not a transgression against some kind of divine law, and sin is just the
category for deeds that we call misdeeds because they ripen in a way that
hurts, either ourselves or others.
To
say we are punished by our sins just means that we have hurt ourselves by our
actions.
Karma says simply, if you don’t
want to keep getting burned, then stop putting your hand in the flame.
To become a different kind of person is to experience the
world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when
we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.
Insofar as we are actually not separate from the world, our ways of acting in
it tend to involve feedback systems that incorporate other people. People not
only notice what we do; they notice why we do it. I may fool people sometimes,
yet over time, as the intentions behind my deeds become obvious, my character
becomes revealed. The more I am motivated by greed, ill will, and delusion, the
more I must manipulate the world to get what I want, and consequently the more
alienated I feel and the more alienated others feel when they see they have been
manipulated. This mutual distrust encourages both sides to manipulate more. On
the other side, the more my actions are motivated by generosity,
lovingkindness, and the wisdom of interdependence, the more I can relax and
open up to the world. The more I feel part of the world and genuinely connected
with others, the less I will be inclined to use others, and consequently the
more inclined they will be to trust and open up to me. In such ways,
transforming my own motivations not only transforms my own life; it also
affects those around me, since what I am is not separate from what they are.
This is the excellent teaching of karma at the elementary
level for beings who believe in a self and who don’t routinely believe that
their own actions affect how they view their world and circumstances. Learning that trust is dependent on the
presence or lack of the sense of nonseparation with others and the world is a
very important step in learning about how karma works and ripens.
This more naturalistic understanding of karma does not mean
we must necessarily exclude other, perhaps more mysterious possibilities
regarding the consequences of our motivations for the world we live in.
This more elementary understanding of karma is not exactly
more naturalistic, except in the sense that it is based on a socially
consensual description of reality that is framed in terms of a physical self
and environment as being the natural way of seeing reality. It is like the naturalistic understanding of
genetics as being determined by blood that does not mean we must necessarily understand
how the genome actually works. It is like the naturalistic understanding of a
car by knowing how to turn it on with the key, without necessarily knowing how
the engine is constructed or works.
If we want to know how karma actually works, then like
knowing how genes actually work or how the weather actually works, it is
necessary to study in depth the mysterious aspects and features of the
continuity regarding the ripening of actions. Not everyone wants to understand
at the profound level, which is why not everyone becomes a physicist or
meteorologist. But when we hear secular modernists denigrate karma and rebirth
simply as antiquated superstitions or supernatural beliefs and also advocating
for naturalizing Buddhism by excluding them, then it is like a person denying
global warning because they don’t understand the science. If by naturalizing
Buddhism we mean transplanting Buddha Dharma to our shores to become
established as a native species, then I’m all for that. But if by naturalizing Buddhism we mean to
sanitize it by labeling what we
don’t understand as supernatural causes,
then that itself is a form of superstitious ignorance of the laws of nature
that I object to.
What is clear, however, is that karma as "how to
transform my life situation by transforming my motivations right now" is
not a fatalistic doctrine. Quite the contrary: it is difficult to imagine a
more empowering spiritual teaching. We are not enjoined to accept and endure
the problematic circumstances of our lives. Rather, we are encouraged to
improve our spiritual lives and worldly situation by addressing those
circumstances with generosity, lovingkindness, and nondual wisdom.
This is the wonderfully and marvelously empowering aspect of
karma that emphasizes our own responsibility in life, which exactly is our own
ability to respond to the conditions of life. To ascribe a fatalistic doctrine to karma only
shows a complete misunderstanding of karma or a knowing abuse.
The truly mysterious aspect, regarding the awareness of the consequences
of our motivations and their transformations, becomes apparent when we have
practiced nothing to seek by the karma that is not dark and not bight and come
to the fourth practice of corresponding to Dharma. As Bodhidharma says, “The Dharma is the
activity of seeing the principle of the purity of the nature. By this
principle the multitude of characteristics are thus empty, without being dyed,
without attachment, without this, and without that.” To the mental activity that functions
dualistically and sees everything as dark or bright with positive or negative
motivations, corresponding to this Dharma is truly mysterious. Because our
karma, regardless of whether it is dark or bright or mixed, is not exhausted
all at once, we must continue to practice even if we have had a moment of kensho to see the nature. Bodhidharma concludes his Outline for
Entering the Way by saying, “For eliminating delusions, cultivate and practice
the Six Paramitas, yet nothing is practiced. This is doing ‘the practice
of corresponding to Dharma’."
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