Milinda’s Questions

There’s an “Interfaith Blog Event” going on at 3 different blogs. The topic is karma, and it’s being written about simultaneously by Mike at Unknowing Mind, Jon Pennington at Jesusfollower’s Journal, and Sojourner at A Pagan Sojourn. Mike writes from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective; the orientation of the other two writers is described by the titles of their respective blogs. (BTW, the link came from The Daily Scribe via Green Clouds. Thanks, everybody.)

I’m going to focus my remarks here on Mike’s piece. Being a contentious sort of guy, I’m going to concentrate on points where I have reservations or disagreements; and, being a lazy sort of guy, I’m mostly going to rely on quotations from various sources rather than formulate my own positions. Mike says,

What is Buddhist karma? It is often summarized as “This is, because that is; this is not, because that is not.”

This is indeed a central formulation of Buddhist doctrine. But what should we call the doctrine so formulated? Here’s one contemporary Japanese Buddhist scholar:

It is generally accepted that the principle of the Interdependence (paticcasamuppada in Pali, pratityasamutpada in Sanskrit) is expressed by the Four-clauses Formula:
. . .
When this is, that is;
This arising, that arises;

When this is not, that is not;
This ceasing, that ceases.

Isshi Yamada, “Premises and Implications of Interdependence”
in Buddhist Studies in Honour of Walpola Rahula

The eminent Sri Lankan scholar David Kalupahana agrees:

The second aspect of the Buddha’s discovery [is] the pattern according to which change takes place in things (dhamma). The change in things is not haphazard or accidental. It takes place according to a certain pattern, and this pattern of things, this orderliness of things, is said to be constant. It is a cosmic truth eternally valid . . . This pattern has been variously described as ‘conditionality’ (idappaccayata) and as ‘causality’(paticcasamuppada). Thus, according to the Buddha’s philosophy, there are no accidental occurrences; everything in the world is causally conditioned or produced (paticcasamuppannam).
. . .
The general Buddhist formula of causality is often stated in the following manner:
. . .
When this is present, that comes to be;
from the arising of this, that arises,
When this is absent, that does not come to be;
on the cessation of this, that ceases.

Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism,pp. 89-90

So how does karma get into the picture? Here’s Kalupahana again:

The Buddha gave different causal explanations for different problems. . . . While human behavior is itself produced by causes, it is followed by the correlated consequences. This correlation between action (kamma) and consequence (phala) constitutes the doctrine of kamma in Buddhism. An examination of some of the texts that deal with the problem of moral behavior and responsibility reveals that it is generally founded on the doctrine of rebirth. This is evident from the Cula-kammavibhanga-sutta, which maintains that a person who kills living creatures or has no compassion for them will, because of that behavior, be reborn in an evil state.

ibid., p. 128

To my very limited knowledge, the most extensive discussion of the relationship between the general Buddhist doctrine of causality and the more specific doctrine of karma is in Bruce Reichenbach’s The Law of Karma: A Philosophical Study:

[It] might seem that the law of karma is nothing other than the law of universal causation. . . .

Clearly the two laws are related, though the precise nature of their relation is frequently left unclarified. The law of karma is variously described by different authors as identical with, parallel to, or an application of the law of universal causation.

The relationship is not strict identity.

• For one thing, the law of karma is not concerned with consequences in general, but with consequences which recoil upon the doer of the action, both in the current and in subsequent lives.
• Secondly, the consequences envisioned by the law of karma encompass more (as well as less) than the observed natural or physical results which follow upon the performance of an action. They especially concern its effects on the dispositions, character, passions and desires of the agent, or the creation of invisible qualities of merit and demerit which adhere to the agent. As such, the proponent of the doctrine will be as much, if not more, concerned with the invisible as well as the visible effects of a human action.
• Thirdly the law of karma is usually held to apply specifically to the moral sphere. Since the central causal feature of the law of karma is moral, it is not concerned with the general relation between actions and their consequences, but rather with the moral quality of the actions and their consequences, such as pain or pleasure and good or bad experiences for the doer of the act.

At the same time, the law of karma applies to more than moral causation. This, as we shall see . . . is particularly true in Buddhism, where it is appealed to in order to explain the unity and continuity of the individual.

pp. 1-2

A few couple of chapters later, Reichenbach repeats his list of ways in which karma is a more specific doctrine than causation, and adds a few others:

• [W]hereas according to the law of universal causation the production of effects does not depend on the intentions of the agent (except as they are causally related to actions) but on his action, the karmic relation depends upon both.
• [A]ccording to the law of karma like causes produce like effects. Right actions produce good consequences, wrong actions produce bad consequences. However, it is not obvious that like producing like is a characteristic of all causation.
• [T]he law of causation applies to two events or things that are temporally conjoined, whereas the law of karma states that the effects are manifested at some time in the distant future, either in the next life or in more temporally remote lives. Thus, the immediacy of the temporal relation found in the causal law is absent in the law of karma.

In short, there is good reason to think that, though the law of karma is a causal law, it is not identical with the law of universal causation.

pp. 24-5

He goes on:

But if we conclude that the law of karma is an application of the law of universal causation to moral causation, how can we account for the differences between them? Is any kind of reconciliation possible?

One possibility is to make a distinction between two kinds of effects, which we might term phalas and samskaras. Phalas include all the immediate effects, visible and invisible, which actions produce or bring about. They are often referred to as the results or fruits of an action. Samskaras are the invisible dispositions or tendencies to act, think, experience, or interpret experiences in ways which are conducive to one’s happiness, or unhappiness, produced in the agent as a result of the action. They constitute, in effect, special modifications of the agent.

Using this distinction, one can argue that the laws are consistent. The law of universal causation speaks to the production of phalas: every act produces phalas (results) in the world. The law of karma, however, speaks to the production of samskaras: every karmic act produces samskaras in the agent. The two laws are related in that the law of karma is the application of the law of universal causation, which deals in general with the relation between the act and its effects, to a specific agent of certain kinds of actions. It concerns the disposition- or samskara-producing aspect of disposition-producing actions. The law of karma, then, is the more limited law.

To sum up the argument so far in simpler terms: There’s a simplistic popular idea of what karma is about; let’s call it the Earl Version. It can be captured in the aphorisms “What goes around comes around” and “You reap what you sow.” Many Buddhists object to this understanding of karma, and claim that the doctrine should actually be understood in another way. At the moment I can’t think of a pithy slogan to neatly sum this version up, but let’s call
it the Habit Formation Version. Mike presents the Habit Formation Version of karma very eloquently in his post:

[I]f you’re raised in a household in which your dad responds in open anger to many things, you are likely to develop the same trait. Or if you learn that feigned kindness gets you what you want, you’ll repeat that behavior; and the more you repeat it, the more deeply a feigned kindness response will be embedded in your psyche. In psychological terms, you could say you learned this behavior through Skinner’s operant conditioning. In Buddhist terms, you’ve accrued negative karma.
. . .
The process of karma has been shown to exist by the great psychologists of our day. Freud showed us how our experiences in childhood directly affect our thoughts, actions, and speech in adulthood. Jung showed us how archetypes function in our unconscious to predispose us to certain responses. Skinner and Pavlov gave us the means by which we actually learn many of our responses via operant and classical conditioning, respectively. Even our everyday common sense tells us that a karmic process operates in our lives. How many times have you thought, “Oh, that runs in our family!”

The Habit Formation Version of karma described so well here is precisely what Reichenbach means by “the proposal restrict karmic efficacy to the production of samskaras.” That version is a correct understanding of the doctrine as far as it goes, and its proponents are justified in objecting to the oversimplifications of the Earl Version. The problem is, though, that the Habit Formation Version doesn’t go far enough; and the more one learns about the traditional Buddhist teachings on karma, the more one discovers that the traditional doctrine combines both the Habit Formation Version and something very much like the Earl Version. It’s the exact nature of that combination that makes karma such a puzzling doctrine.

Here’s Reichenbach again:

Unhappily, though, promising as it is, this resolution is not without difficulties.
1. First, if only samskaras have relevance, what is important in karmic considerations is what forms dispositions. Future dispositions or tendencies arise not from the results of the act, but from the dispositions or intentions out of which we acted. If so, what matter are the attitudes, desires, passions, dispositions, and general character with which we perform the action and not the actions per se and their general results. That is, the karma produced by an action is determined largely by the intentions, dispositions, desires, character and moral virtue of the agent.
. . .
[S]uch an emphasis on originating dispositions and intentions as determinative of moral quality implies that it matters little what we do. Consequently, with respect to our accumulation of karma it would mean we could do the most despicable acts, so long as our attitude and dispositions were correct. Even though consequences might be partially determinative of the morality of an act, they can be irrelevant or minimally relevant to karmic considerations. This begins to drive a wedge between the law of karma and the moral law it is sworn to uphold.

Further, it is inconsistent with the fourfold classification of karma in terms of consequences . . . found in both Hinduism and Buddhism. For example, acts which have good intentions but which also have bad consequences, intentional, are classified not as white karma (which would be the case if only the intention mattered) but as black and white karma.

. . .

2. A second objection to the restriction of karmic efficacy to samskaras is that this denial of karmic efficacy to phalas in general separates two things which are functionally inseperable in the doctrine of karma, namely the visible or physical and the invisible and moral. It is precisely the strength of the doctrine of karma that it links the pain and pleasure that we experience with cosmic or environmental conditions, and these conditions in turn with the moral quality of actions performed. But this distinction between phalas and samskaras severs that connection.

Of the two objections presented here, the second seems to me the more compelling, since it’s always open to the defender of the karma doctrine to “bite the bullet” on the first one. But Reichenbach is, IMHO, right on the money in the sentence I’ve highlighted in bold, and he is making exactly the same point I was making when I said that the traditional doctrine of karma combines the two Versions we formulated above.

Reichenbach elaborates on the point as follows:

There are, in effect, two stories, the subjective and the objective. According to the first, karma works through us, creating dispositions and tendencies, merit and demerit, which in turn affect our desires, passions, and perspective on the world. So seen, karma disposes us to interpret our experiences and to act in ways which bring up pain and pleasure. Here the appeal to samskaras (or something similar) provides a reasonable basis for constructing a naturalistic acount of the causal operations of karma. According to the second, our karmic acts affect the instruments of our experiences, from our own bodies to the world around us. They help determine, among other things, the kinds of bodies with which we are reborn, our social status, and how other persons and things in the environment act on us. These instruments mediate properly determined karma to us, so that one can say that we deserve what happens to us. Here the samskaric account by itself is inadequate. Since both accounts are part of the tradition, an explanation of how karma affects objective as well as subjective conditions is necessary.

p. 31

A popular way of attempting to explain how the two aspects of karma work together is the one Mike uses here:

[The Buddha] observed that when one kills, one’s underlying mental state is such that one’s suffering increases, in addition to the suffering clearly inflicted on the killed being. Related to this, he also observed that when killing became abhorrent to a person, that person’s underlying mental state was one that reflected true inner happiness, peace, contentment, and love. Additionally, not only did this reduce the suffering of other beings (since they were not killed), it also increased others’ happiness because of the manner in which our non-killing person now interacted with those beings around him, in his loving, peaceful state.

True, and well said, but as I read it that still doesn’t fully include the objective, phala-producing aspect of the traditional doctrine of karma.
Religion and Philosophy