Anyone who’s been tuning in here during the past week hoping for a continuation of the Great Karma Debate has been sorely disappointed, for which I apologize. For one thing, I’ve been busy; I suppose I can now officially add “freelance programmer” to my list of occupations, having had a bid on a project accepted. I’ve been coding away. But also, a lot if the issues at stake in the discussion Mike and I are having are extremely complex, and it’s going to take me a while longer to sort them out. In the interests of keeping the conversation going, though, I want to respond somehow. Leaving the theoretical issues aside, I want to address an example Mike raises, because it provides an excellent concrete case to think about.
Mike says:
But more importantly, accrued karma affects how I view the world, and affects my perception of the world. My karma does NOT cause a hurricane to come and destroy my house. That happens due to the causes of various weather patterns, water temperatures, etc. My karma does affect my automatic response to such a disaster. But since my karma does not cause such destructive environmental effects, the samskaric account IS adequate.
I find the example a very useful one, in part because I had a discussion with on this issue with a Burmese Buddhist monk and several fellow meditators in the wake of the Christmas 2004 tsunami. It seems to me that there are three possible view:
(1)The bad karma of the people living in the area caused the earthquake and the tsunami that killed them.
(2)The tsunami came about through natural material causes, but it was the bad karma of the people in the region that caused them to be in that location in that time, so that they were killed or suffered harm.
(3)Neither the occurrence of the tsunami, nor the external circumstances of the people, has anything to do with karma. Karma is solely concerned with how the victims reacted to the incident. For example, faced with even the most terrifying forms of impending destruction, some individuals are going to be able to die more at peace with themselves and with the world than others. That’s karma.
The monk, Mike and myself agree that (1) has nothing to do with the genuine Buddhist notion of karma. The issue is between (2) and (3). (3) is the version that’s probably most congenial to most scientifically-minded folks; it seems to me to be what Mike is saying, and it is the only doctrine of karma that I personally can accept.
The monk was fairly insistent, though, that (2) is the “correct” Buddhist understanding of karma. In particular, he suggested that the dependency of the people in the area on fishing as a mode of livelihood might be responsible for the bad karmic effects.
Of course, that doesn’t prove that the view is “correct”, only that is part of the tradition. And that’s all I wish to insist upon, against what I perceive as a tendency to gloss over this aspect of the traditional idea of karma in order to make it more palatable to contemporary Westerners.
Religion and Philosophy
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