[Buddha-l] more tibetan self-immolations

[Christopher Fynn]

On 12/01/2012, Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> wrote:
> On Jan 12, 2012, at 8:37 AM, Franz Metcalf <franz at mind2mind.net> wrote:
>
>> If the idea of an individual's karmic stream (as in, "Who or what is
>> reborn?") is difficult to grasp, even paradoxical, surely the idea of
>> collective karma is much more so. So difficult to grasp, in fact, that it
>> might not be worth the effort, at least to me. Has anyone done serious
>> work on this topic?
>
> In his excellent article on the history of the doctrine of karma, in the
> Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wilhelm Haldfass wrote that the
> doctrine of collective karma, national karma, racial karma und so weiter
> dates back to the 19th century and has a Theosophical provenience. Once the
> idea was brought up, it found favor among various stripes of nationalists
> and social reformers. I guess if anyone can believe in nations and ethnicity
> as ontological realities, it's not too much of a stretch to believe that
> those entities can be agents and that their actions have consequences that
> the agents are somehow affected by. Hell, the US Supreme Court seems to have
> decided that corporations are legally entitled to at least some of the
> rights of individuals. Perhaps we should let Justices Roberts, Scalia,
> Allito and Thomas decide whether Exxon-Mobile has karma. They are surely as
> qualified as any svāmī or bla-ma to weigh in on such weighty matters.
>
> Richard Hayes

Perhaps I'm wrong - but I thought the Jains hold some notion of
collective karma and collective soul in groups of beings e.g. a flock
of birds.