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Notes Towards a Critique of Buddhist Karmic Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Paul J. Griffiths
Paul J. Griffiths
Affiliation:
The University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Extract

Western Buddhology, the responsible scholarly study of Buddhist languages, history and ideas, is now more than a century and a half old. For most of that time scholars working in this field have been primarily concerned to understand and expound their sources, not to criticize or assess the views found therein, much less to make any attempt at deciding whether the central views of Buddhist philosophers are likely to be true statements of the way things are. There are good reasons for this restriction; before a given set of philosophical views can be assessed it must be understood, and in the case of Buddhism the gaining of such understanding has involved the collective philological labours of several generations of scholars and is still in many respects in its infancy. What is the case for the scholarly community as a whole is magnified for the individual working in this field; the effort involved in becoming competent in several Buddhist canonical languages and in becoming familiar with a range of philosophical ideas and preconceptions which are in many respects alien to one's own culture tends to mean that the Buddhologist's apprenticeship is long, his publications so clogged with jargon as to be inaccessible to any non-specialist, and his appetite for truth stifled by Sanskrit syntax and Tibetan declensions. There is the added problem that the Western intellectual who makes the study of Buddhism his avocation is likely to be, in some more or less well defined sense, a Buddhist; and the dangers of making religious commitment the major motivation for scholarly study have been so amply illustrated by Christian history that they scarcely need rehearsing here.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 1982 , pp. 277 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

page 278 note 1 The thesis that Prasangika Mādhyamika is both uninteresting and incoherent - at least in its Nāgārjunian form - is clearly not uncontroversial. There is no space to defend it here; it will have to suffice to say that any conceptual system which creates an unbridgeable gulf between language and reality runs the risk of emptying even assertions about emptiness of meaning.

page 278 note 2 To cry with a Tertullian or a Kierkegaard, credo quia absurdumGoogle Scholar solves no problems; why then believe one absurdity rather than another, or why not, with Lewis Carroll, make it a habit to believe six impossible things before breakfast? More rationally and more interestingly we should say with Anselm, credo ut intelligam.Google Scholar

page 279 note 1 Not, of course, a sufficient condition. Many rational conceptual systems have the disadvantage of being false. But there is no space here to explore further the asymmetry between rationality and truth.

page 279 note 2 These questions are freely adapted from the axioms of assessment developed by Yandell, Keith in ‘Religious Experience and Rational Appraisal’, Religious Studies, X, pp.173–87.Google Scholar My grateful thanks are due to Professor Yandell for his encouragement and stimulus in the writing of this paper.

page 279 note 3 Yandell, , op. cit. p. 186.Google Scholar

page 280 note 1 A good introduction to the major differences between the Buddhist schools on this issue may be found in Lamotte's, Étienne ‘Le Traité de l'Acte de Vasubandhu’, Mélanges Chinoise et Bouddhiques, IV (1935–1936), 151–263.Google Scholar Standard Buddhist discussion of the problem may be found in the fourth chapter of Vasubandhu's, AbhidharmakośabhāsyaGoogle Scholar, and in the same author's Karmasiddhiprakarana.

page 280 note 2 Abhidharmakośa 4.1.Google Scholar

page 281 note 1 Theravāda, Vaibhāsika and most other so-called Hīnayāna schools.

page 281 note 2 cetanā tatkrtam ca tat. Abhidharmakośa 4. 1 c–d.Google Scholar

page 281 note 3 Also properly basic in Plantinga's sense. Cf. Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’, Nous XV (03 1981), 41–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 282 note 1 And this is pretty much what Buddhists do suggest with their system of multi-layered universes, parallel worlds, and periodic emanations of the physical universe from a state of quiescence. Cf. Abhidharmakośa, ch. 3Google Scholar, and the interesting refutation of the view that the material universe was created by God in the bhāsya ad. 2.64.

page 282 note 2 The Buddhist would further argue that direct perception of these and other realms, and of the sentient beings in them, is available to anyone who wishes to undertake the necessary meditative disciplines. There is no space here to enter upon the vitrues and problems of the argument from yogipratyaksa - the perceptions of the spiritual virtuoso. We shall simply note that this is a dubious argument because of the tremendous variety of - often incompatible - systems witnessed to by the perceptions of spiritual virtuosi from different times and different cultures.

page 283 note 1 This proposition leaves out of account what happens when nirvāna is reached.

page 284 note 1 There are extensive and acrimonious debates to be found in Buddhist philosophical literature on the nature of the continuity between the agent (kartr) of an act and the enjoyer (bhoktr) of its result. A good summary may be found in the Karmasiddhiprakarana.

page 285 note 1 It should be noted that it may be possible to make P3 coherent by asserting a rather stronger concept of personal identity than Buddhists - at least in their orthodox moods - are willing to do. Thus if, for example, the theory states that the reborn individual has the possibility of memory of previous lives, then we do have at least one criterion of personal identity and P3 begins to make sense. It would probably still have to be rejected on the ground of implausibility, but no longer on the ground of incoherence. This move - of asserting a strong sense of personal continuity and identity through many lives - is available to Hindu theoreticians, and is also often made by Buddhists, though for the latter it can only effectively be made at the expense of the anātman doctrine.

page 286 note 1 Hick, John has treated some of the issues in Death and Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976)Google Scholar and see also the many works of Stevenson, Ian, e.g. ‘Reincarnation: Field Studies and Theoretical Issues’ in Handbook of Parapsychology, ed. Wolman, Benjamin B.. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977), pp.631–63.Google Scholar

page 288 note 1 This is stated explicitly infrequently in Buddhist texts, but cf. Abhidharmakośabhāsya ad. 4.4.Google Scholar

page 290 note 1 Where is the Antony Flew among Buddhist philosophers to demand that karmic theory be in principle falsifiable?