Karma's a ***!

[Thumpalumpacus]

It's a sad fact of life the some folk only learn by negative reinforcement. It's also a sad fact of life the some folk are simply predators.

[The Grand Nudger]

I just had a similar convo on pagan forums in the last few days. I find myself in the pitiable position of agreeing with Bel. Karma is a way for people who could not personally do bad things to feel comfortable in the thought that bad things will happen to people they would not do bad things to, even when they thought those people deserved it.It's an outgrowth of our complicated and not entirely rational view on how the world should be, with full knowledge that this is not how the world actually is.

Bad people get away with it. No good deed goes unpunished. -Enter karma, to mollify our dissatisfaction with these facts.

[arewethereyet]

I'd love to believe that people who do bad things are eventually made to pay for those bad things. I would also love to believe that good people have only good things happen to them. I am old enough to know that neither of these things happen on the regular.

[emjay]

I've always been interested in Buddhism, but there are definitely two different ways of looking at karma. There's the superstitious, religious version, where it's thought some sort of supernatural balancing justice, perhaps even over different reincarnated lifetimes. I don't really know... I'm not interested in that type of Buddhism at all. I'm interested in the supposed original form of it, before it was tainted by religion, and in that case the understanding of karma just means cause and effect, nothing supernatural about it... you reap what you sow through cause and effect, and nothing else. If you're interested, I'd recommend the book 'What the Buddha Taught' by Walpola Rahula, for a look at the (alleged) origins of Buddhism, stripped of all the modern religious dogma that usually accompanies it.

[The Grand Nudger]

The trouble is that the "original form" is the superstitious and unserious version. More careful people, like you, came along after the fact and corrected it. Not that the forces of traditionalism appreciated, or even could appreciate....your effort.....

You did what the buddha said to do, and killed him when you met him on the road, and buddhists will detest you for it.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

For me, karmic retribution - especially as it relates to rebirth/reincarnation - is one of the most vile concepts in religion, ranking right up there with substitutive sacrifice: Joe lives a shitty life, so reincarnated baby ‘Joe’ is punished for Joe-prime’s misdeeds. Not to mention how this nonsense was used for centuries to justify the caste system.

Fuck that.

Boru

[emjay]

The trouble is that the "original form" is the superstitious and unserious version.  More careful people, like you, came along after the fact and corrected it.  Not that the forces of traditionalism appreciated, or even could appreciate....your effort.....

You did what the buddha said to do, and killed him when you met him on the road, and buddhists will detest you for it.

I knew you'd come along and shit on my parade... that's why I stuck an 'alleged' in there

I don't know if it's accurate or not, but I like that book, and for the most part, I think the logic in it speaks for itself... well the logic pertaining to this life anyway; I have no interest in its speculations about after death... so I'm only interested in it as a philosophy for this life.

ETA: But yeah, I see what you're saying; I personally feel that the Buddha would be rolling in his grave thinking about the way the religion developed and the way he is venerated in modern times, but that could just be the 'retconned' version of which you speak, talking.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's one of the great personal disappointments of how I view the world that the people I want to build up interpret that as shitting on their parade. It's entirely my own fault, ofc...but....All I'm saying..is that you have more considered and accurate thoughts than any stupid fucking buddha. You haven't divined the hidden meaning of a great ancient message, you're the author.

[emjay]

It's one of the great personal disappointments of how I view the world that the people I want to build up interpret that as shitting on their parade.  It's entirely my own fault, ofc...but....All I'm saying..is that you have more considered and accurate thoughts than any stupid fucking buddha. You haven't divined the hidden meaning of a great ancient message, you're the author.

I accept that you may well be right... that he was a product of his time, and that time was a superstitious time, so to assume that he could go that much against the grain with his philosophy is perhaps naive. But however it came about, retconned or no, I do appreciate it in the form laid out in that book.

[Belacqua]

I understand the OP is talking about the common non-technical view of karma, as cosmic retribution.

Still, it makes sense to look at more thought-out versions of the term before we condemn it entirely.

This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Jaina philosophy:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaina-philosophy/

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1.4 Liberation as unobstructed knowledge

Next to these considerations, epistemological concerns are likewise prevalent in the shaping of the metaphysical and soteriological edifices. This is due to the fact that Jaina practices aim at the practitioner’s liberation from wrong conceptions (mithyātva). In the Treatise on What There Is, the self is defined in the following way:

TS 2.8. The defining characteristic of the self is experience (upayoga).

This definition is further commented in the Commentary on the Treatise on What There Is (Tattvārthasūtrabhāṣya [TSBh]), written in Sanskrit by Umāsvāti (400–450 CE), by dividing this experience into cognition (jñāna) and indeterminate perception (darśana) (TSBh 2.9.1).

This stress on epistemic abilities is not typical of Jainism. Indeed, in most South Asian philosophico-religious traditions, the divine, the absolute, is usually primarily knowledge (jñāna), consciousness (cit), insight (prajñā), the subject of experience (puruṣa) or the seer (draṣṭṛ). Therefore, Jaina conceptions of the self (ātman, jīva) as ultimately unobstructed consciousness are no exception here.

Nor is the fact that our spiritual progress consists in a progress which is virtuous and epistemic at the same time. To explain, karma is in Jainism conceived as a subtle type of matter that fills all cosmic space. Its specific property is to develop the consequences of our virtuous, respectively unethical, acts. And then, due to passions which act as a glue, karmic matter sticks to the self and obstructs its potency. Let us think of someone’s reflection in a mirror as a type of expression of herself. Now, imagine that the mirror is red, with the pun that the Sanskrit expression “rāga” means both “red object” and “attachment, passion.” In such a situation, the person will have a red, therefore distorted, vision of herself. Jaina thinkers teach us that karmic matter function likewise, it has the shape of one’s impetus towards objects and, doing so, it impedes one’s epistemic competence, as she approaches things as part of a given limited project she has. From this, getting rid of specific intentions, acting in an equanimous virtuous way is also burning karma is also acquiring the means to see things in a less distorted way. That is to say things as they are instead of things as I intend them to be. This is this removal of wrong habits that enables right knowledge and right sight to take place, and that explains that the acquisition of higher faculties of knowledge is ensured by renunciation from passions and the corresponding destruction of karmic bondage.

In general, within a framework that admits the karma theory:

The acquisition of higher epistemic abilities is ensured by moral behavior and the corresponding destruction of karma. In this dynamic, theories of karma blur the distinction between epistemology and soteriology.

Metaphysical investigations focus on the world qua knowable. For example, Jainas derive the expression “loka”, “the universe”, not from the Sanskrit etymology “open space”, but from the root “lok-”, “to see”, inasmuch as the universe is conceived as “that which is seen by the omniscient one” (Dundas 2002). In general, theories of karma blur the distinction between epistemology and metaphysics.

Even a clod of earth exists as earth because it has earned its particular niche in the wider system of life processes due to its previous deeds. In consequence, the world of nature cannot be separated from the moral order. In general, theories of karma blur the distinction between metaphysics and soteriology.

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