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In Our Time
Karma
00:50:55
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the doctrine on how you answer for your own actions.
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BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.
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This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In India in the first millennium bc, the doctrine of Karma developed among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists. Common to each is an idea that how you act in this world has consequences either for your later life or your future lives. Depending on your view of rebirth and transmigration, you reap what you sow. From this flow different ideas about free will, engagement with the world or disengagement, the nature of ethics and whether intention matters, and more. And these ideas continue to develop today. With me to discuss Karma Monimachata, professor of Indian Philosophy and Tutorial Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford Jessica Frazier, Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu studies. And Karan O'Brien Kopp, lecturer in Asian Religions at King's College, London. Karan, can you give us an overview of the doctrine of Karma before we proceed?
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Karma is a concept that we find in early South Asia. It's important to the development of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. And it refers to a natural law that we can describe as causality. It's cause and effect, but not generally. It's more specifically concerned with human action and human agency. So we can think of it as a theory of moral responsibility. It gives us a guide on how to act in the world and how we weigh up moral justification for any one action. So karma and karmic action affects the people around us, the beings around us, our society, but it also affects us personally in spiritual terms, in psychological terms, in material terms. And these effects can reverberate not just in this life, but in future lives. So we see that Karma is paired with the doctrine of transmigration and reincarnation, and it's also paired with the important notion of Dharma, as, if you will, the expression of the ideal of moral action in the world. What happens when virtue is expressed collectively?
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B
What are the proofs brought forward for this?
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A
Well, we find the earliest discussions of Karma in the archaic layers of the Vedas. So we're thinking here about the early Rig Veda, about the Sangitas or the commentaries in the Vedas. So this would be at least 1500 BCE at a conservative estimate. And the word Karman, which means action, comes from the verbal root to do or to act. And although there are generic uses for this term, karman, in the early Vedas, we also see that there's a particular context of ritual action which is important in the early Vedic religious context. And this refers to the centrality of cultivating the sacred fire into which oblations can be made, such as water or food substances. And what's important here is that every ritual act yields a result or an effect. So these were often conceived of in the early Vedic period in material terms. So ritual action was important to secure the harvest or fertility or any of these kinds of important outcomes. And that forms an important basis for the way that the doctrine of karma will develop.
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B
Did they develop a way of measuring the effect?
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A
Well, in a sense, there is an importance on the accrual of ritual action in this lifetime in order to influence or shape the afterlife. So the measurement is in the type of experience or continuation one will have in an afterlife, which may then be subject to redeath. So in a sense, this early context of Karmana's action is concerned with notions of ritual and with procuring a good stay in the afterlife.
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B
Thank you, Jessica. Where would you look? If I wanted to look for where these were first set out and started, the resonance, which they continued, indeed increased.
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C
Well, it's kind of interesting that in many ways, many cultures have a vague idea that's similar to reincarnation. But there's a specific genre of texts in India, the Upanishads, kind of classical sources in the late Vedic period, something like between 800 and 300 BC that start to unfold this picture. And they, as you said, they're kind of thinking towards new kinds of good that you want to achieve in religion. The old religion had sought for subsistence, basic needs, cows and rain and success with your crops. But things had changed in India by this time. The tribal settlements have turned into kingdoms. There's a new understanding of how agriculture works, an interest in biology. And in the same way that Aristotle starts to develop this notion of looking at nature to understand the world, we see something kind of similar here in India. So they see that, for instance, if you look at nature, it's a cycle. Things come again and again. If you look at nature, even though you can't see the seed below the ground, it gives rise to plants again and again. And that gives us a clue to how humans work. So in these kingdoms, people who are looking for an answer to how humans can achieve immortality in the Upanishads, they start to speculate. There's a wonderful image in the Kaushiki Upanishad, where there's a kind of an early cosmology, they think that when you die, you rise up into the sky, you go to the moon, and if you're not ready to pass out of the human, the sort of embodied realm, you arraigned back into the ground to become plants. The plants nourish animals and you're reborn. And the text says you could be a worm, a bird, a fish, a lion, a tiger, or a human. So there's a kind of a basic cosmos picture of humans going through this natural cycle. And in the Chandogya Panishad, it tries to turn this a bit more into philosophy. It says, just as a tree has a root under the ground, you can't see, so that when you chop it down, it grows again. So to a human, even when we're cut down by death, can regrow out of this secret root under everything. And this becomes the basis for a new theory of how human immortality can work.
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B
Why did this happen? We put in the date about 800 BCE. Why did it happen then? Was it not something that was at play in the Egyptian civilization, for instance?
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C
Good question. So you've got similar sorts of ideas in other cultures. The ancient Greeks have it Pythagoras got. It's in Plato's Phaedo. And they come up with all kinds of interesting philosophical reasons why other cultures have similar ideas. But in India, it's more systematic. It's seen as a kind of an automatic mechanism, almost like a science, a physics of reality. And it has this moral characteristic. Why it arises at this time exactly is a little unclear. I think one of the reasons is that in those kingdoms, this kind of center of intellectual culture encourages people to think in a philosophical way. So in the Brahda Ranuka Upanishad, there's a wonderful scene in chapters three and four where the great philosopher King Janaka gathers together the intellectuals of his kingdom and says, explain to me the nature of things. What is the knowledge which will get us to a kind of a higher state of being?
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B
What do they say?
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C
Well, they say, well, this. This is a Hindu text. So there's going to be debates that I'm sure we'll hear more about. But they say that there is a root of everything, a root of all reality and of all nature. And if humans can find their point of access to that root, they too can grow again into new lives. And that's really exciting because, you know, if you don't want cows anymore, if you don't need more grain More rice. Immortality is something that you probably still want.
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B
Where does the Hindu idea of the self come into this?
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C
So I think all of these kinds of ideas of a hidden reality that allows us to live again and again start to inform a notion of a hidden essence of the self. And a lot of ancient texts, the Chandogya Panishad, talk about the idea that you can kind of dig underneath the things of nature, you can dig into reality and find a hidden essence that kind of re arises. It also starts to make arguments about the idea that if humans arise, if life arises, it must come from. So where. So the Bhagavad Gita says, nothing comes from nothing. Where does life come from? There must be a kind of a resource that we can tap into again and again. But this will be a huge point of debate because Buddhism has a very different picture of how the self works, even though they still have a conception of reincarnation.
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B
Thank you very much, Marima. Before we move towards Buddhism and other areas, can you summarize the idea of karma in classical thought?
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C
Yes.
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D
So one aspect that has not come to light yet is thinking about this nature of the cyclic existence. Karma is not only thinking about your future lives. Karma is also trying to explain inequalities in this life. So it very much works like an explanation of inequalities in this life. Why are some people so well off? Why are some people healthy, others not? Why are some people rich? And Jessica was right. They talk about this in the urban context. It's when the kingdoms have started forming and big cities have come into existence. This has become very important. And people are faced with these inequalities and they want an explanation. And karma is the explanation given. It is because of your deeds in the past that you are born in such and such a caste or such and such a situation with such and such characteristics. Now that also. So the notion of caste in the Indian society, the notion of kinds of characteristics people have, are born with, is also brought into this by Karma. And of course, talk about, you know, reincarnation and future lives, as both Karen and Jessica have emphasized.
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B
Is there a structure of teaching? Can you tell us about how it goes from generation to generation?
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D
So one way in which it goes from generation to generation would be, you know, the Purana literature. So we have talked about the Vedas. That is, the more, if you like, you know, the more technical, scholastic literature, but there also the Purana literature in ancient India, which is full of stories, myth that you tell the children and you sit around the table and Listen. And that has a lot of stories about someone being reborn as an elephant, someone being reborn even as a cooking pot. So children are told that you must behave yourselves. In the Yoga Sutra, there is this example of being reborn as a cooking pot if you behave very badly and you can imagine what life would be like.
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B
So we have that there. What changed with Buddhism then?
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D
One important change that Buddhism brought around was instead of thinking of karma as a natural law, it was now a moral law. It was, it transformed into a moral law in, I think because of the influence of Buddhism. I mean, there are different views about it, but I think it transformed into a moral law because of the influence of Buddhism. Buddhism did not believe in the caste system. Buddhists did not want any of that. They wanted to explain inequality. Now, one thing to say is, and how do they explain inequality? They use the karmic doctrine. But they also tie this notion of human beings are responsible for their current life and you can make a difference to your future life. The way you act in this life. In fact, the decisions, the choices you make in the present, they affect how your life will evolve from here on and your future lives.
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Thank you very much, Karen. Karen O'Brien Cohen Central to the Buddhist ideas, as I understand it, on karma, it seems it's the idea of intention.
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Yes, as Monoma said, we get a turn to the psychological and this focus on what we might call moral psychology in Buddhism. And there is this focus on intention often called chetana. And it's seem to operate not only at the level of the mind, but to be expressed through speech and also through action. So what the Buddha says is that if you have the right intention, you will carry out the right action. So intention starts to be foregrounded as the most important determinant in the moral quality of any action. Now, what this does is it opens up an interesting space potentially between action and intention in that in certain instances it may be morally justifiable to carry out a harmful action in the world if the intention behind it is demonstrated to be pure according to Buddhist values. So one example that we see in the Vinayas or the law codes in early Buddhism is the notion of meat eating. So in certain instances it may be morally justifiable to eat meat as long as one can demonstrate that they have not intentionally caused the death of that animal. And there are some other more extreme examples of this which kind of go right to the case of murder. In certain cases, it might be justifiable morally to carry out the killing of another human being so that Takes in.
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B
A completely different area then, doesn't it?
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It does. It lays that emphasis on intentionality, but it's not exclusive to Buddhism. We also see some similar discussions happening in Jainism at the same time.
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B
Can you give us some idea of the social geography of that, please?
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C
Yes.
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A
So we've been talking about karma very much in individual terms, but there are also beliefs in what's called co. Transmigration. So the idea that selves or souls, however they're conceived, transmigrate together in groups, and they may then show up as a family unit or a social group of some kind. So in Buddhism, we see that there's an emphasis on reciprocity in certain kinds of moral relations. So, for example, in Theravada Buddhism, between monastics and the lay community, there are processes that are called merit transfer. So the lay community support the monastics by donating material items, clothing, food, money and so forth. And in return, the monastics, who are perceived to be very pure virtuously, are able to transfer some of their karmic merit to lay Buddhists. Or we see in certain acts of ritual worship, individuals are able to retrospectively or historically transfer some of their karmic merit to their ancestors, who may be trapped in cosmological realms where they're stuck and they can't move on to be reincarnated. We also see in Mahayana Buddhism, from around the second century onwards, the development of a new concept of altruism, which is referred to as the Bodhisattva concept. So this means one who has the ability to attain nirvana but defers that, puts it on hold so that they can focus on the liberation of all other beings. So this is a turn away from that kind of moral psychology towards a more socially oriented understanding of karma and its consequences for the collective.
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B
Thank you. Jessica Frazier, was anything like this being developed in Greece, where everything's. Everything seemed to develop or anywhere else?
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C
Indeed, as you said about Egypt, it's actually in some ways a very common idea that after death there is new life in some form. And belief in ancestors who surround you in this life is extremely widespread then and indeed now. But specifically the transmigration, finding a new life again and again concept is widely known to be found in ancient Greece. Right. So the Orphic cults Pythagoras is involved with this. They believe in metempsychosis. And every student who studies Plato's Phaedo sees the arguments that even Plato gives for why the soul is a natural principle of life, why the soul must surely oscillate between life and death. It could never cease to exist. Exist. And that actually there has to be a kind of a higher part of the human person which is part of an eternal and immortal, a deathless realm. So the Greeks have the concept, but they're not the only ones. You see, people like the Yoruba in Nigeria, Native Americans as well, have this notion that you get born again in a way that allows you to fix the problems that existed in your previous life. So there's a sense of a kind of a cosmic justice that needs to work itself out. The Indians, however, do something different in some ways. Of course, it's a widespread idea, but they add at least two novel elements to it, right? One is specifics of this moral mechanism of karma, which means that as the Brahdaranyaka Upanishad, arguably the oldest text we have, that mentions karma Something like 800 BCE as it says, as you act, so you will become, as you desire, so will be your future. It says the self is like a caterpillar that crawls up a blade of grass and reaches over to another grass blade and then crawls down it to the ground again. The soul is a creature that can travel through this life, reach to another life, and come back into a new life again. And another image is given. In the Bahrain Upanishad, it also says, the morality of this means that we have the possibility of progress. It's not one life and you're done. It says it's like being a goldsmith, as a goldsmith crafts a beautiful statue, and if he doesn't like it, can melt it back down again and try to make something more perfect. So that's what our lives are. They're attempts and they can get better. But the important thing about this is that while there's this moral element to it, there's also a really important sense in which this is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to escape the journey of rebirth. And Buddhism, when it turns up, particularly emphasizes, because Buddhism has this general view at the time that life is suffering, that to be in a worldly existence is painful. Being born again, ouch. Dying again, even more painful. But that's okay. We just need to find the escape route. So along with the notion of karma as a moral journey is the notion that the bigger drama is to find an escape route from any form of embodied existence.
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B
Thank you. As I understand it, Manima Chalaya, in Hinduism, there's the idea of the continuing self, but not in Buddhism. So how do these things come together.
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D
In Hinduism, you know, as Jessica was saying there is the idea of a continuing soul. And so what happens is when you perform a certain action, on account of that action, they say you acquire some karmic residues or seeds. And the agricultural analogy is used over and over again in the Indian text. You acquire some seeds. So the seeds are kind of carried over by the soul into the next life, later in this life and into the next life. What happens in Buddhism is they want karma, they want rebirth, but they don't want a soul. They don't want the notion of something continuing which will take the seeds, so to say, to the next birth. So it's because they don't believe in anything that continues to exist. One of the cornerstones of Buddhism is the notion of impermanence. Everything is impermanent, including us. All we are human beings are is a bundle of physical and mental states put together. And what relates us to our future selves and what relates us to our future lives is exactly the same thing, causal relationship on account of our actions. Now our next incarnation comes into being in this life. I smoke now, I will pay by having bad lungs, so on and so forth. Similarly across lifetimes, that's what determines how you're born across lifetimes. It's on account of the actions you do right now. And in the earliest text, there are a couple of analogies that are used that come to my mind. You know, they say, how can one understand karma without transmigration, rebirth without transmigration. So in the Milindapanna, one of the analogies that is used is, you know, if you light a candle and the candle burns at each moment, when it burns, it is dependent on the flame is dependent on different bits of material. It's not the same flame in some sense, but it's not different because it's causally dependent. Another example they use, which I really like, is that of teaching. When you're teaching a student, what do you pass on to a student? There's nothing physical passed on from a teacher to a student. There is just information. There is just a causal relation that is passed on. That's what happens across lifetimes. There is a causal relation between your previous self and your future self. But it's the same thing that happens within a lifetime. Nothing dramatic across lifetimes.
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B
And was that widely accepted in the terms in which you described it?
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D
It was accepted by the Buddhists, but not by the Hindus. That said, even the Hindus did not regard death as a major event. This notion of fear of death is not an important thing in India. In the Indian Subcontinent. What it is is in the Gita, for example, rebirth is described as the soul changing its clothes, putting on a new garb. You know, that's how the Gita opens. Say, you know, you cannot kill anyone, or, you know, what happens when someone dies is on account of their karma. Their death is determined to be at a certain time and they will be reborn again. And so there is not the usual drama about the fear of death in the Indian tradition.
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C
You want to come in just briefly on. I think that's absolutely right. It's really interesting to see how a very different way of looking at the self means that you don't have to fear death. The Hindus. It's interesting because in some ways this doctrine gives rise to a huge debate that kind of animates Buddhist thinkers, it animates Hindu thinkers and other figures as well. And this becomes central because really what's at stake is whether there's a soul. And that relates to whether there's anything immortal and fundamental in reality. The Buddhists are ingenious. They come to understand things like emergence at a very early stage in history. And at the same time, the Hindus also kind of push back with their arguments and say causation creates the self. It helps to generate an ongoing sense of identity. But the Hindus, after all, said, but what creates the causation? If you create a swirl of water in a pond, the swirl dissolves, after a while, it disperses and the swirl is gone. What is it that holds that self together over time, life after life after life, shouldn't it just fall apart? So the Hindus look for new arguments that say whatever it is that remembers your past and is preparing for your future, whatever it is that wakes up again morning after morning, despite your unconsciousness, has to be that thin thread that keeps the self together no matter what changes it goes to. So sort of debates arise on both sides and actually becomes a huge intellectual and philosophical motivator for Indian thought.
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B
Karan, we should have said more about Jainism and karma. Can you help us there?
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A
So the Jains have a distinct concept of karma, which is that it has a material quality. So they have a belief in the pure soul or the jiva, that gets somehow enveloped or shrouded by karma. And karma is thought to have this sticky quality so that it adheres to the soul and it covers the soul. And this brings with it ignorance and lack of wisdom and other kinds of moral weaknesses. So the goal in Jainism is to remove that sticky karma bit by bit through acts of moral purity and purification. And the Jains do have, in some senses, quite a radical ethical notion of pure or the ultimately pure or virtuous moral action. And that would be the sort of acknowledgement that all action in the world causes harm. So moral action is about mitigating harmful effects in the world. And for monastics, this is interpreted in very subtle and deep ways. So, for example, one would be expected to have a vegan diet, to not eat root vegetables because this would disturb and harm insects in the earth, to not consume honey, to perhaps wear a mask so that one doesn't inadvertently inhale and destroy microbes in the air, perhaps literally or figuratively, to sweep the path in front of one as one walks through life so as not to again crush small beings under the feet. So this is quite a radical idea in Jainism, But Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism do all share this acknowledgement that action in the world causes harm.
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B
Thank you, Jessica. What's Kobasa to improve one's position?
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C
Well, in some ways, the notion of karma introduces a completely alternative conception of morality into the possibilities for how to think about life, doing the right thing, and kind of going on an existential journey. If you think of maybe the Abrahamic religions, which are strongly eschatological, you've got one life in generally in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, just one life to get it right. And there are rules that have been set out by the deity, and you will be judged whenever death comes, and that could come at any given moment. And that judgment comes with reward or with punishment. So there's a kind of an urgency. In the monotheistic religions of the west, the Indian way approaches things very differently. You've got a long game, and morality is based not on you being told, here's the rule, follow the rule. You're going to go through many lives. You will experience many situations. You may be an abusive husband in one life and an abused wife in another. So there's a sense in which you have the opportunity to learn moral reasoning on the go, and that changes the way people think of it. In Hinduism, the deities often turn up and give advice on how to live morally, but they don't necessarily tell you what to do. So at the end of the Bhagavad Gita, after a huge, long discussion about the nature of human life and the possibilities of improvement and how to live, Krishna says, I have explained these things to you. Reflect deeply and then do as you wish. It's a completely different way of thinking about life as, in a sense, a more humanistic kind of autonomous way of reasoning. Towards the good. And you've got a longer journey in which to do it. Not one life, but five, a hundred, a thousand lives. So it's a very different picture from that perspective.
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B
Thank you. How satisfactory do you think karma is?
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D
Not very satisfactory, I don't think. You know, just like the explanation of evil and inequality in the Western religion traditions doesn't quite work because, you know, it goes against the benevolence of God in the Indian traditions as well. You know, this kind of a natural explanation of why there is so much inequality is unlikely to go into work. I mean, think about how powerful the law of karma is. There is nothing like a divine creator or anyone who's looking, you know, who's doing the job of keeping the bank account, right? So there is one law which is a natural and a moral explanation of the universe. Why do the seasons come in the regular order? They do because of the natural law of karma or Rita. Why do you know, are people unequal? Because of the moral law of karma. And so, you know, thinking about a law as powerful as this is going to make a messy explanation. It can explain just about everything. And we should be worried about anything that explains everything. But. And that said, you know, that's not the only trouble with karma. The other trouble comes especially for the Buddhists because of not having a self. Jessica pointed out to some of the problems, and the debate between the Hindu and the Buddhist kind of takes off on this point. If there is no self, the Hindus say, how are you going to explain who is the doer of the action? Who is the reaper of the fruits? Who is the enjoyer of the results? And the Buddhist has a hard time trying to explain what is going on in this case. What the Buddhist ends up saying is to say that all this can be explained. All we need is a notion of. And I want to bring back intention in. So all we need is a bundle of mental states. How does action come into being? They say from memory arises an interest. You know, so you have a memory. So I often use this example. Suppose you're in a market and you see some fresh mangoes. You remember enjoying a fresh mango in the summer last year. From the memory, there arises an interest in acquiring that mango. From the interest arises a consideration. How will I get the mango? You deliberate from that, the Buddhists say, arises an intention to acquire the mango. And that intention leads to physical action. And Vasu Bandhu says, one of the Buddhist thinkers, Vasubandhu says, where is a self in there? What does the self do in this explanation, it's all given in terms of mental states, one following another, and you get to action. There is no agent of action, and the continuum I've just described keeps on transforming until you get to the result of the action. You don't need anything like a soul.
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A
KAREN well, I mean, just to say that, to pick up on Manama's point about intention. So those intentions, unfortunately, are often, according to the Buddhists, shaped or determined by the three poisons. So this is aversion and greed and delusion. And so part of the path of being a Buddhist is those is the meditative practice of self reflection, so that one can understand the nature of one's own, of one's own intentions and transform them so that they're counted or neutralized by different types of intentions, which would be something like compassion and generosity and wisdom.
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C
JESSICA it's just interesting to see that this is such a widespread doctrine across much of Asia, and yet I think it's true that it's not in many ways all that successful as an idea. It's fascinating to see how, as Monomer says, exactly how does this mechanism work with the self? If you're born in a difficult life, you're going to have a harder time generating good actions and intentions. So there seems to be an innate slight difficulty with the justice, the equality of the situation. And even the Mahabharata, the great Hindu epic, says it's very hard to untangle the workings of karma, so you can't really use it to explain how people come to be as they are. The Mahabharata actually says, don't try and read people's current situation in terms of what happened in the past. Fate is messy, and yet at the same time in it can happen that karma becomes a kind of tool of control. So that if we look at ethical texts like the Manu Dharma Shastra, we see wonderful deterrents or punishments that the Brahmins recommend, the priests recommend as a way to keep society under control. It says that if you are a priest who drinks liquor, you'll be reborn as a worm, or if you're a thief who steals meat, you'll be reborn as a vulture. And my favorite one is that if you're a king who overtaxes his subjects and then uses their money for your good, you will acquire all the bad merit of every single person in your kingdom and have a really tough time to come. So there's a kind of a sense in which it gets used by people both for good and I think, potentially for social control.
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B
This is probably over naive question to ask the three of you. But do you remember what you were before you were transfigured?
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C
I was once. I was once in the town of Udaipur in Rajasthan and a very kind gentleman offered to tell me what my past lives were. And I had a moment where I thought, do I want to know? I'm not sure if it would help what happened. I said no.
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B
So what's the gender? It must be something that's been thought about and discussed. Where is that discussion? Manima?
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D
I don't think that the belief in karma comes with the belief in having memory of past lives. That's not important. That's not essential to the doctrine of karma. It is just meant to be, you know, as I said, a forward looking doctrine as well. In order to make you behave better in this life. There are all these examples given but there is never made the claim that, you know, the claim that you will remember your past life or how you were born or how you got here. There just has to be an element in faith. Karma works. That's what the Indians would tell you. Just like people say, you know, God is looking at you.
- [34:38]
B
Jessica, you want to come in?
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C
I think that's right. Very few people claim to remember their past lives. And it's interesting that that's the case. Very different from, you know, I go to California and people say I remember being Cleopatra. But it's not, that's not how it works in India. And yet there is the sense in which past lives inform who you are now. So if you look at lots of the great stories of Indian culture, culture, they talk in terms of past lives that set up a situation that only gets fulfilled in your present life. One example is the story of the great God Shiva who's an ascetic wanderer yogi of the mountains. His first wife Sati loves him and he loves her. But her father, who's high caste, rejects him. And in protest, torn between her husband and her family, she immolates herself. There's a tragic ending, but in the stories that's not the end of the story because there can be a new life which completes that trajectory. Sati is reborn in a new body as the beautiful goddess Parvati. Goddess whose daughter of the Himalayas, which happens to be where Shiva lives. And that allows a situation where she can now fulfill her love story and Shiva can be with the woman he loves. So there's a kind of a feeling of a cosmic justice that gets to play out over multiple lives and that you can read your Life in terms of, as one Bollywood film of 2007 put it, if it's not a happy ending, that means it's not the ending. There will be a future in which things are fulfilled. It adds a certain character to the way you can see the world.
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B
Thank you, Karen. When we look at society or families or personal behavior, where do we find the idea of karma at work?
- [36:15]
A
Well, I can talk a little about the Buddhist context and some of the more modern developments. So, for example, in a strand of global Buddhism that is called Engaged Buddhism, there is an emphasis on collective action as a way to improve the world. So it's not just about one's own individual moral standing. And this is a kind of shift that we see from the countercultural period in the 1960s, from the period of war and ferment in Southeast Asia. And it's often traced back to a Vietnamese monk called Thich Nhat Hanh, who is sent into exile because of the Vietnamese War. And he has a very acute personal experience of war and conflict and social injustice. So he really puts forward the theory that Buddhism should always be engaged, meaning it should be socially engaged, it should be politically engaged to bring about greater social justice in the world. And interestingly, he had a relationship, a good relationship, a conversation partner in the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for a Nobel Peace Prize that he didn't win. But it shows that the contribution of Thich Nhat Hanh to thinking about social justice and bringing Buddhism into that broader conversation.
- [37:41]
B
Thank you. Have we said enough about karma in relation to free will? Jessica?
- [37:46]
C
Karma's got an interesting character where I think in the past, it was sometimes interpreted as a doctrine, as being about fatalism or pessimism, that whoever, whatever you're experiencing now is just the result of things in the past, and you can't change it. But that's never how it's interpreted in the Indian texts themselves. I think it's devised as a doctrine that's meant to be there to empower people to think about their actions as having a very powerful and direct impact on the world around them. And you see that in the Upanishads, you see that in Buddhist texts that you take moral responsibility for what you're doing now because it really will generate the world and the very life that you're living in the next instant to later in your life and after your death. So there's a kind of sense that free will is being affirmed and engaged with a kind of a moral goal in line and that's important. Perhaps it's worth remembering though as well, that with karma, the life that you're living right now, your place in society, your gender, your body, even your ethnicity, your region you're in and the circumstance is just one life. It's not the ultimate you. The person who within you thinks, gosh, I could have been someone else, the person who has to work with what you've got but is something more than that and is ready to be a different soul and go on a different journey later, that is the real you. So there's a sense in which it wants to say, don't be constrained, at least in your mind, by the life you're living. Think in terms of a larger identity and aim at a higher goal.
- [39:16]
B
Thank you, Karen.
- [39:17]
A
Well, I was going to mention perhaps just to remind us that the word karma is also a borrowed word in English and has travelled into other languages beyond South Asian languages. And the meanings, for example, in those other languages, including English, are often much looser, not rooted precisely in those early South Asian contexts, and are linked generally to notions of spirituality and morality. So I'm thinking of a study that I just read which was about Gen Z Australians, and showed that more than a third of them call themselves spiritual and more than half of those believe in karma and a sizable proportion believe in reincarnation. So there are quite loose cultural ways in which karma continues to circulate in all kinds of societies.
- [40:11]
B
Thank you very much. Finally you, Jessica. Jessica Frazier.
- [40:15]
C
I think it's important to remember that karma isn't just about India. It kind of half the globe. It's China, it's Japan, it's Thailand, Southeast Asia, much of it. It's Nepal as well as India. All of the Buddhist world, a huge portion of humanity, lives in terms of not at this life being the only life, but rather there's a larger long game. And I think it's important to remember that in most of those cultures there's a goal beyond the next life. Living after death is not the final goal. Getting even to heaven is not the final goal. You can go, you can have bad karma in heaven and go back down to hell. You can be a demon in hell and come right back up to heaven. So that that kind of focus on simple and easy goods, if you like, and sort of gratification in terms of happiness and sadness isn't the ultimate goal. All of those cultures have an ideal of achieving a completely higher state of existence beyond finitude, beyond human bodies and limits. And in that sense, karma has its difficulties. But it's tied up with the idea of a complete liberation into a higher way of existence.
- [41:24]
B
Well, thank you very much. I'm glad we brought in the word liberation at the appropriate time, which was the end. Thanks to Moni Machata, Jessica Frazier and Karen O'Brien Kopp. Next week, it's Claude Monet in England, the French impressionist's painting of the Thames, its bridges and boats, and Parliament in light filtered through dense fog. Thanks for listening.
- [41:44]
A
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [41:52]
B
What would you like to have said that you felt you didn't have time to say?
- [41:55]
D
So one thing worth emphasizing here is, you know, this seems like a big topic because we are talking about the Indian tradition. I mean, imagine if you had someone here, you talking about the Western tradition, Western philosophy. You couldn't get a discussion going because Indian tradition, like the Western tradition, has many different schools. It's a plural tradition with many different views. There is not one school of Hinduism. Karen mentioned a few schools of Buddhism. There is very many schools. They're continuously arguing with each other. The arguments are leading to new theses and do, new ways of trying to defend the doctrines of karma, reincarnation, transmigration, as well as thinking about liberation, for example. Even that is a big issue in the Indian tradition amongst the Hindus. How do we think about liberation? You know, fine to say we will get out of this cycle of birth and rebirth, but it sounds like suicide. Who would want to aim for something like that? I mean, that's a point that was made. And so then you get, you know, this idea that it will be permanent bliss. Then there are other Hindus, the Nyaya, Vaisheshiks, who says that can't be right? Because then, you know, it will be something that you want not for, you know, the greater good, but for your own betterment. It would be as selfish as anything. What's that got to do with morality? And so they kind of define it. The naive define it as just no more of this life. This life is full of pain and, you know, ups and downs. Sometimes life and death, life and death. You know, this continuous cycle of life and death continues. So in the Hindus, you get both these views. This is permanent bliss, liberation. And you also get the view it is just an attitude of what is called vairagya, or disinterest in the human existence. No more of all this.
- [44:06]
B
Karen, the same question, Mr. Mullingba. Was there something you were bursting to say? You didn't Get a chance to say.
- [44:12]
A
Well, I wanted to talk about some of the philosophical texts that I look at and these kinds of philosophical wranglings that have to be carried out to explain transmigration. And it's particularly difficult for the Buddhist because they have this theory of a non abiding self. So I think what they often resort to is metaphors and analogies and images that help to explain the mechanisms of karma, especially across lifetimes. And these can be really interesting. Dasubandhu, whom Monoman mentioned, talks about a canvas of a future life and the mechanism of karmic transfer into that incarnation is like an artist kind of rapidly sketching out an outline of a future self. And then it's up to the individual to fill this in with all the color and the detail of their actions throughout life. And a Hindu thinker, Patanjali, says, actually it's like a fisherman's net that gets knotted in all kinds of myriad ways. So we have a kind of net of karma that gets cast out into a future life and then captures a kind of new existence for us. But I think what is really interested in the philosophical text is that wrangling in terms of the detail of the mechanism of karmic transfer. And there's a really interesting question that is posed both by Patanjali and Vasubandhu, word for word, it's the same set of questions. And they say, well, does one action determine future rebirths, or does it just shape one rebirth? And is it that there are multiple actions which determine one future rebirth? Or do multiple actions determine multiple future rebirths? And this is a really technical question. And they go into the detail, but they're very seriously invested in understanding karma in what we would now call a naturalistic way.
- [46:06]
C
Jessica it's interesting how much the notion of karma becomes tied up quite quickly with the idea that life is all suffering. You don't find it in the very earliest texts where they talk about there is a cycle, but ultimately when you're done with the cycle, you want to escape to a different realm of some kind. And sometimes it's identified with bliss, or sometimes with being or pure consciousness, sat or cit. And at some point the idea enters that all life is suffering, is innately dissatisfactory and no desire can really be fulfilled. So you have to ultimately escape from all of this. And then there is a huge tradition of trying to understand what it is you're escaping to. Is it simply that you escape to nothingness? Buddhism, some schools talk about shunyatal emptiness. Nothingness is this, as you said, a kind of suicide. Is life so bad that you simply want to end it, or are you escaping to something else? And it's. It's also interesting to think that Europe has at some points a similar kind of a journey of thinking in terms of its Gnostic tradition about whether humans are trying to escape the world because being in this world is innately bad. Is life in the world innately bad and we have to find, or are we trying to make something out of it? Is there something imminent in reality which is worth having? And so that kind of goes on and on in the traditions, and they have to work out, in a sense what it is they think of reality itself and human life and not just this doctrine of karma.
- [47:36]
D
Monima, where does this view about all existence. The view about all existence is suffering. I think, you know, is coming from the Buddhists. It is the First Noble Truth. That's what it says. Existence is suffering. The Second Noble Truth says there's a cause of this suffering. The Third Noble Truth says, you know, suffering can be escaped by getting rid of its causes. And the Fourth Noble Truth gives you this way of how to get rid of suffering. You know, that's the description of the Eightfold Path in Buddhism. So I think that's where the belief that all of this worldly life is suffering comes into being in about the 3rd 4th century BC in the Buddha. That's his first teaching, first sermon to, so to say, of the Buddha is when he lays out the Four Noble Truths. And then later on you get the negative conception of liberation in Nyavashaishik, in Bataya, especially in the first century ad. So I think that's where it's coming from.
- [48:43]
C
Jessica One tiny thing is completely relative to the rest of it. After a while, the culture starts to play with karma and rebirth and make quite fun stories out of it. So it's nice to remember that it's not all kind of bad news, as it were. There's a beautiful set of Buddhist literature called the Jataka stories. They're stories about the previous lives of the Buddha. And we see him in many different forms. He's a woman here, he's a merchant here. All kinds of parts of society and different life stories. And what's fun is seeing alternative realities for the Buddha and how in each case, his fundamental character shows through. And it's actually quite nice because it makes you think about your identity. If you had been born in a different situation, how would your own fundamental character show through? So there's a kind of a moral journey that people can go on simply by thinking through these stories about kind of ultimate lives for each person.
- [49:38]
B
I think we have the producer about to make an entrance.
- [49:41]
C
Does anybody want your coffee?
- [49:43]
B
Yes, a cup of tea? Thank you very much.
- [49:45]
C
If you're making some, I will. Yes. Thank you.
- [49:47]
A
To a cup of tea.
- [49:48]
C
Two tea. Three teas.
- [49:50]
D
Tea. Cool. Thank you very much. Thanks, everybody.
- [49:52]
C
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [50:00]
E
I'm Kavita Puri and in 3 million from BBC Radio 4, I hear extraordinary eyewitness accounts that tell the story for the first time of the Bengal Famine, which happened in British India in the middle of the Second World War. At least 3 million people died. It's one of the largest losses of civilian life on the Allied side. And there isn't a museum, a memorial or even a plaque to those who died. How can the memory of 3 million people just disappear 80 years on, I track down firsthand accounts and make new discoveries and hear remarkable stories and explore why remembrance is so complicated in Britain, India and Bangladesh. Listen to 3 million on BBC Sounds.