[Buddha-l] Bangladesh Muslim lovefest

[Richard Hayes]

On Oct 2, 2012, at 1:44 AM, "Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Vasubandhu's Vimsika propounds collective karma.

I have read that text ten or twelve times and have never seen the passage to which you refer. Could you supply the reference?

The karma chapter of the Abhidharmakośa has been discussed here before. The opening claim, that the entire physical world is the ripening of the karma of all the countless sentient beings, could be taken as an endorsement of collective karma, but saying the the whole world is the consequence of the karma of all sentient beings is a far cry from saying that a particular subset of the entirety of sentient beings has a collective karma. 

I have been pretty strongly resistant to the notion of collective karma, as I have said many times before, since hearing a talk by a Tibetan Buddhist who used as his example the extermination of Jews in Europe as a case of the ripening of the collective karma of a people. That seemed to me not just an ill-chosen example but a deep failure to understand the principle that a samāsa cannot have arthakriyāsamartha.

Speaking of karma, has anyone read Owen Flanagan's book in which he makes a case for "naturalized" Buddhism, by which he means a Buddhism purged of the superstitions of karma and rebirth? His claim is that naturalized Buddhism has a good deal to offer the modern world that conventional Buddhism cannot offer because it has too many dogmas that cannot be sustained in the light of critical thinking and scientific investigation. Me makes an excellent case of that thesis, and along the way asks whether "tamed" Buddhism (as he sometimes calls it) still deserves to be called Buddhism. The answer, in a nutshell, is that if vajrayāna and Zen deserve to be called Buddhism, then so does modern karma-free Buddhism.

It will be interesting to see whether the Buddhist Taliban declares a fatwa on Professor Flanagan.

Richard Hayes