A while ago I wrote about how wars may come and go, but conflicts and hatred do not go away, and no one changes their mind, after watching an episode of La Guerra E Finita. After learning the original concept of karma, it appears that, again, the ancient Indians had thought about it before. Maybe they had thought about everything.
I am not sure whether the common understanding of karma could be credited to the Buddhist definition of karma, ie, a moralistic understanding of good and bad, reward and punishment. Indeed, I have heard many times that one's suffering and misfortune in the current life is the result (or perhaps "payment") of having done wrong in the past life, like eating meat or harming people, while good fortune is a reward for having done good things in the past life, like being vegetarian. The idea is to encourage (?) people to do good in the current life to ensure a better life next time, lest one comes back as a worm or a donkey or something.
But the definition of karma in the Yoga Sutras or the Sankya school of philosophy is apparently not so judgmental or ... shall we say, Pavlovian. According to the commentaries collected in the book, karma refers to the endless chain of events that is linked by consequence. One action leads to the next, and the next to the next, and on and on. The Indian mythology is less interested in the origin of everything, when and how the world was created (although there is no lack of origin myths there) than in the perpetuation of change and flutters. What we are doing now has an endless chain of cause and effect before and after us. One could argue, for example, that in 1787, the colonies failed to reach an agreement to abolish slavery or, perhaps more precisely, agreed to preserve slavery as a union, and that occurrence has created an endless chain of consequences that stretches into today and may never end ... until climate change redraws the world map, maybe.
This is a way of looking at any history, from macro to personal, as a continuum that extends beyond major historical events or one's own lifespan. The idea of reincarnation, or samsara, seems scientifically absurd, unless you view it as a metaphor to describe the continuity running through generations. Indeed, the action of one generation reverberates into the next generation, and the next generation into the next, and so on, vastly overwhelming the random de novo mutations. This is karma, and it is a much more accurate description of reality than the "big story"-based theory of humanity in time.
It seems to me that the episodic and event-based view of history (again, it could be either macro or personal) is easier to create and easier to digest for the vast majority of us near-sighted and feeble-minded average people. I don't know what it was about the ancient Indian thinkers that allowed them to come up with such astute and profound insight into the human existence. Maybe wisdom passed down from aliens? (I kid! I kid!)
Being educated in the feeble-minded non-Indian cultures, I have spent much energy and effort in my life to understand how and why we got to this place and where we originally came from (thanks, Jared Diamond!), as if understanding the series of logical links that make me who and where I am can free me from the chain (pun intended but all credits to the Indians) of karma. But the Indians were right: In the subjective experience of an individual, there is no beginning and no end, only a series of consequences within the limits of one life. The ripples of all the karma that led to my life are practically unknowable to me, and so are the ripples of all the karma I am generating, flowing into the future and beyond, mixed with countless other ripples.
The Yoga Sutras contains some vague advice about diminishing the effect of karma within this life and for the next life, such as eating vegetarian food and being nice, or you can devote your life to worshipping a god (but it didn't specify which one, Shiva? Vishnu? Parvati?), which are hardly as specific or didactic as the "donate money now or you come back as a fly" school of persuasion. Rather, the emphasis is on the practice of yoga. This practice of yoga, which Patanjali talks about over and over, is to recognize and experience how the body and mind, thoughts and feelings, the whole lot, is a shell, and even when you shed all of them, there still exists a white light of one's essence, a singular life force completely independent of the shell, that glows on its own energy. (Interestingly, Buddhism does not believe in purusa, but I don't know the details.) What does that mean? I have no idea, but I like it.
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