[Buddha-l] karma and consequences

[Jayarava]

--- On Mon, 16/3/09, jkirk <jkirk at spro.net> wrote:

> I am citing this bit only as an example of the requital that many 
> revisionist Buddhists today may view as a phantasmagoria. And, in this
> respect, I doubt that such requital effects are what keeps
> today's non-Asian Buddhists on the path of sila.

As a revisionist I would see this more positively as allegorical, methodological, and pedagogical; not as phantasmagorical. When you look more broadly you see the Buddha taking whatever motivated people at the time (be it rituals, austerities, superstitions, or whatever) and redefining the goal of such things in ethical terms (I wax lyrical about this in my JBE article). A classic example is "ethical purity" which comes directly from "ritual purity" something which obsessed not only Brahmins, but also Jains. By redefining the goal, but retaining their original emotional engagement, he harnesses the enormous momentum of their traditional beliefs to the new, or redefined goals. He often does not seek to change their minds - we started this discussion with the Kālāma Sutta after all. I think the Buddha was confident that any residual legacy views would fade away under the glare of practice. 

Karma was quite simply the most prevalent religious idea in Magadha at the time, and rather than oppose it, the Buddha redefined it. This made the Dharma far more ehipassiko than it might have been had he merely rubbished the opposition. Which is not to say that there are no polemics, but the audience for these seems most often to be other "professional" ascetics who were picking fights over theories anyway. 

The point of the Buddha's program was not to instil new views, but to get people to practice. As I've said: reading the Pāli and looking around at my peers it seems clear to me that what you believe (either implicitly or explicitly) is less important than that you practice, since the latter will always shed light on the former.

Regards
Jayarava