Despite a widespread interpretation of “karma” as a kind of fatalism, just the opposite is at the heart of the notion: conscious shaping of natural desire, moral responsibility, and freedom. Karma (karman in Sanskrit) is a rich concept, having ramifications for ethics, epistemology, and philosophical psychology as well as metaphysics, according to practically all the schools of classical India. Through Buddhism, karma theory is also developed in Tibetan and Chinese philosophy. For our contemporary Yoga, the sense of “karma” in “karma yoga,” the yoga of action, is particularly important, since it is central to the Gita and other early yogic texts. Karma yoga is the topic of the third section of this chapter. First, I shall pursue the idea’s causal and cognitive sides in the broad terms of philosophic psychology. The Yoga Sutra, for one, shows less concern for the ethics of karma than for the psychological underpinnings of karma in dispositions, samskara.
In the second section, I turn to karma’s ethical dimension, looking at karma theory within the context of what philosophers call virtue ethics and the problem of self-development—including yoga practice—which is only one of several duties. Separate duties may possibly conflict. However, in the classical karma teaching, ethical push (What’s in it for me to be moral?) is said to converge with ethical pull (What is it about others that makes them worthy of moral treatment?), in that one has special responsibility for and to one’s future self. This is perhaps the most important dimension of the karma concept. The best possibility, it is said, is to become an ahimsika, one who practices ahimsa, nonharmfulness. This is viewed as the highest virtue/duty on some Yoga theories, or as presupposed in what is best and central, as in the Buddhist extolling of compassion and friendliness (karuna and maitri).
The third section takes up the karma yoga teaching of the Gita and its call to disinterested action, and begins to look more closely at the social dimension of karma teaching. In the fourth and final section, karma and rebirth are reviewed as doctrines of moral justice, along with the theistic view that uses them to defend the notion of God’s benevolence in the face of evil.
All four sections of the chapter are concerned with the best presentations of karma theory among Yoga philosophers—and indeed try to improve upon them—not with comic-book ideas prevalent in popular culture.1
The word karman in Sanskrit has multiple meanings. The most basic is action, anything that we do. Ritual action or sacrifice is a second, narrower usage that is picked up in the Gita’s karma yoga teaching, as will be explained. For the moment, let us ignore the Gita’s sense to focus on the third, habit, broadly understood, probably the most important meaning for Yoga.
Everything we do creates habits. Our karma is comprised of the habits we have acquired. Habits condition desires. We act in certain ways with expectations of the normal fruits. Now desires may be by nature, occurring willy-nilly (though Buddhists, for one, tend to deny that anything is willy-nilly). Habits, however, clearly are our own responsibility, or our culture’s,2 which we assimilate, or not, as individuals. Though habits shape future action, we create them in part through current choice and enactment. We endorse desires and their expressions through choice, making or reaffirming habitual patterns. Karma in the sense of the habits we have acquired determines what we are prone to do. We can make new karma, or new bits of karma, in changing what we are prone to do.
Nevertheless, as used in Yogic texts, Sanskrit karman is not the equivalent of “habit” as used in English. Karman is, at least in some usages, a collective noun, like “water” in English. We can say that there is a sum total around a single soul or person of bits of karma, and speak of someone’s karma as a whole. Unfortunately for translators, we cannot say the same of a person’s habits. (The sum of a person’s habits could be called her character.) The words “habits” and “karma” are therefore not synonyms. For habits necessarily individuate, like rivers or ruts.
I propose, then, to use “karma” as an English word. Indeed, “karma” is an English word, long ago anglicized. In our usage, karma can be spoken of as a generalized line of action (“Murder is bad karma”), but, as mentioned, it can also be summed up. The moral worth of karma both aggregates like buckets of water poured into a tub and individuates with respect to certain acts; for example, a single act of murder has its own karmic repercussions, no matter how good the overall score.3 The “moral payback” dimension of the theory to be examined in the third and fourth sections relies on both aspects. A particular rebirth depends on the aggregate, according to the mainstream theories, but there are also individual lines of karma, i.e., habits, that are said to continue. It is held that some become so deeply entrenched that they reemerge in the next birth as talents or deep dispositions, as will be discussed. The soul is not a tabula rasa, according to Yoga.
A person’s habits are maintained subconsciously—Yoga theorists are largely in accord here—through things called traces or dispositions, samskara, more literally, that which makes fit, a being-preparedness. These are in part, though not entirely, conditional formulas impressed on the mind or even the brain—let us leave open for the moment their precise location (in the body or bodies we inhabit simultaneously, physical, pranic, mental, etc., according to Vedantic and tantric psychology).
In the simple conception of the Yoga Sutra (YS), formulas shape “mind-stuff,” chitta, which also has a vital side,4 to constitute samskara. In other words, mental dispositions have both a mental and a pranic or vital side—the latter an energy vector or coloring characterized as “sattvic,” “rajasic,” and/or “tamasic,” the modes or gunas of the psychology of the YS as well as of the Gita and other texts. The three words represent the traditional theory of natural “strands” of which mind-stuff is composed: sattva, intelligence and clarity, rajas, passion and energy, and tamas, obscurity and inertia. This is a universal and natural inheritance. Specific formations are determined by choice and practice.
Other schools build on these ideas. In Nyaya, for instance, not all samskara are psychological. Something with elasticity or impetus, for example, a falling rock, is said to possess samskara as a physical property, something like potential energy.5 Psychological samskara, like those that have only physical effects, are not perceived, at least not normally perceived, but rather posited to explain things perceived, like the measles virus that was postulated to explain measles long before it was microscopically identified. These mental dispositions, sometimes called traces or impressions, constitute the subconscious vehicles of karma and are considered causal factors for a range of psychological phenomena, including remembering and any activity guided by what we have learned. Thus karma includes training, and samskara are the dispositions we acquire by learning how to do all the things we do, from speaking to asanas.
According to classical philosophers across schools, mental dispositions are formed by perceptions and other cognitive occurrences, including intentions and efforts to act along with actions. Training involves repetition and a kind of circularity, a disposition required to know what to do and the same disposition reinforced by the doing. For example, writing your name requires memory of the name, and the doing of the writing reinforces the memory. The same goes for our ability to recognize something that we have perceived previously (“This is that Devadatta I saw yesterday” is the stock example in classical texts). Thus samskara—a very broad idea in the Sanskrit philosophical lexicon—function to maintain both cognitive continuity and bodily skills.
Though samskara are theoretic entities, the theory is nevertheless broadly empiricist, much like the empiricism of David Hume’s “impressions.”6 A simple version with respect to cognitive occurrences runs: a perception indicating a tree as as a banyan produces a samskara that when aroused helps to bring about a remembering, an effort, or another psychological event with the same indication (a banyan tree). Perception is the premier cognitive link with everything known, according to almost all Yoga traditions; yogic perception is an extraordinary knowledge source nonetheless reliable in connecting us to inner realities (see the third section of chapter 4 on the epistemology of yogic perception). Yoga philosophy is therefore empiricist. But not everything we know is a matter of the immediately given. To know objects around us, samskara—mental dispositions—make inference and other modes of knowledge, such as testimony, possible. As indicated, these dispositions are themselves known indirectly (that is, by ordinary folk—some yogins can directly perceive samskara, according to the YS 3.18 and commentaries) by the knowledge source called postulation (arthapatti), according to some. According to others, they are known by inference. Again, they are posited to explain memory, expectation, fulfillment, frustration, and other cognitive continuities. Accordingly, there are many types of mental samskara.
Beyond this simple theory—and especially concerning the metaphysics of samskara—there is quite a lot of diversity of opinion in classical texts. Buddhists conceive of samskara as causal continua,7 whereas Vedic traditions tend to think of them as marks or relational properties, stamps or impressions resting in the self or soul, or in the chitta—in any case, in a substance. But practically all contributors to Yoga philosophy—Patanjali and company, Vedantins, Buddhists, Nyaya philosophers, Jainas, tantrics, and others—theorize about subconscious samskara. They form psychological bridgework. Whether it be something in this lifetime or something in a previous lifetime that is being remembered currently, we are not directly aware of the vehicles of remembering, and we do not constantly hold before our minds information acquired in the past. Yet the information is retrievable, like patterns or programs in a computer. Dispositions, samskara, comprise the storage bank. Some samskara are stored in the physical body, but not all. Otherwise, it would be impossible to remember incidents in previous lifetimes or, indeed, have any kind of karmic continuity from one life to the next.
Such mental dispositions are also considered by most of the classical theorists to be vehicles of desire and impulses to act. Our habits have an affective and motivational side. We are born beings of hunger and thirst, sexual desire, who want to survive, and so on. Often we endorse these basic drives when we act. Yoga teaches that in principle will trumps desire, and Jaina traditions in particular show that a person can commit suicide (i.e., bodily suicide, not elimination of the self) by not eating. The motivational and affective side of the theory is perhaps the most interesting. But let us concentrate a little more first on the cognitive side of samskara as presupposed in knowledge and action. Here we may again turn to Nyaya.
Veridical cognitions shape the mental vehicles that guide unhesitating effort and action, action that we expect to be in accord with our desires. A person can be lucky and get what she wants guided by a false belief, but, generally speaking, success requires knowledge and knowledge requires beliefs formed by genuine knowledge sources.8 For example, a perception of a pot forms a disposition to remember it, which, when triggered in an actual remembering, would prompt—given desire to drink—unhesitating effort and action, to fetch the thing. Thus the notion of justified true belief so central to millennia of Western epistemology has much in common with, in classical Indian philosophy, that of samskara formed by veridical cognitions that are the results of knowledge sources, perception, and the rest.9 Our habits include our beliefs, which are maintained by samskara.
Note, furthermore, the importance of samskara to explain perceptual illusion (as well as other types of cognitive error), what classical Yoga philosophers call pseudo-perception (pseudo-testimony, etc.). For example, a person apparently sees a snake when the thing in front of him is really a rope. We can imagine that from the subject’s own perspective the object seems alive. In other words, that the thing is a snake seems to be given perceptually. But at work would be a samskara that under normal conditions would prompt a remembering and in the deviant conditions of perceptual error has fused into the current pseudo-perception a snakehood bit of intentionality. (I use here a philosophic term of art to translate the Sanskrit vishayata, which is more literally objecthood.) The person’s nonveridical cognition has misplaced intentionality (vishayata); it presents something (the rope) not as what it is (a snake).10 This object-hood, this misplaced intentionality or content comes from samskara.
Similarly, people perceive a piece of distant sandalwood as fragrant, having actual sense data of the smell though the wood is too far away for connection with the olfactory organ of the body, located in the nose.11 Such phenomena show dramatically that the mind can retrieve sensory information and project it into current experience. The process is made possible by samskara, which make acquired information available later.
Classical Yoga epistemology is dominated by a causal picture, a view of processes that result in veridical cognition, and samskaras are important causal factors. The gods and goddesses perceived yogically, for example, in occult experience are considered realities—Buddhism and Buddhist-influenced texts such as the eleventh-century Yoga-vashishta aside—and real contact with them viewed as responsible for the experiences. Similarly, samskaras play a role in intentional action, whether in the physical universe or other worlds. Cognitions informed by samskaras guide action, and conversely we make samskaras by what we do. This holds in general. A common biological inheritance is individuated through karma. According to Nyaya’s interactive dualism, we carve out individual selves by choices and intentions to do, including choices made in previous lives. We make our own peculiar habits, which are both good and bad, and include, potentially, dispositions—so Yogic texts emphasize—to practice yoga and, indeed, to maintain the practice into the next lifetime—in the famous soul-making conception of the Gita (6.40–45; see appendix B)—if we do not reach the goal in this one.
Yoga theists and tantrics have a picture of self-determination that begins with God’s emitting the Goddess (devi, shri), who gives birth to and nurtures individual determinations that are, to reverse the image, determinations from the top, that is to say, not the result of karma created by us but divine self-determinations. Shiva lets forth Shakti, who manifests herself as us and all the things of the world. This world picture makes karma less important than it is in—to pick just one school—Mimamsa, Exegesis, the school most devoted to interpretation of the Vedas and therefore to understanding the fundamental principles of language. Mimamsakas see karma as absolutely central to the constitution of the universe, transcending the gods and the goddesses (there is no single supreme person on this view).
But although dismissive of karma by Mimamsaka lights, the tantric view of divine self-determination has plenty of room for determinations we make. Here the creatrix seems a lot like the logos or divine mind of Western theology, and karma fills in the forms. Instead of everything coming up from below and a conception of common karma of the human species and so forth, on this competing conception, certain patterns—like Plato’s Forms—would be imposed from the top.12
In the YS, Patanjali uses the idea of samskara to explain the training whereby one becomes capable of sustaining the deepest trance, which is, according to him, the ultimate goal of yoga practice from a psychological perspective. Patanjali’s ideal is of a person who does not lose consciousness while asleep and indeed maintains yogic trance, samadhi, at all times. This is only possible through the yogin’s having created samadhi dispositions (samskara) from previous days (and indeed previous lives). Then through the attraction of the dualist metaphysics, Patanjali has these special meditational dispositions not only block other samskara firings but also, so to say, burn themselves up, self-destruct, leaving no seed (YS 1.51). In other passages, the YS says that we have to learn not to trigger samskara firings as well as not to be distracted by current firings triggered by whatever cause. This is an important theme throughout the text.13
In everyday life, many triggers of projection and memory are ordinarily not under our control. So it is easy to see the logic of Patanjali’s teaching. In the YS, yoga practices are all about acquiring control, the special concern being control of thought and emotion, with the ability to hold quiet mental chatter. Before moving on to the ethical dimensions of the karma conception, let me fill out a bit further, with respect to samskara, the picture in the YS of the yogin who has perfect control.
In consonance with his or her learning to hold still all fluctuations of mentality (chitta-vritti-nirodha, YS 1.2), a yogin learns to be able to check the firings of samskara. However, the checking itself is a conscious act, creating or reinforcing a samskara of silence. At some point, a last samskara firing fires at itself and burns itself up, freeing the consciousness to attend only to consciousness. Note that all the action occurs—in consonance with the faulty metaphysics of dualism discussed in the previous chapter—on the side of nature, prakriti. It has nothing, ultimately, to do with what we are, with ourselves as the authors of our acts, even our acts of concentration. The YS identifies kaivalya, the aloneness of the individual consciousness, with the psychological notion of “seedless trance,” nirbija samadhi (YS 1.51 and 3.8), “trance without any seed [of a samskara that would force one back to the waking state].” Ultimately, conscious effort is not what carries one to kaivalya. Only prakriti, in arising without distorting subliminal “seeds,” has the ability to do this.
Different views are presented in Vedanta and still other views in Buddhism. Briefly, on all Yoga philosophies, samskara are talked about in connection with being able to sustain concentration and achieve occult powers or siddhis. These in turn connect with conceptions of the goal or goals of yoga, including views about a supreme personal good. Every school’s explanation of a summum bonum is peculiar to the particular school, and thus samskara are thought of ultimately in accordance with preconceived ideas about the fundamental nature of reality.
Abhinava Gupta, for example, a famous tantric of the Kashmiri Shaivite movement who lived around 950 (see the introduction to appendix D), sees the self, the true or highest self, atman, as potentially active and as originating samskara in primordial creative acts. Divine samskara are, in this tantric conception, instantiated in the mudra, the gestures, the mantras, the words said, the facial expressions, the postures of the yogin in identification with Shiva in mystic trance (samadhi).14 Psychologically, the picture is of a tabula rasa upon which Shiva himself writes, a tablet wiped clean of obfuscating samskara by yoga, in which Shiva embeds a divine samskara, a seal with magical power to bring those who imitate it, repeat it, or otherwise align with it to taste themselves the sweetness of the trance dance of Shiva’s pulsation, spanda.
Similarly, in the Gita Krishna teaches that Brahman, the Absolute, is active, making dharma (patterns of right action) without making karma in some sense, though there is no explicit mention of samskara. Whole traditions of Vedantins seem to think that samskara make up the body, the subtle body, that is, the sukshma sharira, of the transmigrating soul, even though the relation between self-consciousness, or atman, and the reincarnating individual is conceived very differently by Advaitins and by Vedantic theists (and the theists themselves hardly agree).
Despite all the diversity of connecting theory, everyone holds that your acts as well as your experiences make up a large part of who you are and who you will be in future births, even though some factors, such as self-awareness, are given from above, being self-determinations, according to some theorists. On all views, dispositions, samskara, provide crucial connections in terms of information and tendencies to act.
Buddhists embrace largely these same views, though, as mentioned, Buddhist philosophers see samskara as causal continua, in contrast with Hindu or Vedic views (of Vedantins, Nyaya philosophers, etc.) of samskara as properties of a self or a substance. Buddhists for their part eschew all notions of enduring substances and thus weave into their psychologies of samskara commitments to doctrines of momentariness and “no-self.” The question of what survives death will be taken up in chapter 4. There too we shall survey the Buddhist–Nyaya controversy about personal identity (What makes the present person continuous with the person she was in the past?) And we shall revisit translife identity in the very last section of chapter 5.
Finally, a historical note on the ethical dimensions of karma theory. The karma idea first appears in the Upanishads, where the main point seems to be that virtue is its own reward. This holds for this lifetime and our reincarnations. A passage from the Brihadaranyaka (c. 800 B.C.E.), 3.2.10:
“Yajnavalkya,” said he [Jaratkarava], “when the voice of a dead man goes into fire, his breath into wind, his eye into the sun, his mind into the moon, his hearing into the quarters of earth, his body into the earth, his soul (atman) into space, the hairs of his head into plants, the hairs of his body into trees, and his blood and semen are placed in water, what then becomes of this person (purusha)?”
“Artabhaga, my dear, take my hand. We two only will know of this. This is not for us two to speak of in public.”
The two went away and deliberated. What they said was karma. What they praised was karma. Verily, one becomes good by good action, bad by bad action.15
Jaratkarava’s question targets personal survival, and the answer seems to be that only karma survives. The word used for “person” is purusha, which connotes the fully particular individual, whereas the dead man’s atman (“self” would be a better translation than “soul”) is said to merge into ether, akasha, translated above as “space.” As in the later Katha Upanishad (see appendix A), the question of survival concerns the person as an individual, not as the cosmic self, atman. Anticipating the Buddhist positions of no-self and karmic continuity, the Upanishad identifies karma as key to a translife personal identity. It is also the most important element in the composite that makes up the living man or woman. Karma can be good or bad, including, presumably, the karma that shapes a subsequent birth: “Verily, one becomes good by good action, bad by bad action.”
Thus samskara are conceived to underpin an appeal to self-interest that is a foundation of morality. What’s wrong with being a thief? Well, your choice to be a thief binds you to being a thief, a karmic pattern that determines what you’ll be like tomorrow and next month and next year and in a decade.16 But the body ages and dies, and strategies to make life as pleasant as possible might prudentially include thievery. Against this, the Upanishadic idea is its rebirth teaching. Imagine determining yourself unendingly, choosing to be a thief not only in this lifetime but into another and endless incarnations. Contrast this with one who acts now compassionately and begins to become forever compassionate. Which would one want to be?
Then there is a second consideration: put crudely, payback, future pain and suffering or future pleasure and happiness. In the Buddhist conception, some karma leads to stable experiences of happiness while other leads to pain, and, unlike in the theistic view where God guarantees the justice of payback, it happens as natural law. Mimamsa has a similar theory. In endless rebirths, not only are you stuck with what you are but also, if you are a legitimate target, watch out, for in beginningless transmigration it’s guaranteed, in either this or another body.
The Upanishadic claim that yoga leads to discovery of a universal self, atman, is taken to have ethical implications, in particular that we should practice ahimsa, nonharmfulness (also translated “noninjury” and “nonviolence”17). Similarly, the ubiquity of sentience in Jaina cosmology and the universal accessibility of nirvana in Buddhism are said to necessitate an ethics of ahimsa, according to both classical and modern authorities. And the list of five “social restraints” (yama) in the Yoga Sutra begins with nonharmfulness (YS 2.30: see appendix C). No one can say that only her preferred metaphysics entails ahimsa, but each of several positions seems sufficient to justify, motivate, and explain the practice. My own view is that the ethics of Yoga can be constructed independently from Yoga metaphysics. (Buddhists too tend to take this position about the relation between ethics and metaphysics.) But it is instructive to review the ways previous Yoga philosophies have found a relation between the deep nature of ourselves and reality and prescriptions about what we should and should not do. In practically all Yoga philosophies, ethics begins with ahimsa.18
Yoga and practice of ahimsa are said to have, furthermore, a converse side, fearlessness, namely, transcendence of life’s evils. We also learn this first in the Upanishads. The Isha (c. 500 B.C.E.) makes the connection with yogic self-discovery in a common theme: realization of a cosmic self (atman) brings freedom from sorrow. Verse 7: “Those who see all beings as in the self alone / And the self in all beings, henceforth do not recoil (from anything). / For whom all beings are known as just self, / For him how can there be delusion? How can there be grief? / For he sees (everywhere) unity.”19 There is only the single self, the knowledge of which banishes fear and grief.20 Conversely, we practice ahimsa, trying to see others as ourself or having the same self as we.
From the Gita (6.32): “Who sees through the lens of likeness to self the same everywhere, Arjuna, whether pleasure and happiness or pain and suffering, that yogin is deemed the very best.” The commentary by Shankara (c. 700 C.E., the oldest and most important classical interpreter) takes the words “pain and suffering” to mean the pain and suffering of others, who dislike it just as one dislikes one’s own pain and suffering. Similarly with the favorable attitudes of all toward pleasure and happiness. Shankara:
As to me pleasure is desired, so to all beings with breath pleasure is agreeable.… And as what pain or suffering is mine is disagreeable, disliked, in that way for all beings with breath pain and suffering are disliked, disagreeable. So it is explained that one who, seeing the same in all beings, sees through the lens of likeness to self pleasures and pains as similarly regarded by all, well, such a person does not do anything disagreeable to anyone, becoming an ahimsika, one who desires no harm—this is the verse’s meaning. The one who is in this way an ahimsika, firmly settled in a vision of equality, is deemed (i.e., considered) the very best yogin, preeminent among all.21
In line with Advaita Vedanta metaphysics, Shankara interprets the self mentioned here and elsewhere in the Gita as identical in everyone. The discipline to be practiced to realize it includes seeing others as like oneself. Thus Shankara and hosts of later Vedantic interpreters, including of rival subschools, tie the practices of ahimsa to both a yogic goal and a conception of commonality, or identity, of consciousness.
Jainas, like Buddhists, reject Vedanta and the institutions of Hinduism, but not of course yoga practices or ahimsa. According to Jaina doctrine, everything is sentient. There is a hierarchy of consciousness, some beings having only a single sense faculty, two, three, and so on. Human beings have eleven sense faculties: five external senses of knowledge and five more of action, along with manas, the inner sense, and buddhi, rational intelligence. There is a corresponding hierarchy in the prescription of ahimsa. Since a goat or a cow has, like us, eleven sense organs (counting manas but not buddhi), it is not just monks and nuns who should try not to harm such a creature. But, unlike the rest of us, a monk or nun makes effort not to harm anyone in any fashion, for she or he aspires for perfection, or the supreme good, immediately. A householder, in contrast, is not expected to aspire for the supreme good in this lifetime but only for the good karma that will ensure a similarly situated reincarnation. Thus a householder need not practice extreme ahimsa, while monks and nuns are enjoined to radical restraint, e.g., wearing masks not to harm even insects.
Within Buddhism, ethical injunctions, although thought of as standing on their own, are at least implicitly supported by a metaphysics of interconnectedness. The doctrine is especially prominent in northern Buddhism or Mahayana—the “Great Vehicle” (“great” because it is to carry all sentient beings to awakening and bliss)—which emerged in approximately the first century B.C.E. and spread throughout northern Asia (Tibet, China, Korea, Japan). In Sanskrit the position is, more precisely, pratitya-samutpada, interdependent origination: everything is born under the influence of everything else and influences everything.22
Perhaps the most interesting argument for ahimsa draws on the idea of likeness of self that we have seen in Shankara’s interpretation of the Gita, where there is no explicit appeal to self-interest. But prudential reasons are also given. Both types of argument are found throughout the long and expansive history of Indian thought. First the prudential reasoning, which has two parts, a high road and a low road.
The high road is the view that by developing the virtue of ahimsa one becomes fit for supreme felicity, the supreme personal good, parama purushartha. Every classical view of a summum bonum is continuous with every other, the goals conceptualized as self-realization, liberation from rebirth, enlightenment, immortal bliss, nirvana, and so on. Despite the variety, practices of ahimsa were and are almost universally considered to have instrumental value for the ultimate good. One must practice ahimsa to achieve the best for oneself. Nonharmfulness is yoga.
On the high road the prudential is argued not to be just a matter of self-interest: in seeking the supreme good, concern for self and concern for others coincide. Although the summum bonum is personal, it has social value: the liberated (enlightened) act for the benefit of everyone, “to hold together the worlds,” in the phrase of the Gita. A buddha’s career after enlightenment is to serve (seva).
The low road relies on the teaching that virtue is its own reward—an Upanishadic thesis that all Yoga philosophies accept, including, in a modified form, tantrics and Vedantic theists. Each of us is responsible for making ourselves the people we are and will become. This is one side of the truth of karma. Now the best sort of person into which to make oneself, both now and in lives to come, is a person who practices ahimsa.
Karma also involves payback or justice. We get what we deserve, whether in this or another incarnation. Thus we should practice nonharmfulness in order to avoid suffering on our own part. The cosmos, in its laws of reincarnation, embodies principles of moral retribution, whether explained, as in Mahayana Buddhism, as due to interconnectedness (pratitya-samutpada) or, within Vedantic theism, as God’s justice or, in other views, as simply an autonomous and impersonal cosmic force (adrishta, the unseen force).
In support of these lines of prudential reasoning, an analogy to expert testimony is drawn. As only an expert craftsperson has the capacity to judge precisely what is good within the domain of the craft, only a person who is himself or herself of good character is an expert on character. Yogins and yoginis practice ahimsa, sometimes in extreme forms. These people are the experts, wise about the good. One makes oneself like them by behaving as they do.
Then there is the content of the expert testimony, the words of the yogins and their spokespersons, of Mahavira and the Buddha and Krishna. Of course, as we have seen, a person would not be regarded as an accomplished yogin (at least not genuinely accomplished, a true yogin or yogini) if he or she were not to practice ahimsa.23 Nevertheless, by analogy to any expertise, the circularity is not vicious, so it stands that, as taught by the moral experts, we should practice ahimsa.
In a second broad group of arguments, nonharmfulness is defended by an idea of likeness of self, atman, as we have seen with Shankara’s interpretation of the Gita. Jainas, however, probably should be credited for innovating the line of reasoning, which in an old version runs: everything that is conscious hates injury, and the fact that others are like oneself in being conscious and hating injury demands the practices of ahimsa. From the Acharanga Sutra (c. 350 B.C.E.): “If you say that suffering is pleasing to you, your answer is contradictory to what is self-evident.… And just as suffering is painful to you, in the same way it is painful to all animals, living beings, organisms, and sentient beings. [Therefore, one should practice ahimsa.]”24 Respect for others flows from seeing them as like oneself. Other traditions repeat the reasoning more or less explicitly, as in the quote above from Shankara.
The eloquent arguments of the Buddhist philosopher Shantideva (c. 700 C.E.) target compassion, the central Buddhist virtue, not ahimsa. Compassion is said to comprise ahimsa within a larger concern to eliminate suffering, not just to avoid bringing it about. But the considerations he advances also promote ahimsa, and they center on likeness of self or person. Indeed, since there is no nugget of self that endures and suffers, but rather just sufferings—our identities are all fictions, what’s important are psychological processes—he reasons that we should be as concerned to eliminate the suffering of others as we are to eliminate our own.25
The virtue of ahimsa tops the list in the Yoga Sutra of (social) “restraints” (YS 2.30: nonharmfulness, truth-telling, nonstealing, sexual restraint, and nonpossessiveness are the yamas constituting the first limb of the eight-limbed ashtanga yoga of Patanjali), and is central in living traditions of yoga practice.26
Here is, in sum, profound convergence of moral constraint and self-interest. We must appreciate that nonharmfulness is, first of all, an attitude one is to take toward oneself. In the Yoga Sutra, not to mention modern yoga studios, ahimsa is tied to santosha, self-acceptance (YS 2.29–35, 2.42). The idea is not to injure yourself in yoga practice, to “honor the body,” even as in the short term the pain of the postures, breath control, or meditation becomes intense. In the studio, ahimsa means principally not hurting yourself. One listens and responds to bodily feedback, and learns not to push too hard. The whole advantage of asanas can be lost otherwise. Yoga is a conscious process, learning the body’s kinks and patiently straightening them out, or not, depending on bodily signals. Consonantly, the theoretical foundation of a socially oriented ahimsa—that since in reality we are one in self or spirit (atman), or interconnected, etc., we should practice nonharmfulness—presupposes that ahimsa toward oneself is both right and natural.27
Nonharmfulness is a principle to apply to oneself, not just to others.28 But this advice is not merely prudential, for the “pull” of one’s future self, the self one is helping to make right now, is, it may be argued, the weightiest of moral forces. There is no person to whom one owes greater responsibility, since over others, except in unusual circumstances, one has no comparable power to make and shape what the person is. Pregnant women and parents whose children are very young are, perhaps, exceptions. (The pregnant seem to be the “exception that proves the rule,” since a mother-to-be doing yoga shapes for the better [at least] two future selves.) Nevertheless, it is only over ourselves that we have decisive influence, and thus there is a special duty to our own good future self or person. Nonharmfulness applied to oneself provides push to self-development, and, indeed, to yoga practice, which is at minimum a special form of self-development, a kind of prophylactic or immunization to harm. Consonantly, we may note the contemporary movement in medicine to recognize asanas as preventive practice and essential to holistic health.
Interpreters of Yoga philosophy have been perplexed by a corollary to doctrines about self-discipline, namely, that social morality (dharma) can be superseded by exigencies of the path.29 But, coming now to my main argument, it is a mistake to view Yoga ethics so narrowly as to be derived from the notion of a supreme good. In fact, the teaching about the path’s potentially superseding customary moral dictates blocks deductions of social norms from the conception of a yogic goal. This is apparently hard for some to appreciate. The point is not that there is a Yoga brand of ethics but that Yoga teaches goals that sometimes compete with other-directed duties, like having fun versus doing a chore.30 Yoga and the duty of self-development carry moral weight, but I should not like to hold that they are the only moral considerations.31
Moreover, a common supplement to Yoga self-development teachings is the advice not to disturb the minds of those who are not practitioners by revealing powers and encouraging them prematurely to practice advanced forms of self-discipline. Other consciousnesses are more or less ready for one or another step along a spiritual path, and people vary in the obstacles they face. So, by and large, one should leave others alone. You cannot really do much of anything for them, but you can for yourself.32
Interestingly, ahimsa was supported by metaphysicians in classical India by argument not so much from a concrete conception of the truly real (though the tactic was tried by some) but from the premise (just now alluded to) that beings are deluded in a variety of fashions and that each consciousness has its own route to freedom.33 Nonharmfulness means noninterference. Consonantly, in tantric traditions, which view the summum bonum as perfection of the individual and not just reabsorption in the One (or dissolution in nirvana, etc.), paths of development—svadharma, a person’s own individual dharma—are said to vary. True, the warning is repeated that no one can create a successful à la carte spiritual practice. The mind that is choosing what to include and what to exclude is an obstructed, unenlightened mentality that will often reject something necessary. But the particularity of obstructions and progress explains why gurus give different instructions to different disciples, and helps to uphold a certain pluralism among yogic methods.
It seems, then, that Yoga should encourage a libertarian social ethic, and indeed embrace a value pluralism. (Compare the oft-cited list of four distinct values in Hinduism corresponding to different life stages [ashrama] or circumstances: kama, pleasure, especially sexual pleasure; artha, wealth; dharma, familial and community duty; and moksha, liberation, the transcendent goal of yoga.) We leave people alone to pursue their own ends, to make their own selves or persons. Self-determination, in the individualist sense, is to be respected. I make me and you you.
This reading is right as far as it goes, but it leaves out the convergence of moral push and pull in karma theory and yogic self-development. Practicing nonharmfulness is good karma, making us better people morally. Not to smoke is a practice required by respect for a future self, the self to whose lung cancer or other illness I may well contribute were I to develop the habit. Looked at this way, not smoking is a duty to self on par with duties not to subject others to harm. A distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding action may be fundamental for law and political philosophy, but in ethics it is more fundamental to see others and self as comparable.34
Classical Jaina thinkers appear to practice nonharmfulness even in the controversies of philosophy. The Jaina metaphysical position—called anekanta-vada, the doctrine of many-sidedness, the view that no one view (exclusively) is correct, commonly rendered nonabsolutism—has at its methodological heart effort to find a grain of truth in every theory. Although difficult to accomplish, the promise seems in good faith: Jainas enjoy the reputation of being the best historians of ideas among the philosophic authors, at pains to represent fairly a range of positions, whereas polemical misrepresentation is common elsewhere. Furthermore, Jaina metaphysicians do try to synthesize opposed positions. As mentioned in the previous chapter, such relativism/pluralism is an alternative to our New Yoga minimalism as a strategy for maintaining an inclusivist outlook. Inclusivism, in the Jaina view, is a requirement of the yoga of ahimsa.
Nonabsolutism, anekanta-vada—a positive pluralism of perspectives—is the position that reality is so rich that it makes true, with qualifications, every intellectual stance. Thus the Jaina metaphysics, unlike Buddhist and Nietzschean perspectivalism, is not a form of skepticism but rather a bold promise of reconciliation of apparently opposed points of view. Or, as a skepticism it targets only the exclusivism, or absolutism, that partisans propose for their preferred positions, blind to the truth in their opponents’ theories. In other words, Jainas do not set out to challenge even the most general positive claims about the nature of everything or an underlying reality. The point is not to deny but to affirm, to affirm seemingly incompatible perspectives. A special sevenfold logic—called sapta bhangi, seven styles (seven combinations of three truth values, truth, falsity, and indeterminacy), also called syad-vada, “maybe-ism”—was developed to facilitate the disarming of controversy. Here are the weapons of intellectual ahimsa.
There is a similar metaphilosophical position in Buddhism, the avoiding of extremes, anta, advocated by Nagarjuna and his “school of the Middle,” Madhyamika. What distinguishes the Buddhist skeptic and the Jaina perspectivalist is that the former rejects, while the latter accepts, the gist of an extreme position. To take a simple example, Jainas argue that Buddhist Yogachara doctrines of momentariness, etc., at the one end and Vedantic doctrines of permanence, etc., on the other are complementary and incomplete without each other, whereas the Madhyamika would reject both as departing from the middle.
The limits to Jaina inclusivism are only practical, but very real nonetheless. Even nonabsolutism is viewed as nonabsolute, subject to the logic of the “maybe,” despite opponents’ allegations of self-refutation—nonabsolutism as purportedly presenting itself as absolutely true, as the Vedantin Shankara alleges. But there is no self-referential inconsistency in application of perspectivalism to itself, although some modern interpreters, apparently following Shankara, would also label it absolutist.35 Only an omniscient being would be able to comprehend all viewpoints. There are no true, false, or even indeterminate propositions outside of a framework, a vada, a theory or perspective of interlocking beliefs, that is to say, a naya, standpoint. And a special logic governs standpoints.
The Jaina sapta bhangi, a septad of styles or manners of valuation of truth, is comprised of all combinations of three truth values, truth (+), falsity (−), and indeterminacy (0):36
+, −, 0, +−, +0, −0, +−0
Because of the three truth values, this has been misinterpreted as a paraconsistent or multivalued logic invented to resolve logical paradoxes and the problem, known to Aristotle, of the indeterminate truth value of some statements about the future, so-called future contingents. But the Jainas’ is not a logic of truth-functional connectives. Rather, it is a hermeneutical tool. All truths are truths only from a perspective, but some are true to us and, so far as we know, to everyone. Even if we are not aware of controversy concerning the claim that something a is F, this is still only from a perspective, and there may be a perspective in which a is not F or in which it cannot be determined whether it is. We presume, without contrary advice, that a is F (or that the proposition p is true), but we do so fallibilistically—the syad in syad-vada means that a claim is presumptively true, false, indeterminate, and so on (“may well be _____” is a better translation). No claim is immune from the possibility of error. Nevertheless, some claims, or cognitions, are false, or nonveridical, from our own point of view and every point of view that we know of, and some are indeterminate, avaktavya, it is impossible to say. On the classical Indian scene, Advaita Vedanta is the philosophy famous for proposing a third truth value, the inexplicable, anirvachaniya, which holds for statements about the relationship of Brahman to the phenomenal display: we cannot know as finite individual knowers what the world looks like from Brahman’s viewpoint. Jainas use the category of the indeterminate similarly to classify apparently unanswerable questions.37
So what of the combinations of truth, falsity, and indeterminacy, the final four of the septad? In recognizing that a claim can be simultaneously true and false, or another combination, the Jaina view again relativizes to naya, standpoints. From some standpoints a claim is true while in others it is false. From our own standpoint, it is true in some standpoints and false in others, and so on. Our own standpoint conditionalizes other standpoints. Thus the Jaina theoreticians would make clear to themselves the tasks before them. For they see reality as making a claim true in the one standpoint and false in the other. Reality is so incredibly rich that it can underlie and give rise to opposed pictures. However, understanding the details in particular cases of controversy is not easy, as shown by the struggles of Haribhadra (c. 750), Hemachandra (c. 1150), and company to actually reconcile contrary views. The sevenfold schema is nevertheless a tool for work in metaphysics, allowing clear categorizing of problems.
Finally, it is worth repeating that the Jaina position is not self-refutational. It may have other weaknesses, but not this, though the point is subtle. A common misinterpretation of the sapta bhangi sees it as generating unconditional claims. For example, J. N. Mohanty: “the Jaina developed a method known as syad-vada, by which the truths of opposing predications may be synthesized, their one-sided truth claims rejected, and a perfect knowledge of the totality of reality arrived at. Each such predication is conditional, relative to a standpoint, but if that condition is included in the predication, the judgment becomes unconditionally true.”38 This would be like practicing ahimsa toward everyone except oneself, a failure that has also been unfairly laid at the feet of Jaina theorists. Jainas do leave open the possibility of omniscience, but to use the seven truth values to try to disarm metaphysical disputes is not to impute to oneself an absolute point of view. Nonharmfulness requires humility.
Philosophy and other forms of intellectual engagement need not be practiced with an intent to produce a “knock-down” argument, giving the lie to the opponent’s position and indulging in fallacies of derision. The ethic of the Jainas is to show compassion even to positions really regarded as false. Thus maybe (syat) the Socratic method (of trying to show a contradiction in the views of an interlocutor) is not, pedagogically, the best way to train young thinkers. To be sure, Yoga philosophy has not in general followed the Jaina model, but has been insistent upon one or another position as right and others as wrong. Truth treads a narrow path. However, we may regard the minimalism in metaphysics championed in chapter 2 and the alternatives of dualist interactionism and holism explored there as embodying the Jaina spirit. Relativism (positive perspectivalism) and minimalism are brothers and sisters. Again, the main point of Yoga philosophy is to defend possibilities of yoga practice and experience, not a single, absolutely correct theory, the final word. As Nyaya proposes, philosophy is itself a kind of yoga, and like all yoga should be practiced in the spirit of ahimsa.
Yoga morality begins with nonharmfulness, but it doesn’t end there. First, as early as the earliest lists of virtues required of the yogin, exceptions to ahimsa have been claimed. Second, service, seva, a giving of oneself and what one values to others, becomes crucial to the world-oriented practice called karma yoga.
At the very end of the long prose Chandogya Upanishad (c. 800 B.C.E.), we learn that animal sacrifice “at holy places” is excluded from the injunction to practice ahimsa. Thus, in a dramatic statement: “he who is harmless (ahimsant) toward all beings except at holy places (tirtha), he, indeed, who lives thus throughout his length of life, reaches the Brahman world and does not return hither again—yea, he does not return hither again!”39 Nonharmfulness is not the only value, then, even for the yogin. It can be trumped according to circumstance. (Jainas would disagree by and large, I take it, though they too find other virtues and values—for example, charity—that are possibly in conflict with ahimsa.) The question is: What is more important than not harming?
The answer appears to be cosmic harmony, here in the Chandogya from the late Vedic age as also practically throughout Yoga literature, a standard answer much elaborated. There are exceptions, significant exceptions perhaps, Samkhya philosophy as well as some lines of Advaita, of Buddhism, etc., that do not deify harmony.40 But the enormously popular Gita has the harmony vision, as do tantrics generally and the yoga teachings of all theistic sects.
From the earliest times, concern for balance among life worlds, mortal and immortal, and prosperity, which depends upon favorable natural forces, appear to have motivated animal sacrifice. Scholar Laurie Patton: “as many Vedic texts and later ritual texts… indicate, sacrifice of an animal into the [sacred] fire was part of the ecological balance in the ancient Vedic world; the killing and distribution of the animal was part of a larger understanding of human harmony with natural forces.… The gods are given food and return it through their natural bounty; thus, the ecology of sacrificial food production and consumption is the central, guiding metaphor for the survival of earthly and celestial worlds.”41 Over the centuries, animals were used less and less in the rituals of Hinduism, but an ethics of cosmological balance remained in force. That one should strive to perform inner sacrifice, offerings of action to harmony, in order personally to gain equanimity and prosper spiritually was an idea that progressively came to dominate Hindu sensibilities. The trumping power of justice in the political and social spheres can be understood as further manifestations of the harmony motif. Promotion of ahimsa in the Mahabharata, the epic poem containing the Bhagavad Gita, and throughout the Puranas and elsewhere is mitigated by a larger concern for harmony.
The axiological concept is made sharper by taking it as the thesis that worth tracks degree of complex unity.42 Organic unity is highly complex, and the unity of consciousness evident in human memory, self-consciousness, etc., makes humans more valuable than animals, even those closest to us genetically (compare the Jaina hierarchy of sentience discussed above). Furthermore, the purposes of human beings not only pack causal power but also are potentially unifying beyond the interests of the individual, as we find in the concept of the noble cause or of giving of self for something greater, something extending beyond one’s death: family, humanity, works of art. The concept of harmony is not made philosophically sharp in our Yoga inheritance, but this perhaps is an area where we should expect not sharpness but rather a lot of gray. Harmony in any case remains key to understanding the Gita and all the more tantric world-affirmativism, as we shall see.
Nowhere is outright tension between yogic ahimsa and a larger duty more evident than in the Yoga teachings of the Bhagavad Gita (c. 200 B.C.E.). Not only is nonharmfulness preached by Krishna on (of all places) a battlefield, the dialogue between the divine guru and his warrior interlocutor Arjuna is precipitated by the latter taking a step toward an ahimsa attitude. Arjuna refuses to go into combat against those he loves. Krishna, the divine teacher, insists he fight. Arjuna declares at the very beginning—in the first chapter (out of eighteen) and the beginning of the second—a sense of sin in killing, even in the name of right rule. Details of plot and some salient passages show Krishna melding ahimsa into a theology of cosmic harmony. (See appendix B, the introduction, for the setting and an introduction to the yoga teaching as a whole.)
The attitude Krishna tells Arjuna to take in action, called karma yoga, is the Gita’s most striking and original theme, although similar ideas are found in the middle Upanishads (the Katha in particular) and in precepts for monks and nuns in both Buddhism and Jainism.43 The yoga of action (karma yoga) is a discipline of acting in a spirit of sacrifice, says Krishna, giving to another without regard for personal benefit.
Apparently any action in principle can be a gift, so long as it is offered with the right feeling and attitude. Specifically, one is to give without concern for oneself. However, the sacrificer is to be confident there is karmic benefit (burning up bad karma and/or making good karma) or transcendence of karmic consequences altogether (nonkarma-making action). Normally, the psychological dispositions one makes through action not only bind but also invite payback into future lifetimes. Only action done as karma yoga, Krishna teaches, avoids moral retribution. Verse 3.9: “Without personal attachment undertake action, Arjuna, for just one purpose, for the purpose of sacrifice. From work undertaken for purposes other than sacrifice, this world is bound to the laws of karma.” (See also, in particular, Gita 4.21 and 4.22, appendix B.)
Our discussion so far would suggest that at least some forms of yoga are self-directed only. We can even imagine an ardent yogini prone to ignore truly moral duties, who neglects family or profession to master Scorpion Pose. Truly moral duties, an objector might contend, are duties to others, not to one’s future self. Should we not aim to develop a more social self and person? As outlined so far, yoga need not be particularly social. Indeed, this seems correct for many practices.
In contrast, the karma yoga teaching of the Gita is famously social. The whole point of karma yoga is to forget self-interest through action directed to others’ benefit. Furthermore, practically any action or course of action, such as a profession or family activities, would seem to be an avenue for karma yoga practice. After all, Krishna enjoins Arjuna to practice karma yoga in a war, in apparent violation—in an ingenious emplotment—of the yogic principle of ahimsa. Arjuna is to kill the opposing warriors and to win the battle, all the while taking a yogic attitude that involves ahimsa (Gita 10.5, 13.8, 16.2, and 17.14). Yoga can be done in any situation. Yoga is a matter of taking the right attitude in action.
Four senses of the Sanskrit word karman are involved in the Gita’s conception, two of which we have already reviewed: voluntary action and samskara as underlying skills (“Yoga is skill in works,” Gita 2.50, yogah karmasu kaushalam). A third sense, unseen moral force, adrishta, will be taken up in the next section on karmic justice. A fourth sense currently in view is sacrifice, yajna. The karma yoga teaching of the Gita picks up the Upanishadic theme of “cosmicization of the sacrifice.”44
Sacrifice means giving, giving to the gods that are indwelling in people and things, or to Brahman, the Absolute and origin of the universe who enlivens the gods and is present in every self. What one gives is not necessarily ghee or any other thing into physical fire, but karma, action, presented by a flame of, let us say, self-idealization. One offers the gift into the flame of one’s aspiration to be like or with the adored, the beloved, which would be Krishna himself, according to Vaishnavas, whatever be the particular form (god, etc.) of that to which action is offered (Gita 9.23–24). The external puja or ceremony of offering is taken to symbolize psychological gestures made from the lower to the higher within ourselves—a key idea in tantra (see the “Hymn to the Wheel of Divinities Seated in the Body” by Abhinava Gupta, translated in appendix D) and connected to that of psychic transformation (the subject of the last section of chapter 5).
Thus outlined, yoga can be done in the world, in all kinds of action done for the sake of sacrifice. Yoga becomes seva, service. Service promotes cosmic harmony. Thus there would be no incompatibility between ahimsa and violence called for in the interest of “holding together the worlds” (Gita 3.20), consonant with the Upanishadic exception of animal sacrifice, or, in the immediate case, holding together Arjuna’s society. Arjuna is not to intend harm, as part of a yogic attitude, as he works to destroy the opposing warriors, including his own teachers and family, and win the battle. As said by Krishna time and again and confirmed by the circumstances of the conflict, in entering combat Arjuna follows dharma, the right path of action, the only action suitable for offering in karma yoga. Service entails an idea of action done for the good of the whole. Karma yoga as perfectly practiced would make all action a beautiful ritual.
The change of consciousness, or attitude, that karma yoga practice involves is supposed to enable an ethical intuition that can transform ordinary action into dharma, the right way to live, a kind of divine life. Thus is inaugurated—indulge the conjecture—the “tantric turn” that would marry yoga and the world. The movement is not merely Hindu, although it seems to be launched here in the karma yoga teaching of the Gita. Chapter 5 will take up the tantric reconception of the goal or goals of yoga.
To be sure, the Gita also embraces the Samkhya theme of disidentification and the elusive “I” (introduced in the Upanishads; see appendix A), which is central in Buddhism. We mistakenly identify ourselves with our personas and psychological processes, which are really constructs of nature having nothing to do with our primordial consciousnesses. Self-monitoring consciousness is somehow mistaken in what it takes to be self. What you are is elusive, changing with your essential ability to identify with instruments such as the body and sense faculties and indeed the mind (the chitta of the Yoga Sutra). But none of these is really you, nor is it valuable. This is not quite the picture of the Gita, however. In karma yoga, you try to disidentify, downplaying your own role, in humility offering your acts as intellectually you know them really to be, namely, not the products of your little self but rather of forces of nature, natural desires in interaction with forces of the mental, vital, and physical universes. The Samkhya of the Gita does not find natural objects to be products of delusion or worthless but rather targets false identity.
Furthermore, the Gita’s use of the Samkhya theme is incorporated into a larger metaphysical and spiritual vision, a monism, not a dualism like the classical Samkhya of the Samkhya-karika. World-changing action is the vehicle of the Gita’s karma yoga. Only dharmic action is a suitable offering. On this point I disagree with the commentators who say that any action can be done as karma yoga. As a gift to a boyfriend or girlfriend, you do not present something ugly. Here the Gita’s karma yoga teaching embraces bhakti (an idea developed in chapter 5).
So, we can say that the disidentification theme is present in the Gita’s karma yoga teaching but that there is also more to it. Furthermore, it is continuous with tantric ideals of transformation, as I shall show in chapter 5. Some tension between the philosophies of world denial and those of world affirmation is to be expected if the Gita is, as I see it, a pivotal and transitional work. Despite the presence of the Samkhya theme, the Gita has Brahman, the Absolute, as active, making dharma, patterns of right action, including social justice, out there in the world, without making karma. The karma yogin is thought of as a person who can identify with that perspective and thus act without the normal karmic consequences.
Through practice of karma yoga, one self-consciously connects with horizontal and vertical flows of Brahman’s own creative energies. The vertical flow is the transcendent sacrifice (see, e.g., Gita 4.6 and 4.13). The horizontal comprises the interactions belonging to the separate universes of the separate “sheaths,” kosha: food and the “food sheath” and the worlds of feelings and thoughts along with one’s particular feelings and thoughts, the emotional and mental sheaths (see figure 4A). In different terminology, by karma yoga one opens to a universal prana leading to extraordinary powers or siddhis, becoming, in Vedantic language, the Vaishvanara, the “univerally human,” which is considered a stage in yogic transformation of consciousness. The tantric turn is all about the formation of a more complex harmony of the divine and the individual.
One of the most striking of the Gita’s many striking conceptions concerns reincarnation. If you think the goal of yoga too distant, don’t worry, one continues yogic practice into the next lifetime. Arjuna, at Gita 6.37, voices this along with the further complaint that if he practices yoga he will be lost to the world, not a success in worldly terms as well as a yogic failure. Krishna replies (Gita 6.41–44), “someone [like you describe] fallen from yoga would be born in a household of pure and beautiful people. Or, he would be born just into a family of yogins and yoginis, people of wisdom.… There he would recover the purposefulness of his previous life, and would strive, O joy of the Kurus, from that point on toward perfection. For even without trying he would be carried just by the practice in his former birth.” This is the yogic soul-making conception of the Gita.
The tantric and neo-Vedantin philosopher Aurobindo uses soul making as the lynchpin of his theory of the relation between Brahman and the world.45 Brahman is in the process of creating materially embodied spiritual individuals who are in part responsible for making themselves across lifetimes. Thus there would be in the material world as a whole a teleological cause, an “attraction of the future,” that would be expressed in us in terms of right desire and right effort, i.e., in yoga practices and all their wondrous results. We shall return to this yogic soul-making theory both in the next section and in chapter 4 and 5.
Fear of karmic consequence and joy in karmic confidence constitute a second variety of both moral and yogic incentive on most Yoga views.46 The universe is so arranged that an individual will get her due, if not in this life then in a future one. Karmic justice is a distinct variety of incentive, according to Yoga. The idea is similar to Western religious teachings about heaven and hell as doctrines of moral reward. In this section, I shall examine the slippery concept of adrishta, unseen force, which is the name given to the influence of a person’s (or a group’s) karma on events in the sense of moral retribution, including, most importantly, one’s next birth. For obvious reasons, some lines of investigation cannot be closed until I take up theories of rebirth in chapter 4. Here I shall concentrate on matters of ethics, and also, at the end, the theistic problem of evil, against which ideas of karma and rebirth are used to defend the thesis that God is good. The fine points of Yoga views of survival and issues about personal identity will be the focus in chapter 4.
The most widely held picture is that an individual has both a sum of karmic worth and individual lines of karma that attract, like magnets, situations for discharge, karmic cathexis in worldly events causing pleasure and pain in various combinations and flavors. The aggregation depends on moral coefficients added to a total in the case of good karma and subtracted in the case of bad, although the moral worth of some acts stands alone and invites reward or payback independently of the moral worth of the aggregate. The power of karmic vectors to affect events, especially outcomes of enterprises, is considered to be outside or beyond ordinary sensibilities, as is implied in the very word—unseen force, adrishta—used in all schools to refer to the causal power of karma’s side of justice. This is a fate that can work apurvaka, without intermediaries. That is to say, it may bring about a consequence, a bit of bad luck, for instance, in a subsequent birth remotely, without an immediately preceding cause. The classical Indian school of Mimamsa propagated the view that every experience is to some degree, however slight (or overwhelming), influenced by adrishta.47
The force of adrishta is tied to a balance of pleaure and pain, suffering and happiness. That is to say, negative karma is considered paid off, and good karma exhausted, by certain kinds of pain or pleasure. Certain enjoyments and sufferings are, to be sure, deemed themselves sources of good or bad karma. The joke in yoga class is that loosening tight hip joints—a well-known source of torment—pays off bad karma but only if endured with grace. The philosophic point is that the currency of the moral exchange is not merely the moral worth of acts. The workings of karma are complex, and include whole “life lessons,” as are captured in the Jataka tales of the Buddha-to-be’s previous births (recall the story of Sumedha in the introduction).48
Furthermore, on certain Vedantic and tantric and indeed some Buddhist views of an underlying bliss of a true self or no-self state of consciousness, happiness is supposed to be closer to the natural state than pain or suffering, which are deviations. The renunciants’ warning that “All is suffering” is not the final word, existence or nonexistence not being so niggardly in happiness and bliss as one might think. Pain and suffering are instrumental—and thus of positive overall value—in leading us to somehow better bliss or to find the bliss at our core. We shall return to this instrumentality thesis in connection with Yogic theism. For the present, the main point is that the workings of karma are typically only part of the picture when it comes to the hedonically positive and negative sides of experience.
Yoga philosophers have also recognized that getting what we want and avoiding what we want to avoid are wellsprings for all our acts. It is all the more true, then, that the precise relations among karma, destiny, and happiness, though presumably lawlike, are not discerned easily. Buddhists in particular are well known for the simplification that with respect to one’s own actions one can be sure that cruelty and other evil acts will be avenged (without an agent, an avenger, a judge of the dead), and one will secure good results for oneself by good deeds. The processes remain unknown or even unknowable (except to buddhas, according to Buddhists), but that hardly matters given what we know firsthand about suffering.
Nevertheless, even without its lines very precisely drawn, this picture of moral worth is potentially in tension with the causal picture of samskara continuity. Individual patterns of karma—habits and skills—are said to survive and shape the character of the person in his or her next lifetime. The thesis seems crucial to the theory of yogic soul making and is veritably common Yoga opinion, namely, that some habits, values, intentions—karma, in a word—are so deeply entrenched that they reemerge in the next birth as talents or deep dispositions of mental or emotional character.
The problem is that continuity of samskara works from moment to moment, without a break, unlike the remote workings of adrishta. That the two ideas of karmic force are potentially in conflict can be seen in the notion of Hitler reborn in a nonhuman form subject to constant fear and torture. This may be a righteous image, but since the soul is not a tabula rasa according to Yoga, even tremendously positive or negative moral value of the karmic aggregate could not determine a dramatic species crossing, Hitler being reborn as a bat, for instance, or Stalin as a mosquito. What could be continuous between Stalin and an insect? Only a future human being could be shaped by the mental dispositions that are the most important to a human being, I should dare to speculate. However, it is not just a matter of popular opinion among Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas, etc.; philosophers too hold that there is no guarantee that you cannot take a lower rebirth. Appeals to mental complexity are countered by the consideration that a complex mind can dream or experience itself under simpler forms.49
The overall lesson remains the intricacy of karmic laws. The tension between the two ideas of karmic influence leads me to think that by and large, humans are restricted to future human reincarnations. The argument against reincarnation that human population growth has turned up sharply in the last couple of centuries and so there would not be enough human souls to meet the bodily demand can be answered quickly: more souls of higher animals, such as horses and dogs, have perhaps ascended to the human level in recent years than was the rate previously (or maybe heaven or hell are emptying!). In line with our minimalism, all we need say is that an individual who achieves the human level is unlikely to return to an animal incarnation for the very reason that the mental life typical of a human being cannot be continued in the body of a different species. Therefore, it seems reasonable to speculate that the determinant power of the moral worth of karma has to be restricted to birthings by potential mothers within the human species, and of course fathers and others important to an upcoming childhood. Perhaps a karmic sum determines a range of candidate wombs to which are attached likelihoods of future suffering and happiness.
Such speculation is of course pretty airy, since isolating the influence of karma is practically impossible. According to Yoga psychology, we live simultaneously in different bodies or personalities, physical, vital, emotional, mental, and spiritual (see figures 4A, 4B, and 4C). A bad habit for the body, coffee in the morning, for example, may be part of a good mental practice, writing a book, for instance. And not only are there complications concerning types and ranges of pleasures and pains along with the complexity of human action (think of the difference, e.g., between a quick response and a long project), there are further complexities concerning karma itself.
First, it is commonly held that there are interpersonal relations to karma, souls reincarnating in groups, friends and families hanging together through lifetimes—called a “karasse” by novelist Kurt Vonnegut—a group karmically bonded, “soul mates.”50 It’s as though the magnetic effect of karma includes drawing together people who have been associated in previous lives. Is there, then, a second type of coefficient qualifying samskara? Or is a personal affinity vector somehow contained within adrishta? Or are, for example, such ideas as the soul mate or karasse merely wishful thinking, maintained by desire for close affinities to endure beyond death? The evidence for reincarnation is not strong enough to support a very determinate theory and certainly not to support all the popular images.51
Second, it is commonly claimed that karma “ripens” according to law; in other words, that adrishta, though its consequences are remote, works just at certain times. Temporal factors do seem to be evident in those (evidentially key) instances of people reporting memory of events in previous births. As documented by Ian Stevenson, children of five tend to remember incidents in the life of a previous person when he or she was five, and the same for children of seven, ten, twelve, and so on, years of age, to include, one would suppose, adult rememberings.52 The law here might be that an act of type A in circumstances C is made probable by karma of type A created in the past, and some sets of circumstances are more probable at certain ages.
The ripening idea also connects with the widely held Yogic theory that one is presented opportunities to change course in life (and to practice yoga) only at specific times. Popularly the idea is expressed in such stories as that in every incarnation, at the age of thirty Devadatta has to overcome a temptation to murder or at age forty meets his guru. Similarly, Siddhartha of our age, says the Pali canon, throws his begging bowl out into the current of the river, where it clinks against the side of the begging bowl thrown by the buddha of the previous epoch, which in turn clinks, gently, the side of a still previous buddha’s bowl resting on the bottom.53 But some popular lore also has it that karmic payback works more rapidly the more developed the individual. We are lucky if we suffer for our sins in the near term, so the idea goes. The image is of bad karma as like a festering sore.
Third, a certain kind of action is said to block, or at least blunt, the retributive force of karma, including acts of atonement (prayash-chitta) and auspiciousness (mangala, such as chanting om).54 On the Gita’s version of the thesis, action in tune with the dharmic (righteous) forces of the universe—or with the action of Brahman itself in the grand sacrifice that maintains the universe—transcends the moral/amoral distinction (“Though acting, the person who sees himself in all beings is not stained [by karma],” Gita 5.7, and “He who, depositing actions in [the fire of] Brahman, giving up attachment, acts [in the world], sin does not cling to, like water on a lotus leaf,” Gita 5.10). Such action creates no adrishta, or even wipes out karmic influence altogether. In the Yoga Sutra’s conception, a certain kind of meditation creates samskara that self-destruct, leaving no karmic residue (YS 1.50, 3.9–10). The Buddhist view is that karma operates within samsaric consciousness. Once nirvana is attained and one becomes a high-level bodhisattva, one is incapable of acting in a karma-generating way that would lead back into the unenlightened state. Moreover, claims about certain actions lying outside karmic law occur throughout the perfectionist tradition that emphasizes self-development and the attainment of siddhis. Finally, in tantra broadly the yogic soul-making idea is tempered with an inevitable “attraction of the future,” to wit, further “manifestation,” the ongoing creation of Shakti or Shri.55 Thus would we be destined to become greater beings than we are now. Therefore, we have to be able to be creative, to make new patterns not bound by karma.
In all these different views, individual will, though itself creating adrishta normally, can somehow by force of right effort (or by God’s grace provoked by right effort) overcome the influence of adrishta, past and present and therefore future. Yoga philosophy is not determinist. In chapter 1, we saw that Yoga denies causal closure in the physical realm. In my judgment, almost all previous Yoga philosophy has it that consciousness and its powers also transcend karma, or can.
Fortunately, in the concept of the bundle of causal conditions sufficient for an effect, samagri, classical theorists found a notion well suited to the complexity of karmic consequence. That an event shows karmic justice amounts to the claim that unseen moral force, adrishta, counts as a single causal factor bundled into a samagri, that is to say, a single factor among many, the bundle being technically what brings about whatever happens.56 Karmic influence on any particular event may or may not be very great. Yoga has traditionally tended to the view that except in the special circumstances of yogic practice, karmic justice always has at least some small influence.
There are several different psychological versions of karmic justice among classical theorists. Buddhists tend to view karmic justice as tied to the type of contamination of one’s perspective that blocks enlightenment. Thus is avoided the need for a divine arbiter of a soul’s fate, a referee who determines which souls get the better births the next go-round and which will be born in squalor. Such a naturalistic theory is present in Samkhya and the Yoga Sutra and even in some theistic Vedanta, although there is also non-naturalism in some Buddhist schools as well as in more mainstream theistic Vedanta.57 The differences need not further detain us.
Finally, let us turn to theistic treatments and in particular to ideas explaining how God is not the author of evil. The Brahma Sutra of Vedanta has a long section on the problem of theodicy, and the elaboration by the oldest commentator, Shankara, makes plain a mainstream position.58 Although Shankara is an Advaitin, he takes seriously the theistic teachings of the Upanishads and the Gita as meditational aids. Scripture says that Brahman is the source of the world, so since Brahman is unsullied value and bliss, whence evil? How could evil have its source in what is inherently its opposite?
Shankara’s explanation is complex, and only the second part is taken over by the more genuine theists. That part, however, remains the centralmost plank on God and evil within the long history of theistic Vedanta. The first part relies on the distinction between Brahman as “without” and “with” “qualities” (or “attributes”), nirguna contrasting with saguna brahman. According to Shankara, Brahman without qualities is supremely real. Brahman with qualities is talked about in scripture as an aid to meditation. Scripture is like a patient teacher (guru), and it is difficult to appreciate that Brahman as supremely real has no qualities. Scripture talks about God, i.e., Brahman with qualities, as preparation to the austere truth—which is that nothing but Brahman without qualities is really real. God too is part of a cosmic illusion due to spiritual ignorance.
Brahman with qualities is God, the Lord and Creator. How then could the Lord, who is perfect—much as in the Western conception—allow evil in the world? Shankara asks this question and moves to the second part of his theodicy, the part that is shared. Here karma as affecting rebirth is the absolutely hinge notion, and the theodicy is a samskara version—the Eastern version, we may say, a direct parallel—of the free-will theodicy prominent in Christian philosophy. For not only are we responsible for our karma in making our future births; the Lord is just in arranging the universe so that it embodies principles of karmic justice. Rebirth is fair.
The work of the first part of Shankara’s two-part defense is done, in the theistic views, mainly by a sense of gratefulness, it seems to me. God creates many worlds much better than this. But in those worlds I do not exist. Our world is definitely not the best of all possible worlds, but it is a world where I exist. So I am grateful that God in her infinity suffers it.
Alternatively, there is the supposition, which is quite widespread (appearing in Buddhism as well as Shankara’s Vedanta), that there is no first creation, that the transmigratory round or universe is beginningless (anadi-samsara). Shankara in responding to the objection that at the beginning of the universe there was no good or bad karma denies explicitly that nescience (avidya) has a beginning.59
Habits, which we have ourselves made and for which we are responsible, the fundamental dispositions of the soul, carry over into and determine the course of a soul’s next incarnation. The Lord guides the workings of adrishta; unseen force is not blind, according to the theists.60
If in this way beyond virtue and vice being their own reward, there is justly payback for bad acts—i.e., beyond the badness of bad habits—and pleasure and happiness for good karma, then God’s universe could well be just, at least in the sense required to defend the thesis that God is good and worthy of worship. Thus some of what we see as natural evil would be payback, for which, then, the Lord should not be blamed.61 And of course some evil, such as pain, has a biological or other instrumental function, without which our world would not be possible. And so the Eastern version of free-will theodicy, coupled with instrumentality considerations, is quite compelling, it seems to me.
In the view of the bhakti yoga practitioner, suffering is an opportunity to pay off bad karma. We should be grateful and not generate further bad karma by whining and complaining. Far from disproving the existence of God, suffering is a manifestation of God’s love and concern for our welfare. Better to pay off bad karma now than to let it fester, let it blindside us later or in another life. Who cares about it really anyway, since essentially life is delight?
With Shankara the deep question is: Why is there nescience, avidya, spiritual ignorance? If Brahman is the supreme reality, our own true self, why is it we are unenlightened? Advaita has no answer to this, it seems. Theistic views struggle with a similar problem: Why, given the possibility of living enlightenment such as Krishna’s, are we not all enlightened? The answer, again, is karma. We somehow deserve not to be enlightened. But why does God let us get into such straits? The best answer seems to be that otherwise we would not be who we are and there would not be the opportunities we have for development. Like everything finite, from the gods and goddesses down to a pebble, we have our day in the sun. Gratefulness is the appropriate attitude.