Cosmic house points

Karma (or kamma in Pali) is often understood to be an essential belief of Buddhism. Traditionally, it is understood as the basis of Buddhist morality. Karma provides the mechanism whereby greed, hatred and ignorance give rise to unsatisfactoriness through the conditioning effects of habitual mental states. According to the law of karma, an action (including a mental action) performed under the influence of greed, hatred and ignorance will always give rise to undesirable consequences for the person performing the action. The consequences of “good” actions will be “good” in worldly terms, leading to a more pleasant and advantageous position in the world, whilst “bad” karma leads to a worse position. All karma, however, is ultimately bad in the sense that it leads to the continuance of unenlightened existence. An enlightened person is no longer producing any new karma, and only continues on earth as a result of previous karma which is still working itself out[1].

There are a variety of interpretations of karma and its effects in the Buddhist world. The most common, and traditional, view in both Theravada and Tibetan Buddhism is that all our experience is the result of our karma. Whatever conditions affect us now, be they rainstorms, lottery wins or a sudden hostility from a colleague, are on this account due to our previous actions. We live in a world entirely of our own making, no more and no less than we deserve. I will refer to this as the “traditional view of karma”.

The alternative view of karma put forward by some Western Buddhists, such as Sangharakshita[2], still sees all our actions as giving rise to equivalent effects. However, this reformed view does not accept that all our experiences are due to past karma. Instead, this view takes there to be a range of possible types of conditioning at work, which include the types of conditioning recognised by science (such as physical, biological or psychological conditioning) as well as karmic conditioning. So, on this view we do not always get what we deserve. For example, we may be struck down by an infectious disease just because there is one going round, not because we deserve it as an effect of our previous actions. Nevertheless, if I have performed any action motivated by greed or hatred in the past, it will always have an effect on me in the future.

Buddhists in the West often like to distance this belief from the idea of “reward” and “punishment” from God as believed in by Christians and Muslims. For Buddhists the operation of karma is impersonal, being a kind of natural moral law, rather than the rewarding or punishing actions of a person. Nevertheless, the effect on the individual can be understood very much in terms of reward or punishment (which do not always require a personal intervention to be seen that way). Whatever you do that’s good will have a good result, whilst whatever you do that’s bad will have a bad result. This, it is believed, gives us a reason for being responsible for our actions. If we do not take responsibility for ourselves then we will suffer for it.

Whether you adopt the traditional or the reformed interpretation of the workings of karma, the central issues remain the same. The difficulties we might have in believing that we deserve everything that happens to us are only one of many problems with karma. The reformed view has dealt with that particular problem, allowing for the possibility of tragedy, and releasing Buddhists from the apparent need to defend undeserved suffering as somehow just. The more sensible Buddhists who take the reformed view at least do not have to argue that children who die of leukaemia must have done something wrong in a previous life. In this sense the reformed view is an advance on the traditional view, but it nevertheless leaves many problems with karma unresolved.

There is an apparently necessary link between belief in karma and belief in rebirth, because if one does not experience the good or bad effects of an action during this lifetime, then it is believed that the “left over” karma will instead either affect the nature of our next rebirth, or lead to other events affecting us in future lives. Given that we do not always seem to experience the bad effects of our actions during life (for example, brutal dictators live in happy retirement, and angelic people die unexpectedly from diseases or accidents), rebirth provides Buddhists with a let-out clause so that they can continue to believe in the law of karma no matter what we may experience.

This let-out clause alone makes it clear that belief in karma is a metaphysical belief not in accordance with the Middle Way. This alone might be enough to justify Buddhists in jettisoning all belief in both karma and rebirth. However, in my experience it rarely is. More conservative Buddhists simply accept karma and rebirth in the faith that the Buddha came to know the truth about them, and what he is supposed to have said must be ultimately right, to be finally understood when one gains enlightenment. More radical Buddhists sometimes say that they are agnostic about rebirth, and then defend karma by misleadingly reducing it to the practical realisation that “actions have consequences”. We all certainly need to recognise that actions have consequences, and this point is central to basic moral reasoning. However, the law of karma claims much more than that actions have consequences: it claims that they unfailingly have equivalent consequences according to the nature of the action, even if those consequences may take many lifetimes to come to fruition. To take this traditional metaphysical doctrine and dress it up as a practical moral insight (apparently assuming that people can only really understand the nature of moral consequences if they accept the doctrine of karma) is one of the most dishonest things I have observed Western Buddhists doing – yet they do it routinely and it has become part of Western Buddhist culture. This obfuscation is one of the key ways that dogma finds its way into Western Buddhism by the back door.

However, the metaphysical nature of karma is only the central point, from which spring many other problems. One of the biggest of these is the type of mentality required to appeal to karma as the basis of moral responsibility. Under this mentality, we are motivated to act well out of concern for the rewards or punishments that will follow. In many British schools there is a system of “house points” that resembles this. If pupils behave well, and achieve the sorts of things teachers want them to achieve, then they get rewarded with house points, whereas if they are naughty they get them deducted. Awards and perhaps prizes may follow, in addition to praise, for gaining house points. This closed system of justice is very reassuring for children, though there are also some whom it inevitably fails to motivate. Arguably, this may be a good way to motivate many schoolchildren up to a certain age. However, as they advance into greater maturity the house points cease to have much effect, perhaps because many adolescents are developing their own, more mature, ways of judging the worth of their actions, or perhaps because they become much more interested in the judgements of their peers and less in those of teachers.

A system of rewards or punishments on a cosmic scale infantilises us all, and it is hardly surprising if it fails to motivate educated people in today’s Western world. For one thing, it works on the assumption that “being good” can be reduced to a set of simple, clear rules in the way it can in a school. But adults live in a complex world full of contradictions between different “good” things. For example, going on retreat might be good for one’s own state, but not good for one’s family who don’t want to be left behind. It is not even clear which of these conflicting actions would result in good karma. A right judgement here, based on the Middle Way, involves recognising and addressing that complexity in conditions. However, if you are trying to gain good karma you will be bound to oversimplify your picture of the situation in an anxiety to avoid breaking the rules. Belief in karma encourages a nursery-school picture of morality. It is hardly surprising if it has normally been accompanied in traditional Buddhism by an over-simplified ethics: a point I will return to in chapter 10.

For another thing, the law of karma leads us to assume that we will be motivated by the same sorts of consequences in future as the ones that affect us now. House points may have been a big deal at school, but they mean almost nothing after you have left. Similarly, the kinds of good or bad consequences for moral or immoral action that might make an impression on us currently may well seem irrelevant in future. Let’s take an example episode under the law of karma. Let’s say that one day, when filling in my tax return, I find a way of fiddling it undetected, and thus save myself a substantial amount of money through dishonest means, but am free from punishment by the law. Later in life, however, I become extremely non-attached to money, and no longer care very much about gaining it or losing it. At this point, however, the karmic consequence of my earlier dishonesty revisits me, in the form of someone else swindling me of the same amount of money I earlier swindled from the government in lost tax revenue. However, this loss really makes no impression on me, and can hardly be said to be a punishment equivalent to the loss I earlier inflicted on others.

It’s possible to argue here about the idea of moral equivalence in the law of karma. Perhaps being swindled of the same amount of money is not really equivalent. However, the deeper problem here is that there is no acceptable basis for equivalence: I cannot be justly punished (or rewarded) for an action I did at a different time when I was different, because I am no longer the person who committed the offence. Human law naturally has to skate over this problem (although question are still raised about whether it is worth pursuing old war criminals for crimes they did fifty years ago), but karmic law, by its very nature, must be unfailingly just. It is this idea of justice that is imported from an over-simplified, infantilised universe and projected onto the one we actually inhabit. Absolute cosmic justice is not only against the evidence, it is actually contradictory in its very conception.

Again, I must repeat that it makes no difference to these contradictions whether the justice is administered by a person such as God, or just happens impersonally: karma would not serve its supposed function of supporting moral responsibility if it was not absolutely just. It also makes no difference how far you see karma as working through material processes in the universe or through the mind of a person. Even if karma is understood as operating entirely through the way we are in the habit of seeing things (e.g. if we see others as hateful, we interpret their behaviour as hating us) then the same problems stand. We do not know whether our future mental states are magically organised so as to reflect the effort we have put into the past ones. Experience suggests this is probably not the case, but that mental states are formed by many conditions rather than just past moral efforts, but in any case it would be impossible for the pleasure and pain we find in our future mental states to be precisely just in terms of our past mental efforts.

The “reformed” view of karma just makes the question of justice impossible to test in any way. It is claimed that our past mental efforts have an equivalent effect in the future, but we cannot tell when we have future experiences whether those have been formed by past karma or not. Thus the doctrine cannot even be put to the supposed “test” of an indefinite amount of future experience in the way that the traditional interpretation can. Although it manages to fudge the issue of just reward and punishment, the reformed view does so at the expense of becoming even more speculative and metaphysical, being purely a matter of faith in any event.

Of all the doctrines of Buddhism, karma has perhaps the least to be said for it and the most confusions attached to it. However, as with all the other doctrines there do seem to be some genuine insights behind it, and these genuine insights have continued to provide some of the basis of credibility according to which thoughtful Buddhists have accepted karma. The biggest of these is the recognition of the ways that our mental state, and our care for it or lack of care for it, can affect our future outlook and experience. If I give way to anger now, for example, I may make an enemy who will inflict pain on me in the future. Reflection on common experience is enough to make it clear that actions do generally lead to consequences, and that thoughtless actions quite often lead to negative consequences. The role of our mental states in these consequences quite often goes insufficiently recognised, and Buddhism quite rightly draws attention to these.

However, on the basis of these universal common insights Buddhism has erected an elaborate metaphysical edifice, and Buddhism continues to present itself in a way that is misleading and contradictory because of this. Its long-term relationship with the more practical elements of Buddhism can perhaps only be explained by the importance of karma as a moral motivator in ancient Indian thought. Whether the Buddha was at fault in making use of this cultural structure in his own context is a complex question that I will not attempt to resolve here, but it is much clearer that the doctrine of karma has no relevance to our own time, and will certainly not inspire moral responsibility in our own time.

If one turns, instead, to the Middle Way as a source of moral responsibility, a much more universal conception can be found which is equally applicable to the Buddha’s time and ours. Quite simply, moral responsibility consists in addressing conditions, rather than sheltering under metaphysical conceptions which prevent us from addressing conditions. To the extent that we do not address conditions, the potential of our lives will tend to remain unfulfilled. The virtue of living our lives in greater awareness of the conditions that surround us is its own reward.

One of the strongest artistic demonstrations of this I have come across is in the film Groundhog Day. Here a man finds himself living the same day over and over again, and rapidly realises that this means there are no long-term consequences to his actions. It’s true that his first response to this is the infantile one: he does forbidden things. However, after a while he realises that the only way to be happy in this situation is to interpret it positively. He then uses each day to practise so as to do the next one better, improving both his own skills and his care for others. He realises the benefits of goodness, not because of any beliefs about the good or bad consequences of his actions in this life or a future one, but because he is forced to focus more intensively on the period of time he is living in now.