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No self and Karma
Jeongjwa
Explorer
While I see and topically comprehend anattā (no-self) and Kamma/Karma (cause and effect) separately, one intersection of these two insights that I find difficult lies in their relationship. Simply:
If there is no permanent self who/what owns the outcomes of the actions?
If there is no intrinsic self, who/what is descending into the womb of the mother upon rebirth?
If there is no self, who/what is seeking rebirth as a bodhisattva?
If there is no self, who/what is going to the pure land?
I'm aware I'm mixing traditions and this may cause some of the confusion, but I'm satisfied with any insight to any of the above questions.
Currently my understanding of the nature of Karma seems to imply something must exist to carry it out. It is as if Karma is momentum and existence itself is water, upon where the waves are rise and fall. The waves are not the water per se, but cannot exist without the water (hope this makes sense).
How can one not exist and yet carry karma between moments/life times/kalpas?
If there is no permanent self who/what owns the outcomes of the actions?
If there is no intrinsic self, who/what is descending into the womb of the mother upon rebirth?
If there is no self, who/what is seeking rebirth as a bodhisattva?
If there is no self, who/what is going to the pure land?
I'm aware I'm mixing traditions and this may cause some of the confusion, but I'm satisfied with any insight to any of the above questions.
Currently my understanding of the nature of Karma seems to imply something must exist to carry it out. It is as if Karma is momentum and existence itself is water, upon where the waves are rise and fall. The waves are not the water per se, but cannot exist without the water (hope this makes sense).
How can one not exist and yet carry karma between moments/life times/kalpas?
0
Comments
the long answer is with the subtle three-fold thought structure of subject, action and object the whole perceptual field of existence/non-existence is constructed.
To put obviously we mistaken the rope for a snake.
Take away the delusion and the whole structures of suffering/liberation, sentient being/buddha fall away.
You're asking the question. You know the one that everyone is actually wondering.
Hate to say this to you, but you gotta sit and practice. And if you set up the right conditions and sometimes its just random luck you break through and just wake up.
Examine nature. Examine your experience. The three marks point to it all.
The Buddha taught that everything you experience through your 6 senses.. is not me, not myself, not mine.. you cannot truly find a me, myself, or mine in anything you look at, is there a self in your hand? your arms? your mind? what is this mind, this consciousness?
what continues on is a stream of consciousness kept alive through craving, it is this stream that continues on to find a new host because it wants to keep craving and living, you need a body to have the 6 senses to have contact to propagate that craving. There is no "you" that continues on, the next life you are not the same person, you may or may not have similarities or tendencies to your previous lives, but in all actuality each new life is a fresh start, to live chasing craving, or to practice dhamma and "get off" so you don't have to come back again.
When you practice and start to develop little insights into anatta, it rocks your world, when you start to see the ego as not me, mine, myself, I feel like you flirt the fine line between schizophrenia and awakening :P.
Karma isn't real exactly for the reason that if it was real then there would be no liberation from suffering. Fortunately it is not real and we can just let go of it. That's what Nagarjuna proposed. I can't find the website where I found this info about 2 years ago. It was a great list of Nagarjuna's philosophical findings.
So my advice is to research Nagarjuna.
Sometimes people talk like they have to realize emptiness in meditation. They say that when you step out of meditation you have to respect karma. Because you could get dragged back into suffering even though suffering is not real.
The newborn and the adult are actually not the same self. But if one views them as the same self, then you reap what you sow makes sense. This sense of self is what drives karma.
In terms of reality, everything is merely cause and effect. Because of constant change, there is really no permanent self. This self is just a false assumption.
There is nothing that carries on to the next life. (Orthodox systems posit a little storage compartment that just holds the seeds of Karma, but that screws up the ever changing anatman part of the theory) So does Buddhism as a system entirely fall apart? Bad actions have consequences in this life, usually. And that is good enough for me, the system doesn't need to be airtight. And I read one effort to salvage the system-- I currently like the idea I read in Tom Pepper's article on Anatman that:
1) We don't have any essential part that is just us. Disassemble us piece by piece, you can't find the part that is the part that makes us us-- i.e. no soul. At this point, sunyata enthusiasts saw, wow! Nothing left-- that's who we are! But you can also look around and say, all those parts, that is *all* that we are made of, don't bother looking for an immortal, reincarnating soul. And that has consequences. Biggest that what ever we spend time on, it should be on the parts that exist, not the part that doesn't exist.
2) The idea can be salvaged with a Buddhist feeling, but probably brand new idea. We participate in a social system, which sort of has a hive mind quality, a collective consciousness. This is sort of like a shared soul (which some Buddhist do appear to believe in), but a collective consciousness doesn't last forever, they get fragmented. If you ever suspect a large organization of people had a mind of it's own, that would be a collective consciousness. And that is the recipient of our good and bad karma. That is the only way we transmit via cause and effect. This collective "soul", for me, is sort of interesting-- very little magic, provides a motivation for ethical, altruistic behavior (what's good for the collective consciousness is good for me, too), but it doesn't entail eternalism. This sort of collective soul involves souless individuals who really die.
Now departing from Tom Pepper's article...
3) I once read Neuromancer-- great Sci-Fi novel, where the author speculated that sufficiently advanced computers would gain AI and in their own AI world operate as demi-gods of a sort. It also suggests an origin for the suspicion that deities exist, they would just be personifications of the "thoughts" of the collective consciousness. I haven't hashed out the details, but it would be a way to use deities/bodhisattvas in practice, but not devotionally (I suppose you could petition the collective consciousness to do something-- take you to paradise, but since it's made up of living individuals, they'd probably all ignore you).
We are the results of our actions and interactions.
There is no permanent self.
Them bones them bones, them dry bones
However the you of tomorrow will experience the consequences of actions carried out by the you of today - and the consequences of actions carried out by all those previous yous.
Does that help?
Karma is nothing but a direction. To take your analogy, if you are the boat, then your actions set the sail and rudder and point you in a particular direction. That direction is your karma. Want to change your karma? Move the sail and change the direction. Where does the old direction go to when you change the karma? Kinda a nonsense question.
There are storms and rocks ahead, but you did not put them there. You did not "create" the consequences, good and bad. If your karma causes you to run aground, you did not create the rock. The universe exists with or without you. You just blundered into it.
But remember, we're not on boats and the universe is not a storm-tossed sea. Except when we are and it is. So what are we?
Mahatanhasankhaya Sutta: The Greater Craving-Destruction Discourse
worth to read