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ISSN 1076-9005 Volume 11, 2004
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
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.
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
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
