Samsāra

In our progress through the Early Buddhism component of the Buddhist Studies curriculum we have come to the inevitable encounter with the complex of ideas that form a cluster around the central conception of action-result (P. kamma-vipaka). In the weeks to come we will be examining various concepts drawn from the suttas of the Pali canon, and discussing them in light of later developments in Buddhistic thinking, the Zen tradition in particular, and our personal experience. This is the first in a series of postings about karma, renewed existence, and samsāra.

The vision of samsāra—the repeated renewal of personal existence as shaped by the results of past and present acts—has a simple underlying message, to wit, life does not end when you die. On the contrary, it goes on and on, endlessly, unless you abandon life altogether. Buddhist tradition has invested heavily in a literary tradition intended to convince us that for eons in the past we have been wandering among the realms of existence and will continue to do so for an unimaginable span of time to come, unless we adopt the Buddha’s eight-point program for putting an end to pain, not just in this body but in all possible future bodies. The overarching task is to get out of life and stay out, and the alternative is virtually endless dukkha.

It is at least arguable that, if you can manage to believe in a cosmology that offers the prospect of indefinitely long-term suffering, you have a powerful motive for striving to extricate yourself from the conditions that condemn you to an unpleasant eternity. If you can’t adopt that particular conceptual scheme, then the matter of whether or not you achieve awakening is likely to seem much less pressing, for we will all die sooner or later, and then our troubles will be over.

Most Western students of Buddhism and Zen are inclined to accept karma and samsāra as part of the package without giving them much thought. As it is typically presented—“what goes around comes around”—karma seems little more than an exotic variant of the idea of cause-and-effect. Thinking in causal terms is both commonplace and necessary. Kant believed that causal reasoning was part of human nature, and its evolutionary advantages are obvious. Upon reflection, however, the conceptual schema of karma, rebirth, and samsāra turns out to be very much more complex, and to require very much more in the way of support, than the physics of “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

As we shall see, belief in karma and renewed existence is rather more difficult than it might appear to be at first glance. Can the notions of morally-charged action and conditionally-renewed existence do the heavy lifting required to produce a plausible continuity of the non-self across many lifetimes? Do we, fascinated by and absorbed in the world as we are, really need or want to look beyond it?