Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Karma & Rebirth: A Contemporary Call to Orthodoxy

Dhamma without Rebirth?
By Ven. Badulle Sangarathana

In line with the present-day stress on the need for religious teachings to be personally relevant and directly verifiable, in certain circles the time-honored doctrine of rebirth has come up for severe re-examination. Although only a few contemporary Buddhist thinkers still go so far as to suggest that this doctrine be scrapped as “unscientific.” Another opinion has been gaining ground to the effect that whether or not rebirth itself be a fact, the doctrine of rebirth has no essential bearing on the practice of Dhamma and thence no assured place in the Buddhist teachings. The Dhamma, it is said, is concerned solely with the here and now, with helping us to resolve our personal hangups through increased self-awareness and inner honesty. All the rest of Buddhism we can now let go as the religious trappings of an ancient culture utterly inappropriate for the Dhamma of our technological age.

If we suspend our own predilections for the moment and instead go directly to our sources, we come upon the indisputable fact that the himself Buddha taught rebirth and taught it as  a basic tenet of his teaching. Viewed in their totality, the Buddha’s discourses show us that far from being a mere concession to the outlook prevalent in his time, or an Asiatic cultural contrivance, the doctrine of rebirth has tremendous implications for the entire course of Dhamma practice, affecting both the aim with which the practice is taken up, and the motivation with which is followed through to completion.

The aim of the Buddhist path is liberation from suffering, and the Buddha makes t abundantly clear that the suffering from which liberation is needed is the suffering of the bondage to samsara, the round of repeated birth and death. To be sure, the Dhamma does have an aspect which is directly visible and personally verifiable. By direct inspection of our own experience we can see that sorrow, tension, fear, and grief always arise from our greed, aversion and ignorance, and thus can be eliminated with the removal of those defilements. The importance of thi directly visible side of Dhamma practice cannot be [over]estimated, as it serves to confirm our confidence in liberating efficacy of the Buddha’s path. However, to downplay the doctrine of rebirth, and explain the entire import of the Dhamma as the amelioration of mental suffering through enhanced awareness, is to deprive the Dhamma of those wider perspectives from which it derives its full breadth and profundity. By doing so, one risks reducing it, in the end, to little more than a sophisticated ancient system of humanistic psychotherapy.


The Buddha himself has clearly indicated that the root problem of human existence is not simply the fact that we are vulnerable to sorrow, grief and fear, but that we tie ourselves, through our egoistic clinging, to a constantly regenerating pattern of birth, aging, sickness and death within which we undergo the more specific forms of mental affliction. He has also shown that the primary danger in the defilements is their causal role in sustaining the round of rebirths. As long as they remain unabandoned [sic] in the deep strata of the mind, they drag us through the round of becoming in which we shed a flood of tears “greater than the waters of the ocean.” When these points are carefully considered, we then see that the practice of Dhamma does not aim at providing us with a comfortable reconciliation with our present personalities and our situation in the world, but at initiating a far-reaching inner transformation which will issue in our deliverance from the cycle of worldly existence in its entirety.

Admittedly, for most of us the primary motive for entering upon the path of Dhamma has been a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction with the routine course of our unenlightened lives rather than a keen perception of the dangers of the round of rebirth. However, if we are to follow the Dhamma through to its end and tap its full potential for conferring peace and higher wisdom, it is necessary for the motivation of our practice to mature beyond that which initially induced us to enter the path. Our underlying motivation must grow toward those essential truths disclosed to us by the Buddha and, encompassing those truths, must use them to nourish its own capacity to lead us toward the realization of the goal.


Our motivation acquires the requisite maturity by the cultivation of right view, the first factor of the Noble Eightfold Path, which as explained by the Buddha includes an understanding of the principles of kamma and rebirth as fundamental to the structure of our existence. Though contemplating the moment is key to the development of insight meditation, it would be an erroneous extreme to hold that the practice of Dhamma consists wholly in maintaining mindfulness of the present. The Buddhist path stresses the role of wisdom as the instrument of deliverance, and wisdom must comprise not only a penetration of the moment in its vertical depths but a comprehension of the past and future horizons within which our present existence unfolds. To take full cognizance of the principle of rebirth will give us that panoramic perspective from which we can survey our lives in their broader context and total network of relationships. This will spur us on in our won pursuit of the path and reveal the profound significance of the goal toward which our practice points, the end of the cycle of rebirths as the mind’s final liberation from suffering.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Karma As Rationale & Pseudo-Explanation

The Problem with Karma: Notes from the Conflict in Sri Lanka
By Amarnath Amarasingham

Over the past month, there has been some speculation among members of the global Tamil community on whether Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa visited Texas to obtain cancer treatment in secret. The story in itself is not particularly interesting, but it does have relevance for the post-conflict situation in Sri Lanka. Many reacted to the news not with sadness, but with a sense that cosmic justice was being meted out. Some argued that Rajapaksa, responsible for mass human rights violations during the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war, was now getting his just desserts. Although many nationalist Tamils profess to be atheist or secular, the reaction to the news was always framed in Hindu and Buddhist notions of karma, popularly defined in the West as "what goes around comes around."
For Sinhala soldiers as well, the notion of karma was ever-present throughout the war with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which came to a bloody conclusion in May 2009. As Daniel Kent's recent research makes clear, Buddhist monks blessed Sri Lankan soldiers before they went out for training, preached at their funerals, and counseled soldiers and their families about the conduct of war and its justification.

For many years, scholarship on Buddhism, and Eastern religious traditions generally, was often guided by a crude assumption that Western religions held a monopoly on violence, while the East was largely peaceable. Over the last several years, research into conflict in Buddhist societies has forced scholars to rethink our assumptions. According to Kent's research in Sri Lanka, for example, there is real debate within the Sri Lankan army about notions of karma and intention in the killing of enemy soldiers. While there are many different aspects to the discussion, I focus here on one important question: whether religion, particularly discussions of karma and intention, restrict genuine reconciliation between Sinhala and Tamil communities in post-conflict Sri Lanka. I rely heavily on Kent's research on the Sri Lankan army, but much of what follows can likely be applied to the Tamil community as well.

Karma may complicate moves toward reconciliation in Sri Lanka, firstly, by assigning causal explanations to events that are largely inexplicable. Kent recalls interviewing a Sri Lankan Corporal, named Specs, at Panagoda army camp near Colombo, who told the story of narrowly escaping a blast from an improvised explosive device. His friend, who was not so lucky, was blinded and had both of his hands blown off. For Specs, his survival is explained with reference to karma. "That sort of thing must occur as the result of merit," he says, "one becomes disabled like this because of some sort of negative karma, but one's life is saved because one has done some sort of merit. That is what we think. It must be that. It is the way of karma." Not only do karmic explanations bring a spiritual rationalization to bear on worldly events, but these justifications often tend to be self-serving. In other words: I survived because I am good.

Perhaps more important for our present purposes is the way in which karma is linked with intention. Kent interviewed one monk, the Venerable Pilassi Vimaladhajja, who pointed out that negative karma does not accrue when an enemy is killed. "Vimaladhajja is not giving soldiers a blank check to kill whomever they wish while fighting the enemy," writes Kent, "He stresses that if a soldier has the intention to kill, a negative karma occurs. If a soldier's intention is to fight the enemy in order to protect the country and religion, however, their actions do not produce negative consequences." As Kent observes, those who hold this belief look at killing as secondary with the primary intention being the protection of the country.

As with the example above, however, it is assumed that karma, as a cosmic force, is supremely capable of discovering one's underlying intentions. Depending on how the soldier's life subsequently turns out, his ideas of karma and intention may have to be re-evaluated. As one soldier told Kent: "Honestly it is possible to rape and pillage during war without being caught. However, if you do that, nothing will ever go right for you ... there was one incident when we were in Trinco ... the Tamils had cultivated a field and left it. Our guys went and harvested the rice. They harvested the rice, sold it and took the money ... there were 21 guys who did that. All 21 of them were killed on the same day at the same time."

Such faith that karma will mete out punishment with mathematical certainty may work against the potential for remorse, regret or reconciliation. The very fact that some soldiers are still alive and living a life of health, wealth and happiness, is, with profound circular logic, seen as evidence of just conduct during war. This, in essence, is the problem with karma. 

Monday, July 1, 2013

Confession & Summary

As a product of my education—that is, as a snob, an elitist, a neo-Darwinian, and a skeptic—I naturally suppose it to be insuperably difficult for the educated class in the West to embrace any form of religious orthodoxy. I am well aware that to think so is an error on the face of it. Consider the case of the biologist Kenneth Miller, who describes himself, sincerely if incomprehensibly, as an orthodox Darwinist and an orthodox Catholic. Yet the idea that I seem to be stuck with, namely, that doctrinal conformity is practically impossible for a post-Enlightenment person, is not groundless, and may yet prove to have some validity as a generalization. Over the course of my life I have watched Catholic doctrine and practice crystallize and dissolve, again and again, upon the background of the pre-Vatican II Church into which I was baptized. I have studied the historical ebb and flow of the religious visions, enthusiasms, and awakenings that produced, among other things, the more than 250 ostensibly Christian denominations represented in the armed forces of the United States. My own rather shaky edifice of belief is the result of nearly continuous demolition and rebuilding. So let me begin by declaring that while I can imagine the benefits of orthodoxy, I have little feeling for it in the way of either sympathy or nostalgia. Thus I am surprised, again and again, when a one of my contemporaries mounts a defense of Buddhist orthodoxy. When faced with a choice between a philosophically suspect Buddhist doctrine and an explanation consonant with the findings of the sciences, I choose the latter every time.


Given the exuberance and fecundity of religious philosophy in India, the Buddha showed remarkable restraint when it came to ontological speculation, let alone commitment. On the contrary, he seems to have done his utmost to discourage the proliferation of theoretical constructions. From the time of his immediate successors, beginning with the Abhidhammists, attempts have been made to fill in the gaps in his teaching and to address those questions which he declined to answer. Ever since, there has been an alternation between those among his disciples who would capture the Dharma like a truffle in aspic, and those, like Nagarjuna, who would return to a wide-open prospect. Then, too, the geographical journey of the Buddha-Dharma brought it into contact with native religious elements which not only refused to be subordinated, but threatened to overshadow even fundamental doctrines. The history of Buddhism is a history of orthodoxy-busting.

Huston Smith complains that the story of life as told by scientists is dull, incomplete, uninspiring if not actually depressing, and lacking in the happy ending he seems to think life demands. Perhaps we are reading different books. Anyhow, there is a reason why Professor Smith gets upset whenever E. O. Wilson or anyone else suggests that science is, or ought to be, the base line against which all opinion is measured. What really bothers Smith, I think, is that, whether you find the stories told by scientists uplifting or demoralizing, more or less satisfactory than the stories told by the religious scriptures, only the stories of science are subjected to a continuous process of re-evaluation and adjudication. Only the stories of science are routinely scrutinized, analyzed, and tested against observable data. In short, they are the only stories upon which there is any real possibility for agreement.

The conceptual,schema of karma and rebirth fails to deliver useful information. It is based on no confirmable evidence, has no predictive value (as might be expected of a "theory" that is compatible with any imaginable set of circumstances), generates no testable hypotheses, and cannot to date be plugged into the body of modern science. The many troubles with the karma complex boil down to the following kinds:
   ·As ostensible fact, it has no evidential support.
   · As theory, it is (1) conceptually incoherent, (2) almost certainly absurd, (3) lacking in explanatory power and (4) incompatible with existing theory.
   · As a sound basis and a source of motivation for moral striving, it is inadequate precisely because it is not what it claims to be, namely, the true picture of a just universe.


In order for the karma-rebirth-samsāra complex) to make a serious claim upon our attention, it must be (1) a collection of facts about the world (events or processes) explicable under the terms of our best theoretical understanding, and/or (2) a theoretical schema capable of enriching our understanding of the facts. As it happens, the karma complex is commonly presented as both fact and theory. However, it is easily shown that the karma complex cannot fill the bill in either category.

To the extent that talk about karma, rebirth and samsara is put forth as a kind of conceptual knowledge, it is subject to the same kinds of analytic scrutiny as other such claims. To the extent that it purports to comprise or encompass fact, it falls under the rubric of science and is subject to the criteria of scientific method. The same is true of any such statement