Karma And Rebirth: The Basics

Wheel of Life
Gaden Tharpa Choorling Gompha monastery, Kalimpong, West Bengal

I have an interest in the thesis that the Heart Sutra, beloved of the Mahayana, and chanted in Zen temples and centers basically every day, was in fact a Chinese composition, which was later back translated into Sanskrit. Best I can tell this theory was kicked off by the formidable scholar Jan Nattier. But of the various scholars who’ve dug into this question, possibly none has done so with as much diligence as Jayarava Attwood. He has shifted me from finding it a charming idea to thinking it almost certainly is so.

Jayarava is an independent scholar. His formal academic training was first in chemistry, and later as a librarian. Over the years following a course of independent study and then writing out of that, he has come to be respected as a critical thinker in several areas of Buddhist studies. He is published in peer reviewed journals as well as maintaining a blog that is more than worth following. Today he is often cited by other scholars.

Another of the areas he has given sustained attention to is the question of karma and rebirth. For some the doctrine is axiomatic. One must subscribe to the received tradition in order to consider one’s self a Buddhist. While certainly not the definitive view, it is strongly held and advocated by many people.

This has not stifled serious investigation of the doctrines. Here again Jayarava has done some serious work. The article that follows is archived at his blog. He is also the author of a book length study of the subject.

I find this essay on the basics of the question an important contribution. So, I asked him if I could reprint it here at my blog and he graciously agreed.

***

For a couple of years now, I’ve been working on turning some of my essays into a book on Karma and Rebirth. It’s slow progress, but the book is currently about 175,000 words with quite a bit more material to integrate. One of the things that I have not done is include a basic introduction to the subject. I was thinking readers of the book would already be Buddhists and so have some understanding of the subject or, if they needed an introduction, that they could read a book like Nāgapriya’s, Exploring Karma & Rebirth (2004).

In the process of researching some of the gaps I’ve identified, I started to wonder if it might be better to have some kind of basic overview of the subject that is tailored to this book. For example, I nowadays locate Buddhism in a continuum of religious belief regarding such fundamental myths, as the just-world (or moral universe), the afterlife, the immortal founder, religious superheroes, and so on. Buddhists tend to have definite ideas about each of these myths and since I’m setting out to disrupt those ideas, why not make this clear and give some idea of why I would want to.

Composing my own introduction would also help to locate Buddhism in an appropriate historical and cultural context. Most other books on these topics pay too little attention to the religious spectrum and have a tendency to treat Buddhism as historically and culturally unique. On the other hand I try to keep up with and participate in the latest research on the history of Buddhism in India, so my introduction could incorporate information that has recently come to light.

There are so many different approaches to karma and rebirth, especially if we consider historical positions that are no longer current, and this historical perspective is important in the argument I develop in the book. Almost every detail of the various sectarian theories is disputed by other sects. For every detail that one might cite as being an aspect of the Buddhist doctrine of karma and rebirth, there are always seem to have been contradictory views. Several well known texts, e.g. Kathāvatthu, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, and many less well known texts, record disputes amongst the sects over doctrinal details, especially the mechanics of karma and rebirth. Some of these disputes are purely historical and almost no one remembers them or bothers to mention them. They occasionally receive attention from scholars of Buddhist doctrine, but the results of these studies tend not to end up in the kinds of books that Buddhist practitioners read. And to complicate matters we are seeing a rise in the production of sophisticated sectarian apologetics for taking the traditional myths of Buddhism as authentic or statements of fact. Religious leaders whose positions in life depend on articles of faith are feeling the challenge of secularism and science and responding with spirited defences of their superstitious beliefs.

The story of just how contested these doctrines were in the past is very important to those of us who wish to contest them in the present, because it undermines the false certainty that we often meet in traditional presentations of the Buddhist religion and modern apologetics. All too often the discussion about belief is shut down by those who wish to define a Buddhist as “someone who believes in karma and rebirth”. And if you don’t believe then “you are not a Buddhist”. One of the leaders of the Triratna Movement, for example, has said “Without conviction that these are the essential mechanics of life, one will not practice the Dharma.” (Subhuti 2007). I have (anecdotal) reason to believe that about half of our Order disagree with Subhuti on this point. I disagree with him. Many of us practice the Dharma convinced that karma and rebirth are nothing to do with the mechanics of Buddhism, let alone the mechanics of life; and an even larger number practice with unresolved doubts on these issues (i.e. with no conviction one way or the other). The untold history of disputes over these myths is important because it allows dissenters to see that they too are part of a long tradition of dissent.

The attitude to Nāgārjuna is instructive. He was very critical of the mainstream views of his day and attempts to show that those views on karma and rebirth are incoherent. He particularly raises what I call the Problem of Action at a Temporal Distance, the problem that in karma theory, the consequences (phala) of an action necessarily occur long after the conditioning action cease, contravening pratītyasamutpāda, which requires the presence of conditions for causation to occur. Nāgārjuna banishes the whole business of karma and rebirth to the domain of relative truth (saṃvṛttisatya). From an ultimate perspective (paramārthasatya), according to Nāgārjuna, there is no karma, no agent (kartṛ), no result (phala), no one who experiences the result (bhoktṛ), and no rebirth (MMK 17.30). Now, I’ve read a number of explanations of this approach and they all baulk at accepting Nāgārjuna’s dismissal of karma and, contradicting Nāgārjuna, restate the Mainstream Buddhist assertion that actions have real consequences. For example David J. Kalupahana concluded:

“The most significant assertion here is that the rejection of permanence and annihilation and the acceptance of emptiness and saṃsāra (or the life-process) do not imply the rejection of the relationship between action (karma) and the consequence.” (1986: 55)

In other words, Nāgārjuna’s ultimate rejection of karma and rebirth does not sit well with anyone who identifies with more mainstream Buddhist ideas. The dismissal has to be rationalised. For Kalupahana, raised in Buddhist Sri Lanka, the idea that the “relationship between action and the consequence” might break down seems to be inconceivable, although it is very difficult to construct any meaningful connection when we take a Buddhist approach, as my book shows. Nāgārjuna himself has shown that there is no way to connect action to consequence without resorting to eternalism. Belief trumps every other kind of argument in religion. And this may be why the metaphysically exuberant Yogācāra ideas about karma and rebirth eclipsed Nāgārjuna’s metaphysical reticence outside of scholastic circles. Last time I raised this, someone pointed out that the Doctrine of Momentariness (kṣaṇavāda) gets around the problem, but this is debatable and I’ll briefly say why below.

In Buddhist arguments about karma and rebirth, metaphysical innovations and speculations abound, with most aimed at defending the doctrines from some internal threat as objections are raised from within the Buddhist community. As objections to doctrines of karma and rebirth appeared, those doctrines were modified in response. Many Buddhists see the doctrine of pratītya-samutpāda as the central Buddhist doctrine, the most identifiable idea associated with of Buddhism. In fact, this doctrine was frequently modified to deal with inadequacies in the doctrines of karma and rebirth, as in the Abhidharma “dharma” theories. If any doctrine is central to Buddhism it is that karma leads to rebirth and awakening means no more rebirth. Historically, karma was the priority.

The doctrines of karma and rebirth that are taught these days are the homogenised result of a few centuries of critical enquiry in early Common-Era India, followed by centuries of rote repetition of the surviving doctrines. There are four main versions of these doctrines in the modern world: Theravāda, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, and Pure Land, though the view that any one person espouses may not respect the boundaries suggested by these labels. Modern views are often eclectic and syncretic. In the book I try to outline the most prominent Indian Buddhist theories of karma and rebirth including the four above as well as Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika views. Most sectarian views involve dismissing other sectarian views as incorrect, leaving almost nothing agreed upon beyond the bare fact that Buddhists believe in karma and rebirth.

This means that writing a completely non-controversial account of karma and rebirth that takes an historical perspective turns out to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. My approach to introducing karma is to set out what I think the uncontested or uncontroversial aspects of the doctrines of karma and rebirth and then proceed to outline the points of contention. The latter takes a lot more space than the former and forms the bulk of this essay.

Karma and Rebirth Defined

My attempt at a non-controversial definition of Buddhist karma and rebirth is as follows:

Karma is the Anglicised word for the process that links consequences (phala, vipāka) to actions (karman), as well as the actions themselves. Because karma does not immediately manifest as consequences, it accumulates over time. The main consequence of karma is rebirth (punarbhava), but karma may also manifest as sensation (vedanā). Rebirth is governed by a theory of how experiences arise, i.e. by dependent arising (pratītya-samutpāda). Enlightened people don’t make new karma. When enlightened people die they are not reborn.

The doctrine of karma is the Buddhist version of the just-world myth and like other versions is tied to an afterlife in which the injustice of this life is balanced out. This myth produces a cognitive bias, in the Wikipedia definition:

“The just-world hypothesis or just-world fallacy is the cognitive bias (or assumption) that a person’s actions are inherently inclined to bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person, to the end of all noble actions being eventually rewarded and all evil actions eventually punished. In other words, the just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of—a universal force that restores moral balance.”

If we replaced “just-world hypothesis” with “Buddhist karma” in this statement, we would have a serviceable definition of karma. All the major religions have a version of this myth. And yet the world clearly is not fair or just. Evil actions go unpunished and good actions go unrewarded. The idea that actions always have timely and appropriate consequences is debunked by lived experience. And this inevitably leads religions to link the myth of the just-world with the myth of the afterlife. Judgement and reward in the afterlife is how religions rationalise an unjust world.

The doctrine of rebirth is the Buddhist version of the Myth of the Afterlife. This myth is correlated with the cognitive dissonance associated with the knowledge of our own inevitable death. Life “wants” to go on, self-conscious beings consciously want to live forever but come to understand that they die. In the tension of the irresistible force (life) meeting the immovable object (death), the afterlife is born and thrives.

A seldom noticed feature of the Buddhism version of the afterlife is the bifurcation into a metaphysical narrative and a moral one. Buddhist metaphysicians have always stressed that the relation between us and our rebirths is governed by dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda). This is first and foremost a description of how mental states arise, but is applied in all sort of other ways. Thus the one who acts is neither identical with or totally different from the one who experiences the consequences. The latter arises in dependence on the former. Buddhist moralists (often the same people in a different didactic mode) emphasise that actions have consequences for us. Many suttas and all jātakas explicitly relate how actions rebound on us in subsequent lives, or that what we now experience is the result of our actions in a past life. I conjecture that this moral version of the Buddhist afterlife is necessary because without a strong connection between action and consequence for the agent, morality is not possible. That this contradicts Buddhist metaphysics is not problematised in Buddhism teaching, it is simply that in switching from one mode to the other, Buddhists simply ignore the contradiction. I don’t see this as a disputed teaching, since the ability to segue back and forth between metaphysical and moral discourses with respect to the afterlife seems to be universal.

Pure Land Buddhism completely circumvented karma by introducing the concept of a living Buddha from another universe responding to our cries for help. Now karma doesn’t matter because it can all be over-ridden by Amitābha who, simply because we call his name, ensures a good rebirth and subsequent liberation. The magic of the name is so powerful that it can overcome aeons of bad karma.

Everything else about karma and rebirth seems to be complex and disputed. There are a number of main areas of contention related to karma and rebirth. The next section of this essay will set out these areas.

Historical Disputes About Karma & Rebirth.

1. Action at a Temporal Distance is Forbidden by pratītyasamutpāda.

Solving the problem of karma’s requirement of action at a temporal distance produced a great deal of innovation over the centuries, but ultimately the Doctrine of Momentariness (kṣaṇavāda; DOM) won the day. DOM comes in various flavours, e.g. Theravāda, Sautrāntika, and Yogācāra. All DOM variations involve the invention of ad hoc entities or processes to account for the continuity between action and consequence, e.g. dharmas always exist (sarva-asti-vāda); a carrier in the form of a “person” (pudgala-vāda); a ‘carrier’ in the form of vijñāna (Johansson, Waldron); a carrier in form of ālayavijñāna (Yogācāra). The most radical solution to this problem is Nāgārjuna’s, already mentioned above, which was relegate all such questions to the realm of saṃvṛttisatya.

The Theravāda DOM proposes 24 different types of conditionality to account for the ways that dharmas need to function in order to preserve a working theory of karma. And it seems to work as long as there is only one action in one lifetime (to my knowledge no presentation of the Theravāda DOM ever deals with more than one action). With two or more actions it fails to sustain a connection between action and consequence, primarily because of the fundamental axiom accepted by Theravādins that the mind can only allow one citta at a time (discussed further below). Other DOMs reduced this list to just four types of conditionality. The Yogācāra DOM invents a new kind of entity to solve the continuity problems (see 3. and 4. below), i.e. the ālayavijñāna or store-cognition.

There are a whole raft of related series of problems. If karma accumulates how does it remain latent or dormant for such a long time and then become active, particularly in a DOM when dharmas are always active, if short lived? How does a karma “know” when to ripen? If it does not interact with our minds while dormant, how can it then become capable of interacting? The DOM solves these problems by making dharmas always active. This removes any latency and the need to know when to ripen. Dharmas produce identical dharmas, so their effects on our minds are constant.

However there is still the problem of death. Which I deal with separately below.

2. Temporality

DOM versions all assert as axiomatic that the mind can only process one citta at a time, we’ll call this the Serial Processing Axiom (SPA). This vitiates the DOM because it cannot account for how we perceive change or succession. For example we could not perceive music or language the way we do if consciousness was truly momentary and not persistent over at least the immediately past moment In practice both require us to retain in mind multiple sense inputs covering many seconds or even minutes. Because of SPA, momentariness fails to account for the phenomenology of cognition. And this may be why the first chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK) is quite as tortuous as it is. Nāgārjuna, who apparently accepts SPA, is trying to account for the perception of change in a paradigm which cannot produce a coherent account. If we drop the axiom, then change is a simple matter of comparing the immediate past with the present – something that almost any animal with a brain is able to do. Mosquitoes and flies, for example, are adept at perceiving movement, making them very hard to swat.

Buddhist ideas in this area are also hampered by the reification of the grammatical categories present, past and future. The tendency was to talk about the past and the future as needing to have an ontological status. Nāgārjuna devotes a whole chapter of MMK to this thorny issue, but arguments over the reality or non-reality of past and future are doomed to failure. The trouble is karma. Indian Buddhists continued to struggle to relate present consequences to past actions – somehow an action in the past must continue to act as a condition for an event in the present, and present actions must be conditions for events in the future (else Buddhist morality fails). However, real and unreal do not apply in the domain of experience. The arrow of time is a notoriously difficult subject, but to be hampered by treating the past and the future as something other than aspects of experience makes it impossible. Past and future are all about how we experience a flow of events and the arrow of time.

Neuroscience does agree with Ābhidharmikas, and disagree with the sutta authors, that consciousness is not continuous and has a granular structure. However, it also suggests that the brain takes an appreciable time (ca. 250-500 milliseconds) for the brain to process sensory stimulations. Thus cognition is not momentary in the sense that the DOM argues for, but takes place over time. Neuroscience also argues for a massively parallel system of processing sensory data, in which our brains construct a gestalt from all the present sensory streams.

3. Continuity During Sleep and Nirodha-samāpatti

This is another very specific problem within a DOM. If the required continuity between action and consequence is provided for by an uninterrupted series of conscious moments, then deep sleep and the cessation of mental activity in meditation when there is no consciousness of anything, present show-stopping problems. If there are no conscious moments, then connectivity between moments is broken and continuity between action and consequence is lost.

Theravādins and Yogācārins both adapted their DOM to account for this. The former invented the bhavaṅga-citta which they designed specifically to solve this problem: it’s a post-hoc patch which only exists because of this problem. A bhavaṅga-citta is one a kind of mental activity that we are not aware of, hence it is sometimes translated as subconscious, though it should not be confused with the Freudian subconscious or the Jungian unconscious. The bhavaṅga-citta always has a single object which is set for life at rebirth by the re-linking mental activity (paṭisandhi-citta). It really only exists to provide for continuity and to interrupt if two moments of mental activity are potentially different, e.g. a kuśala mental event followed by an akuśala mental event requires the intervention of a bhavaṅga-citta which is avyakṛta or undetermined with respect to kuśala/akuśala.

Yogācārins also had to patch their DOM. In their case, the ālayavijñāna, was always present and provided the continuity at times when the mental lights were out. This drew the obvious criticism, that the ālayavijñāna was an ātman by another name, but Yogācāra weathered this criticism and persisted into the present. This pattern of post-hoc patches to theories is quite typical of the history of Buddhist ideas, especially where Buddhists were trying to explain their world rather than their experience.

4. Continuity Between Death and Rebirth

However, the potentially disastrous discontinuity for karma theory is death, because when a person dies their mental stream has to continue seamlessly in some other body in order to preserve the integrity of the just-world myth. Theravādins solved the problem of the death-discontinuity by making rebirth instantaneous, that is by defining reality to match theory. Death is defined in such a way as to deny the possibility of discontinuity. Here the reasoning is post-hoc, there cannot be an interruption of the stream of mental activity, therefore there is not an interruption. But this idea of instantaneous rebirth was hotly disputed.

For Vaibhāṣikas, the idea that mental activity could cease in one place and instantly arise in another was illogical. Travelling from place to place takes time. Instantaneous travel was a miracle too far for them and so, along with other sects, they invented the interim realm (antarābhava) to account for the time it took. Unfortunately this gave rise to a whole new range of problems and disputes. Since the interim realm is not mentioned in any early Buddhist texts the status of it with respect to rebirth destinations (loka or gati) was called into question. If there was some kind of existence (bhava) between death and rebirth, what form did that existence take? Where the skandhas involved? How long did it last? Was there any contact between this interim realm and this world or the next?

Some modern Theravādins accept that there is an interim realm, which nullifies the traditional Theravādin orthodoxy regarding karma and rebirth.

Some Buddhists took advantage of a mysterious form of existence attributed mainly to group (kāya) of devas called mind-made (manomaya), where kāya or sometimes nikāya means ‘group’. Since kāya can also mean “body” some Buddhists reasoned that in the interim realm, the departed took the form of a mind-made body (manomaya kāya) which further came confused with the Hindu subtle body (liṅga-śarīra or sūkṣma-śarīra). Others noticed an obscure passage about conception requiring the presence of a gandharva. The gandharva is a minor deity in the Ṛgveda with possible roots in Indo-Iranian mythology, since a parallel term is used in the Old-Iranian language, though referring to something very different. Some Buddhists claimed that we take the form of a gandharva in the interim realm, though this sense of the word seems to be entirely unrelated to the divine musician of myth. Versions of the interim-realm existence involving a synthesis of these also exist, i.e. that the gandharva is a mind-made form.

5. When and How Does Karma Ripen?

Karma is always closely linked to rebirth, in the sense that rebirth is the major consequence of karma. But there are variations on this. At least one sutta tells us that all karma is discharged at rebirth. Each time the slate with wiped clean. Other texts, especially the Jātakas, make it clear that karma in past lives can continue to manifest after many lives. Other texts seem to imply that karma may ripen in the moment or at least in this lifetime.

An early medieval Theravādin analogy for karma was with the regularity associated with seeds and plants. Karma produces appropriate results the same way that a rice seed produces a rice plant (bīja-niyāma) and produces it in a timely fashion, just as fruits ripen in due season (uju-niyāma). See comments on analogical reasoning below.

Rebirth is said to be in one of five realms. Or six realms. The realms of the devas and asuras were originally counted as one, which makes good sense because in all of the stories the devas and asuras all live and fight in heaven (svarga). However, Buddhists seem to have lost the sense of the Brahmanical myths that their early founders had incorporated and so separated devas and asuras into two different realms. Though this makes a nonsense of the existing myths, it does make for a slightly more sophisticated eschatology, in that more afterlife destinations allows the myth of the just world more freedom in addressing the wrongs of this world, for example, some texts says that people who are jealous go to the asura realm after death; whereas people who are saintly go to the deva realm. Other realms are associated with particular dispositions: greed with hungry-ghosts, ignorance with animals, anger with hell.

6. Is Karma Inevitable?

This question was the subject of my 2014 Journal of Buddhist Ethics article. As far as the suttas are concerned karma must inevitably ripen. It is inescapable. But for later Buddhists this strict criterion is negated or deprecated. Buddhists, especially in the Mahāyāna texts, introduce the idea that one can escape one’s karma in a variety of ways. This is highlighted in the different versions of the story of the meeting between King Ajātasattu and the Buddha. In Pāḷi the King is doomed by his patricide to a long stay in hell. In other versions surviving in Chinese, the King is so blessed by meeting the Buddha that his karma is partially or wholly nullified and he does not end up in hell, but in one version is in fact liberated. I know of no recorded disputes on this major change in Buddhist doctrine, but as far as I know the inevitability of karma is still a tenet of Theravāda orthodoxy (though as we have already seen there are many unorthodox Theravādins), thus there is a potential dispute.

In my article I pointed to the Tantric practice of reciting the 100 Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra as the acme of the breaking of the inevitability criteria. Now, however, I realised that Pure Land Buddhism completed negated karma much earlier by allowing that anyone who is dedicated to awakening and brings Amitābha to mind to be reborn in Sukhāvati where the conditions are so favourable that liberation is guaranteed.

7. Is Everything That Happens Due to Karma?

The early Buddhist answer to this was an emphatic no. Many other factors are involved in conditioning our experience of the world. However, modern Theravāda apologists sometimes argue, following Tibetan Buddhist versions of karma, that those other types of condition only arise because we are born in a particular world (loka) and that rebirth is driven by karma, therefore ultimately all experience is the result of karma.

8. What Constitutes an Authority in These Disputes?

In these debates about the details of karma and rebirth there was often a contest around what constituted an authority. For example the tradition Theravādin argument against the interim realm was that it is not mentioned in the suttas. The counter-argument put forward by Sujato is that certain passages may be interpreted as veiled references to the interim-realm. On the whole the Pāḷi Canon is not shy about the supernatural, so why it should be vague about the interim realm is unclear. Of course Buddhists continued to produce texts and as time went on the issue of the authenticity of newer compositions emerged. Abhidharma texts and śāstras such as the Yogācārabhumi or the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya began to be far more important and more authoritative for later Buddhists.

On the other hand sometimes logic did make an appearance (as in the argument about travelling through space instantaneously). More often reasoning was analogical, with analogies being largely drawn from nature. The problem of Action at a Temporal Distance was addressed by the analogy of the seed for example. If one could argue that an unseen process, like karma, was exactly analogous to a natural process, like a seed becoming a tree, then that would suffice to settle matters in ancient India.

Modern Contributions

So far we have mainly outlined the unresolved traditional issues, with only a few references to neuroscience. The nature and extent of these traditional disputes are not well understood in the mainstream Buddhism of today. They are explored in a number of modern scholarly publications, but even there the importance of these disputes seems to be underplayed. To my mind these disputes are incredibly important to the history of Buddhist ideas because they undermine the consensus presentation of karma and rebirth as historically uncontroversial. In fact, almost every detail of the various ideas related to karma and rebirth is disputed, sometimes hotly and intemperately. Buddhists want to have karma and rebirth, but they cannot figure out how to make them work. Problems such as those outlined above become drivers of innovation and change in Buddhist doctrines. Modern apologists for karma and rebirth mostly don’t understand the problems and thus don’t address them, or at least are not able to address them in ways that would appeal to people outside their sect.

The fact that these matters were never satisfactorily settled in ancient India is highly relevant to modern discussions of the salience of karma and rebirth. This is because those who, like Subhuti, assert that practising the Dharma requires such convictions, gloss over the historical fact that conviction requires a coherent basis and there is no coherent version of karma and rebirth to base such conviction on. Conviction in this case requires ignorance of, or insensitivity to, these historical disputes. In other words any belief in karma and rebirth has to involve taking certain propositions on faith.

These are the conclusions we come to from exploring the history of karma and rebirth in Buddhism, something very few sectarian Buddhists have done. We have not yet raised the question of how science affects the plausibility of karma and rebirth.

The very word ‘science’ activates the missile defence systems of Buddhists: the Materialist is a person-to-person missile that obliterates all arguments from science. Similarly with the Scientism or Reductionist missiles. Cluster-bomb-like attacks like Relativism or Cartesian Dualism are also activated and ready to be deployed. Tackling such objections from anti-scientists leads down a road in which the details of what we know about the universe are called into question and that becomes the subject of the debate rather than the beliefs in question. In a sense it is fair enough. Epistemological questions (how do we know something) are important, but they cut both ways. I am happy to explain how I know that the world at one scale is made up of atoms and that the forces that govern atoms are so well understood that no supernatural forces are relevant to questions of karma and rebirth (see There is No Life After Death, Sorry). If only a dualist could explain to me how they know that mind is made of some other stuff and how it manages to interact with material stuff. None can.

Really getting to grips with these kinds of meta-disputes takes a lot of time and energy. I have written some relevant essays and will be expanding on these as my book takes shape. I plan to tackle Relativism in a forthcoming essay. But let us, for the sake of brevity, stipulate that enough doubt has been cast on the objections that I may continue to explore the implications of science for karma and rebirth. I’ve been looking at this for some time now. I wrote a series of essays on Vitalism for example, and tried to show why Vitalism and Cartesian (matter/spirit) Dualism are a bad theories, i.e. that they don’t make accurate or precise predictions.

But in the long run the laws of thermodynamics are decisive. There is simply no way for the information contained in the atoms of our bodies to be transmitted to a fertilised embryo in some remote womb. In order for this to happen the mainstream models of matter and energy, which are incredibly accurate and precise, would have to be completely replaced by another set of theories that were at least as accurate and precise, and yet allowed for some supernatural influence. Unfortunately the people attacking the science arguments are not themselves scientists and have no interest in replacing the laws of physics.

My understanding is that we now understand enough about physics and chemistry to rule out any relevance for supernatural entities or forces interacting with our world. They either can’t interact or they interact so weakly with the atoms in our bodies that they are undetectable and thus cannot observably affect our minds. There is no observed behaviour of matter at the scales relevant to karma and rebirth that requires any more explanation than what the standard models provide. In addition, though study of the mind is still in its infancy, we also know enough to know that no experiences require any supernatural or matter/spirit style dualism to explain. Supernaturalism, Dualism and Vitalism just don’t offer us any insights into the world or our experience. As theories they don’t make accurate or precise predictions, and they have little in the way of explanatory power. We can confidently set them aside and get on with trying to understand the world through mainstream physics and chemistry.

Scientific theory and observation is certainly incomplete. We do not understand everything about our world or our minds. But we understand a good deal. What is seldom acknowledged by advocates of failed supernatural theories is that they have even larger explanatory gaps. The supernatural is always a worse explanation for an experience than a natural explanation or no explanation. Some things do remain unexplained and thus it is always better to admit ignorance than to assert that something can be explained when it cannot. The supernatural fails to explain what it purports to explains. There is no longer any good reason for a well-informed and thoughtful person to believe in the supernatural.

I have also explored at length why religious and/or supernatural beliefs remain plausible to so many. Religious ideas do seem intuitive or at least minimally counter-intuitive to many people, but this is not a reason to believe in them. However, this need not lead to intolerance, which is irrational. Religion is more or less universal amongst humans and acknowledging this costs us little. Nor does it change the essential task set out by Buddhism, i.e. to transcend our view of ourselves as isolated individual selves and the harmful behaviour associated with this view.

Apart form the traditional versions of karma and rebirth there are versions that have been modified to be more compatible with modernism. So for example a version of karma that appeals to many modern Buddhists is that repeated actions form habits that make us more likely to behave in the same way again and shape how we see the world and how the world sees us. Buddhist practice in this view is about identifying habits and trying to eliminate them. This certainly seems to work and I have argument against it per se. But it has almost no relationship with traditional Buddhist views on karma and rebirth and I think we are still getting to the point where such views will be wildly acknowledged in the Buddhist world. My view is that considerable deconstruction of Buddhist doctrines is still required.

Afterword

Having looked closely at Buddhist doctrines of karma and rebirth over time, my conclusion is that, that no traditional version of them is coherent on its own terms. I emphasise the latter because, although I am sometimes known as a science enthusiast and accused of being a Materialist, I have carefully evaluated these Buddhist doctrines while trying my best to take the tradition at face value. The logic of the doctrines does not stand up to a sustained inquiry, the different versions all contradict each other and such plausibility as the doctrines retain seems to rely on sectarian readings which ignore historical disputes. But even granting the stipulations of sectarianism, still, no version of karma and rebirth is coherent.

In the light of modern science I would go further. The forces that govern matter and energy at the scales relevant to the discussion of karma and rebirth are well enough known and precisely enough specified, that no just-world or afterlife theory is possible and thus no version of them will ever be plausible. And this is a problem for Buddhism as a religion. It’s a problem for those people who insist that to be a Buddhist one simply must believe against all evidence to the contrary. And that creates a kind of paradox, because honesty is one of the first principles of Buddhism and another important principle is that Buddhists do not rely on blind faith (though this is more honoured in the breach than in the observance). If we are honest and ask for evidence then the belief-system collapses.

And I believe this is the point we have reached. The belief-system of Buddhism is breaking down from within and being bypassed by secular presentations of Buddhist techniques (including, but not limited to Mindfulness therapies). My intention is to actively participate in the ensuing discussion about what Buddhism looks like in the post-deconstruction era.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2014). Escaping the Inescapable: Changes in Buddhist Karma. Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 21, 503-535. http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/2014/06/04/changes-in-buddhist-karma

Kalupahana, David J. (1986). Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. SUNY.

Nagapriya. (2004). Exploring Karma & Rebirth. Windhorse Publications.

Subhuti. (2007) There are Limits or Buddhism With Beliefs. Privately circulated.