is what i do

Kamma and rebirth

Over at Faith Commons, last week, I made a flippant comment in response to a post by Bill questioning the relationship between the organized Church and the teachings of Jesus, and he challenged my flippancy with a serious request for “a quick list of parallels” between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of the Buddha. I’ve been working on a response to that challenge, which I will post here and there very shortly. But in the course of writing that, what began as a footnote glossing the Buddhist concept of rebirth has turned into something way too long for a footnote, so I’ve made it into a post of its own, and here it goes.

This one is the sticking point for a lot of people. They may find Buddhism appealing for its rationality, its common sense. But then they come to the concept of rebirth and they balk. I did. It took me a lot of study, and a lot of thinking, to come to terms with an idea that I found so improbable, so difficult to reconcile with a doctrine that was in other regards so clear and persuasive. I came to realize that my problem with the Buddhist notion of rebirth was based, as so many of my problems are, on unexamined preconceptions derived from the popular culture in which I’ve grown up. When I heard the term “rebirth”, what filled my mind was more Shirley MacLaine than the Buddha; I associated the concept with all sorts of New Age nonsense, with Doonesbury’s Boopsie channeling Hunk Ra, with Mehitabel’s insistence that she is a reincarnation of Cleopatra. And that, of course, is not what it’s about, at all.

Rebirth, in the Buddhist sense of the word, is not the transmigration of a particular personality, a distinct individual soul, from one body to the next. Personality is transitory, just as the body is. When death takes us, the body disintegrates into its component parts; it is no more. And neither is the personality. I am no more.

So if it’s not “I” that is reborn, then who or what is? That’s where the concept of kamma comes in (Sanscrit karma), another widely misunderstood, and utterly fundamental, concept of Buddhism. Kamma, as I understand it, is the ethical or moral weight of our actions; and, like anything with weight, kamma has momentum: once aroused, it persists until its energy has been spent. There are actions that have neutral kamma. They fall into the “chop wood, carry water” category, to borrow a phrase from a famous zen story. Get up, brush your teeth, have breakfast, get the kids ready for school; take life as life comes, and respond appropriately. Minimal kammic impact from that. But when we try to alter the world to make it as we want it to be, then the actions we take to do that have kammic weight. It may be generally good kamma: we exercise regularly to stay healthy, give generously to help the victims of a natural disaster, take care of our aging parents, talk to our kids about safe sex, weed our gardens, write letters to the editor. If our kammic actions are mostly in such categories, our lives are likely to be generally good, and the goodness spills over to those around us; we’re likely to find lives rich in friendships, enjoy good relationships with our partners, our parents, our kids. Contrariwise, if we behave foolishly, or greedily, or lustfully—if we are constantly attempting to wrestle the world into conformance with our desires and our expectations—then we are likely to live lives filled with frustration and dissatisfaction, abandoned by friends, with dysfunctional families.

There are two important things to understand about kamma and the law that determines kammic action and results.

First, it’s not simple (surprise!) The dynamics of kammic action and result are not just a moral rendition of the law of cause and effect, in which good deeds generate good fortune and evil deeds are punished. (Although they frequently do and are.) Sinners sometimes win the lottery, and a saint may be washed away by a tsunami. One’s deeds do not determine one’s fate in any such direct way. But we can be certain of this: the sinner’s lottery winnings will not bring him lasting happiness, while the saint, observing the advancing wave, will be able to comprehend his imminent death with equanimity.

The second thing to understand about kamma is that kammic energy, while it certain affects us in our current lives, does not dissipate or disappear when those lives end. And it’s not just that the kamma generated by our actions continues to work on those we leave behind (although it does). If we have not abandoned craving completely, with no residue left behind, then the kamma that has marked each one’s life and been shaped by that one’s desires and deeds must, when that life ends, find a new home.

And so the concept of kamma and the concept of rebirth come together.

Almost everyone has pondered, at one time or another, the fact that some people are born with a lot of advantages, while others are born to poverty, chaos, and despair. (Just after I finished writing that last sentence, Bruce and Martha came over to the porch and began working on Martha’s homework, which involved reading aloud a children’s version—Martha is seven—of the story of Anne Frank. Kamma?) In our culture, we shrug our shoulders at such puzzles, accepting “God’s will” as an adequate explanation. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” That’s never worked for me. On the one hand, I’m quite certain that I don’t deserve the grace-filled life that has been mine; on the other hand, it seems impossible that any Being with the least trace of compassion (and God, reportedly, is filled with the stuff) could deliberately inflict such fates on millions of children in Somalia and Sudan (and our own inner cities), or, for that matter, on Anne Frank and the millions of other victims of politics and ideology.

But if I, who am considering such weighty questions, am, in fact, the current possessor of kamma that has been working itself out through many lifetimes (think of a wave, moving across the surface of the ocean; each crest, each trough, is a particular configuration of water molecules, none of which is the wave), then it ceases to be a matter of reward and punishment and becomes, instead, a matter of responsibility and opportunity. The kamma that took birth as me placed me in a situation in which I grew up safe, healthy, well-loved and well-educated; I had a fortunate career that permitted me to pass on many of the benefits I’ve enjoyed to the kammic entities that were born as my children; and I had the opportunity, which is rare in this time and in the history of mankind, to encounter the teachings of a Buddha. Now, when I die, if I can face death with courage and a measure of equanimity, and if my deeds in this life have been generally skillful (in the Buddhist sense, i.e. generating good kamma), then the kamma that I have inherited and, in my turn, shaped through my desires and actions, will take new birth in an equally fortunate realm. That is the responsibility I bear. If I deny that responsibility, turn my back on the wise teachings to which I’ve been exposed, grasp at sensual pleasures, rage at the inevitability of an end to this life, then my kamma will experience rebirth in a lower realm.

And when an Anne Frank, experiencing hatefulness, witnessing the brutal death of friends and family, facing the inevitability of her own end, can still preserve a hopefulness, a lovingness, a calm, then her good kamma will take rebirth in a better life. That is the opportunity that the nature of kamma and rebirth holds out to even the least fortunate beings.

We won’t be around to see it, Anne or I, but our efforts in our lives to behave well, to still our passions, will not have been in vain. In fact, they may lead, eventually, over many more lifetimes, to nibbana (Sanscrit nirvana)—the final dampening of the kammic momentum and the end of rebirth and the dukkha (suffering, dissatisfaction, distress) that is an inevitable concomitant of all births, even the most noble. But that’s another topic, for another essay.

In case you are wondering, all this speculation is not Orthodox Buddhism. I’m not even sure that there is such a thing. Rather, what I have tried to share is my attempt to make sense of notions that, on the one hand, are central to a tradition in which I’ve found almost nothing but wisdom and rationality, and, on the other, seem so unlikely, on so many levels. I’m more or less satisfied with the sense I’ve made of those notions, kamma and rebirth. My understanding has the benefit of explaining something that has always puzzled me—the differential fortunes with which we are born. And if it is not a scientifically rigorous explanation, that’s OK; I have perfect faith that no scientific theory will ever be developed that adequately explains the luck of the draw. And my understanding of kamma and rebirth does not demand, in any way, the abandonment of any established scientific theories or of the methods of thought, experiment, and discussion that have been developed to evaluate such theories.