13

Rebirth and Free Will: How Buddhists Understand Karma

VEN. AJAHN AMARO

ROBIN KORNMAN

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER

First, would each of you like to describe your understanding of karma and its importance in the Buddhist path?

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: The basic approach in the Theravāda is that karma is based on intention. There’s a frequently quoted passage where the Buddha says, “Intention is karma.” Having will, we create karma through body, speech, and mind. The intention is what creates the potency behind the action. So it’s the things we intend and then act upon that are the key creators of karma. Those actions arising from our intentions in the past, we then experience as fruit in the present moment.

Often people think of karma in a fatalistic way or deterministic way. They’ll say, “It’s my karma,” by which they mean it had to happen that way. That view is antithetical to the Buddhist teachings. The effects of past actions can cause a particular tendency, but the ripening of karma is never fixed. Over and over again in the Pali canon, the Buddha tries to counteract the view that life is created according to an inescapable, determined pattern. Karma preconditions our present experience, but what we do with that is entirely based on the choices we make—and the degree of wisdom or good-heartedness, or greed, hatred, and delusion, we bring to our experience in the present moment.

ROBIN KORNMAN: Karma has nothing to do with fate, predestination, providence, or destiny. There’s a tendency to hold to a religious belief of one’s destiny. Karma has nothing at all to do with that kind of thinking. Quite the contrary, karma means that the world could be operating in a terribly impersonal way, not in a way that gives your life meaning through destiny.

If you didn’t have a teaching on karma, you wouldn’t be a Buddhist, no matter how much you believed in the Buddha otherwise, because without karma we would become nihilists ethically. Karma is what tells us what’s good and bad; nothing is inherently good or inherently bad, but some things lead naturally to states of suffering and some things lead naturally away from suffering, and that’s how you define good or bad karma.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Each of us, given our tradition and personalities and the students we encounter, will emphasize different points with respect to karma. Here’s how I often put it. Because of our intentions and actions of the past, we find ourselves in a given situation in every moment. A great deal of that is due to our personal deeds and thoughts in this lifetime. Some of it is due to a given condition that predates this life. For example, I didn’t create myself. In any moment, then, I’ve got a determined situation in which I am fully responsible to act.

So you could say there’s some determinism in karma, and also some responsibility. We cultivate the past so that we can be clear and responsible in our actions going forward. The slogan I often use with people is, “The situation you’re in is not your fault, but it’s absolutely your responsibility to take care of it going forward.” And then they ask, “What do you mean it’s not my fault? If I did actions in the past that led me to this place, how can you say it’s not my fault?” I respond that the person who did those things in the past is no longer here. However, the person in this present moment has a huge responsibility to take volitional action from this moment forward. The Buddha taught a path of action and responsibility in a very realistic way.

Does a person who has a profound understanding of karma perceive himself or herself as having choice, free will, in the simplest understanding of that phrase?

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Every moment is a choice.

ROBIN KORNMAN: Yes, I agree. And yet, as my teacher used to say, if you see the situation clearly, you are faced with the choicelessness of one path. I don’t think he was talking about free will. He was just saying that most situations are choiceless, when you realize what your alternatives are.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: You could say every moment is a moment of choice, and if you really see clearly, there’s only one choice to make.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: And that one choiceless choice changes millisecond by millisecond.

It’s interesting that both free will and determinism depend on the idea of a “me” that either has a predetermined future or a “me” that is exercising free will. But when there is enlightened mind, it doesn’t really sound like free will, because it’s ever so slightly dictated by the completely open heart responding to the way things are, moment by moment.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Judeo-Christian thought presupposes concepts and problems and issues that simply dissolve from the Buddhist point of view. Free will versus determinism—from a Buddhist point of view there is no such issue.

ROBIN KORNMAN: Nevertheless, perhaps we can find points of connection. The simplest teaching on karma I know is dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), as expressed in the chain of the nidānas. There are gaps in the chain, when the next act is not determined, which is what makes enlightenment possible.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: In the Theravāda, they particularly point to the gap between feeling and craving.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: The choice gap.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: The difference between “I like” and “I want.”

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Karma is the crucial teaching in Buddhism, because there is cause and effect rather than determinism. It presents the possibility that we can transform our life and the lives around us. The Buddha taught that we’re all empowered to do that.

You mean karma is not bad news. [laughter]

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: No, it’s very good news.

An ethical system that doesn’t have an ongoing person at its core is shocking to many people. Such shock has caused some people within Buddhism to simply sidestep the issue and say, “Well, I don’t really know about or believe in karma and rebirth. I’m just trying to be a good person and follow the Buddha’s path.” As teachers of Buddhism, how do you address that conundrum? How do you teach an ethical system that doesn’t require a person?

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: This is not a new issue. It’s been going on since the time of the Buddha. It does seem counterintuitive. If the body, feelings, perceptions, consciousness, and so forth are not self, who is it that receives the results of the karma made by this nonself? It requires a wisdom approach—a meditative, contemplative approach—to see how that might work.

If you consider the teachings on nonself, there is a subtle presumption that there is a doer. The meditator examines every perception, every thought, every memory, and every action and intention, but when the meditator looks for the doer, the agent, it can’t be found, which is the very point of the process of meditation. In that experience, they can see the selflessness within a thought or sensation.

And yet there is choice. There seems to be a decision-making agent, someone who’s choosing between helpful courses of actions and deleterious courses of action. But when we use the same analytical method as we used in looking at sensations, and so forth, to look at this act of choosing, there does not seem to be a central agent; it’s a concatenation of circumstances.

ROBIN KORNMAN: But Buddhism is a religion, and all of us here are often in the position of being pastoral counselors, trying to convince people to do things as if we believe they existed. In some sense, you have to ignore the emptiness of the self to preach the religion.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: I agree. You have a name, I have a name, we all have names. In the normal conventions of personal use, there is individuality. I’m responsible for my actions in the eyes of the law. But if we are talking about the deep tissue philosophical structures and the heart of karma and nonself, we end up talking in a different way.

ROBIN KORNMAN: When I talk to a student I find it helpful to assume, if not actually say, “You feel like you exist and I feel like I exist. From the point of view of existence, you have a buddha nature you haven’t discovered and I have a buddha nature I may be beginning to discover.” Then we can move ahead and talk about a vaster ethical system than simply avoiding the negative results of our previous karma.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: From the standpoint of the Zen tradition, and also in my own experience working with people, I like to point out that we all have an experience of subjectivity. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be so interested in “the self.” There’s an experience people have of being a subject somehow. The problem is not that this experience needs to be denied but rather that we’re mistaken about the nature of the experience. Rather than understanding that the experience of subjectivity is an ever-changing, ongoing flow of experiences, we take this flow of experience to be a graspable person who must look good and be happy and on and on.

So karma makes sense in terms of the ongoing, ever-evolving, ever-changing, ever-disappearing and reappearing subject, because downstream that subject experiences events that were caused upstream by actions of the subjects of the past. The problem arises when I think that there is a graspable subject here and a graspable object there. But in fact, even if I understand the true essence of my self, I still want to pay attention to karma, because there will still be effects in the future—although the effects come to bear not on a permanent graspable self but on the ever-changing, ongoing stream of self.

It’s a tricky kind of language, and we have to be careful to draw it out for students, because most people take the no-self language to be a denial of the experience of subjectivity. And such a denial is absurd.

The idea of not having an agent, a doer, runs counter to philosophies that celebrate will as what makes life worth living.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: In the Buddhist worldview, there is no equivalent to this celebration of will. It is a totally different view of life. Rather than the assertion of my will as fulfilling my destiny, as the reason for my existence, the Buddhist view has more of a sense of a sharing, a cooperative and creative discovery of experience moment after moment in concert with everything. That’s our destiny and that’s our joy. The whole idea of will implies a separate individual asserting his or her will. That asserting of will escalates to asserting my will against the will of others, so if I want my will to have its satisfaction, I will have to do battle with the wills of others. In Buddhism, that whole construct is just called ignorance.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: I think there is a gulf of difference separating will and the notion of resolution, such as you would find in the Theravāda system of the ten perfections (pāramī) of the bodhisattva. One of them is resolution or determination (adhiṭṭhāna). You cannot become a fully enlightened buddha without perfecting the capacity to be determined, to be resolute.

The latter view is what we call vow, which can lead to the end of karma. The Buddha says that the action of perfecting wisdom brings about the cessation of karma. There’s wholesome karma, unwholesome karma, and then there’s the karma that leads to the cessation of karma. That is the pinnacle of spiritual practice.

ROBIN KORNMAN: When you completely stop believing in ego, karma no longer has the slightest effect. It ceases to function and you are free of karma.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: Enlightened people are subject to no law whatsoever. The heart is totally freed and unfettered, completely unbound. All they are is an inclination guided by infinite wisdom and infinite kindness, so their actions in the world are immensely powerful but not guided by ego’s concerns. Hence, they have powerful presence and an enormous capacity to manipulate the world, but the self does not motivate that so-called manipulation. It merely responds to people’s needs and the needs of the situations put before them. They are guided by wisdom and compassion and not by any kind of reactive ego concern.

It seems easy for people to accept the principle of karma on a small scale, but it is much harder for people to accept the notion of karma working over lifetimes. What is the mechanism through which this happens?

ROBIN KORNMAN: In the Mahāyāna, we talk about the storehouse of consciousness (ālaya), which stores the seeds of our actions that will bear fruit later on.

But that simply posits a place where seeds are stored. It still begs the question, how does the actual mechanism of karma work?

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: Today, Buddhadharma exists within a very skeptical materialist society. It seems important to me, then, to be faithful to the simple teachings. For example, the definition of mundane right view is recognizing the workings of karma—that there are past lives, there are future lives, and that they are the results of good and bad actions.

Even though many of the canonical teachings and classical commentaries stress seeing the rebirth process stretching over lifetimes, more often than not the Buddha talks about the rebirth process in moment-to-moment terms. Acting on an angry impulse, one is reborn into regret and so forth. And of course, the whole process cascades. Its workings are responsible for the day-to-day conditioning of human beings, for how society works, and how the whole world is structured.

ROBIN KORNMAN: Yes, in that sense, we can speak of societal and national karma.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: Yes, and on a very deep level, the tendencies of different species, and the very fact of being born as a human being in a particular time and place, arise from certain causes and carry their own constellation of effects and imprints of memory.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: In trying to understand karma in a very deep way, I find the need to go beyond the doctrinal or philosophical. The understanding has to come from the deep experience of ongoing meditation practice. The short-range karma can become very clear, but long experience on the meditation cushion can allow you to realize that this moment contains dimensions that you will never be able to entirely grasp with your five aggregates and six consciousnesses.

The bigger questions of the karma of past lives or the karma that gives rise to whole world systems, and all the various doctrinal elaborations, are efforts to explain in logical ways an experiential and intuitive feeling about the inexorable working of karma that arises from deep practice. It is not really possible to account conventionally for such an understanding. Your explanations will be found wanting.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: When I think and talk about the workings of karma on a large scale, I liken it to the first law of thermodynamics: the sum total of all energy in the universe is constant. With respect to karma, I think of it as the law of the conservation of consciousness. All causes must have their effects, and those effects will ripple through the whole system. What is reborn from one life to another, one day to another, one moment to another, are heaps of habits and insights.

How are they carried? An action in one place can bear fruit in a far-off place. The rebirth process is like that. The kind of movement of energy across space and time is what we experience as the rebirth process. So even if we can’t understand conceptually exactly how karma works, we can attend to the whole system. As Norman was saying, there’s an intuitive sense that deepens with meditation over time and that gives a sense of where things are going, what things are important, what shape they have.

So while we can see that larger scope through the insight that arises in meditation practice, there’s no rational argument that explains how cause and effect work on a large scale.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: In the Theravāda canon, there is what are called the Four Imponderables, and one of them is the workings of karma. The Buddha said that if you tried to figure it out intellectually, your head would explode. The thinking mind doesn’t have enough dimensions to encompass the reality of it.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: I am reminded of a kōan concerning karma that is central to Zen practitioners. There’s an old man attending abbot Pai Chang’s lectures. Pai Chang asks him who he is, and he answers, “I’m really a fox, and I’ve been reborn as a fox for five hundred lifetimes, because in a previous life when I was the abbot of this very temple, someone asked me, ‘Is the enlightened person free from karma or not?’ I told them the enlightened person is free from karma, and because of that I’ve been reborn for five hundred lives as a fox. Can you please help me?” Pai-chang replies, “The enlightened person does not obscure karma,” and this answer enlightens the old man. He’s later freed from the body of a fox, and the fox body is given an honorable burial.

The crux of the kōan is, what does it mean to not obscure karma? The enlightened person is free from karma—and we know what that means—but there’s more to it than that. The deep answer is not to be found doctrinally but rather on the cushion. This kōan describes the Zen understanding of karma. One can say a lot about this kōan, but the important point is that the situation is not quite so simple or convenient, from the Zen point of view, as saying that the enlightened person is free from karma. The way to clarify that is not by doctrine but by intuition on the cushion.

VEN. AJAHN AMARO: I don’t think the teaching on karma necessarily needs to be sophisticated or refined. In the Southern Buddhist countries, karma is taught on a very simple and straightforward basis. That approach is as much a part of bringing the understanding of karma and its result into the Western culture as are detailed explanations of paṭiccasamuppāda, because essentially the simple teaching in the form of a simile expresses the same thing. The Buddha’s teaching is: if you sow the seeds, you reap the fruit. It’s an aphorism that two- and three-year-olds learn in Thailand and Sri Lanka. It becomes a basic format for existing within the world. Such simple directives are a recurrent theme introduced all the way along through one’s education.

ROBIN KORNMAN: In the Tibetan traditions we have great practitioners who are also great metaphysicians, following the Indian tradition of people like Candrakīrti and Nāgārjuna. Teachers like Mipham the Great and Jamgön Kongtrül say that our karma is subtle and very difficult to study, and then they go ahead and study it in great detail. They say that there is no teaching of the Buddha that can’t be demonstrated through inference. They are inspired to figure things out for the culture, for the civilization, philosophizing out the details of the functions—what karma is and what it does. There is an approach that says that it is worthwhile to present comprehensive systems of thought that can have civilizing effects throughout the world and, in so doing, can actually bring about whole Buddhist civilizations.