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Chapter Five. Karma and Rebirth
- University of Hawai'i Press
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Chapter Five Karma and Rebirth Karma and rebirth are two aspects of life personally verified by the Buddha through extrasensory perception. Ofone who has developed such powers, it is said: "With his clear paranormal clairvoyant vision he sees beings dying and being reborn, the low and the high, the fair and the ugly, the good and the evil each according to his karma." 1 These claims on the part ofthe Buddha and his disciples are generally ignored by many scholars who have written on the Buddhist theories of karma and rebirth. Hindu scholars writing on Buddhism made such statements as this: "Early Buddhism is not an absolutely original doctrine. It is no freak in the evolution ofindian thought."2 But even a more sober scholar from the West felt that "Buddhism started from special Indian beliefs, which it took for granted. The chief of these were the belief in transmigration and the doctrine of retribution of action. ... They were already taken for granted as a commonly accepted view of life by most Indian religions."3 Such interpretations of the Buddhist doctrines of karma and rebirth appear to be based on two assumptions: first, that they were accepted by the Buddha mainly because they were present in the mainstream of the Brahmanic and ascetic traditions and not because they were personally verified and found to be true, and second, that they are in no way different from the pre-Buddhist theories and that Buddhism had nothing to contribute since the pre-Buddhist theories had attained finality even as far as the statement of these theories was concerned. Concerning the first assumption, the best refutation so far is that ofJayatilleke who says: 44 With all deference to scholarship, we wish to submit that this conclusion arises from both an unhistorical as well as an uncritical survey of the material. In fact, that a belief is found in a stratum A and in a chronologically successive stratum B, provides no conclusive evidence that the thinkers of the stratum B uncritically and dogmatically accept it from the stratum A. If we say so, it would follow that even a good scientist uncritically and dogmatically accepts the theories of his predecessors with whom he happens to agree, merely on the grounds of this agreement!4 A college student may take certain scientific theories to be true because he finds them in a textbook on science. But a competent scientist does not do this. In the same way, a lay disciple of the Buddha who has not developed extrasensory perception may be expected to depend on the Buddha-word, but one is not justified in saying the same of a person like the Buddha who had mastered all the techniques of yoga and who had developed all the extrasensory powers to such an extent that his own teachers, the ascetics Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, considered him to be on a par with them. With regard to the second assumption, it may be pointed out that only a superficial study of the pre-Buddhist and Buddhist theories of karma and rebirth would yield the conclusion that they are identical. If they are identical, why did some of the Buddha's contemporaries accuse him of propounding a theory of annihilation of the sentient being (i.e., denying rebirth and moral responsibility by denying a permanent and immutable 'self')? Or, what made some of the monks who lived during the Buddha's own day raise the question: "Since body, feelings, perceptions, dispositions, and consciousness are without self, what self can deeds done by the self, affect?"5 That is, how can karma be explained when the Buddha has rejected the immutable self? The Materialists, who denied a permanent 'self', denied both rebirth and moral responsibility. But the Buddha, while denying such a 'self', retained the doctrines of karma and rebirth. The problem ofreconciling the doctrines ofkarma and rebirth with the doctrine ofnonsubstantiality (anatta) is, therefore, not a problem faced only by Western students of Buddhism, for it created difficulties also for contemporaries of the Buddha, as well as for many of his later disciples. This fact alone should be sufficient to show that the Buddhist theoriesofkarma and rebirth are very different from the pre-Buddhist theories. In fact, one of the most significant contributions of the Buddha to Indian philosophical and religious thought lies in the explanation of the phenomena of karma and KARMA AND REBIRTH 45 [35.175.212.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:20...