In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7 The Quest for Liberation So far, we have observed the development of two key ideas about the nature and destiny of human beings that arose in India during the early Axial Age. The first was rebirth, the concept that our present earthly existence is only one in a series of lifetimes; and the second was karma, the belief that our deeds have positive or negative consequences that return to the agent according to the nature of the act. These two concepts come together in the notion that the state of one’s future existence is determined by how one acts in this present life. Good karma ultimately determines a favorable rebirth; bad karma means an unfavorable rebirth. To speak of a “good” or “bad” rebirth implies a hierarchy of being. One might be reborn at any place on this hierarchy, ranging from plant life to the various levels of animal life to the human realm, which is stratified from low caste to high caste, and then to various states of divinity. A preponderance of bad karma might take you from human to buzzard; an abundance of good karma might enable the low-caste person to be reborn as a Brahmin. To have a “high” birth—to be reborn as a god or a Brahmin or, in some senses, as simply a human person—is extremely rare and requires a great deal of karmic merit. For the vast portion of our infinite number of rebirths, most of us have been reborn as insects or other animal forms. That we have achieved a human rebirth in this life is a wondrous—almost miraculous—occurrence, because it is such a difficult feat. An ancient parable from this era makes the point in a vivid way. The parable invites us to imagine that the entire world is covered with water and that floating on the water’s surface is a yoke with a single hole, like a collar used to harness an ox. An eastern wind pushes the yoke west; a western wind pushes it east. A wind from the north pushes it south, and a southern wind drives it north, so the yoke is constantly moving. Now, suppose a blind sea turtle lived in this vast ocean and came to the surface once every century. How often do you think that blind sea turtle, coming to the surface once every one hundred years, would stick its neck into the yoke with 67 a single hole? The parable suggests that a human rebirth occurs with the same frequency. The Tibetans, who adopted one of the Indian views on rebirth, frequently refer to existence as “this precious human birth.” What makes it so precious is not just its rarity, but also its great significance. Humans, more than other animals or even the gods, have the ideal opportunity for positively affecting their future existence. One of the reasons that beings spend a great number of lifetimes at the animal level is that animals simply are not capable of generating much karma, good or bad. Those beings are not in a position greatly to affect their rebirth, but humans, by the nature of their very makeup, have almost limitless opportunities to act morally, that is, to produce karmically relevant deeds. To squander this precious human life would be tragic, to say the least. SAMSARA: The Problem The ideas of rebirth and karma may have arisen independently of one another. If so, it is clear they came to be inextricably linked in the Indian imagination during the Axial Age. When that connection was made and widely accepted throughout India, then a completely new attitude toward life came to pervade the Indians’ view of the world. In the preaxial era, the Aryans took delight in the pleasures of this life and beseeched their gods for the goods that could make their lives more comfortable and enjoyable. Death was accepted as a fact of life and perhaps as the transition to an agreeable existence in heaven. That perspective changed significantly when the concept of samsara was adopted. THE REEV ALUATION OF THE WORLD One of the first tenets of the theory of rebirth that must be grasped—and this is especially true for many of us living in the West—is that samsara is not a desirable situation. Most people who believe in reincarnation do not want to be reborn. Usually, those who look forward to rebirth imagine continual existences much like the current (and probably privileged) life they...

Share