Karma (कर्म)

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Karma/Rebirth: it is almost universally admitted that a common presupposition of pan-Indic thought is encapsulated in the words “karma/rebirth.” The word “karma” is derived from the verbal root “kr. ,” meaning “act,” “bring about,” “do,” etc. Originally, “karman” referred to correct performance of ritualistic activity with a view to receiving the desired results. It was believed that if a ritual is duly performed, nobody, not even divinities, could stop the desired results. On the other hand, any mistake in the performance of rituals, say, a word mispronounced, will give rise to undesired results. Thus, a correct action was a right action and no moral value was attached to such an action. Eventually karma acquired larger meaning and came to signify any correct action having ethical implications. Depending on the context, it could mean (a) any act, irrespective of its nature; (b) a moral act, especially in the accepted ritualistic sense; and (c) accumulated results, i.e., unfructified fruits of all actions. Underlying these senses is the idea that a person by doing, by acting, creates something and shapes his/her destiny.

Karma is based on the single principle that no cause goes without producing its effects, and there is no effect that does not have an appropriate cause. Freed from any theological understanding, that is, independently of postulating any God or supreme being as the creator and destroyer of the world including animals and humans, the idea is to posit a necessary relation between actions in this life, previous births, and rebirth in the next. Since many of our actions seem to go unrewarded in the present life, and many evil actions go unpunished, it seems reasonable to suppose that such consequences, if they do not arise in this life, must arise in the next. Karma carries the belief that differences in the fortunes and the misfortunes of individual lives, to the extent they are not adequately explicable by known circumstances in this life, must be due to unknown (adrsta) causes which can only be actions done in their former lives. These two concepts of karma and rebirth are interlinked and together form a complex structure. Belief in karma is also shared both by the Buddhist and the Jaina thinkers despite the differences in their metaphysical and religious beliefs. It has entered the American vocabulary and is expressed as “what goes around comes around.”

The doctrine of karma forms the basis of a plethora of ethical, metaphysical, psychological, and religious Indian doctrines. A commonly stated account of karma in terms of “as you sow so shall you reap” or “as you act, so you enjoy or suffer” are attempts to connect the underlying thought to our ordinary ethical and soteriological thinking and, precisely for this reason, does not capture the underlying thought in its totality. A necessary sequence of lives, worlds (insofar as each experiencer has his/her own world), destinies, and redemptions is posited in order to eliminate all traces of contingency, arbitrariness, or good/bad luck from the underlying order. It is not a causal order in the ordinary sense, because the causal order obtains within a world and is not the result of the moral nature of God as the creator or attributing moral nature to the God (e.g., when one says “the God is good”), which presupposes that the God’s will, despite its omnipotence, conforms to this underlying order. As a consequence, though religious thinkers in India formulated their concepts of divinity to conform to this underlying order, the very fact that the atheistic thinking, e.g., Buddhism, and non-theistic thinking, e.g., Advaita Veda¯nta (non-dualistic Veda¯nta), recognized this absolute presupposition only shows that theology, like morality, is only a faint attempt to throw light on this presupposition and does not completely illuminate it.

Most Indian thinkers seek to establish karma on logical grounds. The two familiar arguments are that in the absence of such an order, there would arise the twin fallacies of phenomena that are not caused and that which do not produce any effect. This idea of necessary causality requires, better yet, demands, that every event has a cause and that every event must produce its effects. It is worth noting in this context that the idea of causal necessity that is applied is modeled after empirical and natural order best exemplified in scientific laws and philosophically captured in Kant’s Second Analogy of Experience.5

The resulting understanding of karma/rebirth then becomes a super science, a science that not only comprehends the natural order and the human order but also all possible worlds, each world corresponding to one birth. The order that is being posited in the karma/rebirth is not a natural order, and what is called a “theory,” if it is a theory, is neither a scientific theory nor a super science. Many Hindu and the Buddhist enthusiasts wish to see it as a scientific theory, though it does not share any features of a scientific theory. Then, there are those who regard it a “convenient fiction,”6 which would imply that the entire pan-Indian culture, both the Vedic and the Buddhist, is based upon a fiction. Again, where must we position ourselves as critics in order to hold such a view of these ultimate presuppositions? As thinkers, we have no ground to stand upon from which we can pass such a judgment.

A plausible philosophical move would be to say that karma/rebirth encapsulates Indic peoples’ understanding of a transcendental ground of the human life and the world. It is not an empirical or scientific theory, it belongs to a different order, neither natural nor supernatural (the supernatural being understood as another natural). The transcendental, usually construed as the domain of subjectivity, selectively isolates an area of human experience and grounds the totality of the empirical in it. Many thinkers have rejected this conception of ground and prefer that the ultimate ground be ontological, some principle of being. Karma and rebirth encapsulate a fundamental understanding of that ontological ground, of our relationship to the world, which cannot be adequately accounted by the metaphysic of nature or metaphysic of subjectivity. Both the Advaitins and the Buddhists postulate beginningless ignorance (avidya¯) and argue that this principle accounts for our inescapable experience of obscurity, darkness, and failure to completely understand this ontological ground. And yet, both the Hindus and the Buddhist philosophers have sought to throw light on it in different ways and have assured us that though we do not quite understand it, wise individuals do, because they have a direct experience of this ontological ground. It is worth noting that in Advaita Veda¯nta, this beginningless avidya¯ is not simply non-knowledge, i.e., not knowing; it is also a positive entity, the source of all creativity, indeed, of entire mundaneity. In Indian thought karma rebirth, no matter how shielded from us, no matter how inviolable in its operations (even gods cannot escape it), gives to humans the possibility of escaping from its clutches, becoming truly free, and realizing one’s essence, which is moksha.