(Sanderson in Sutherland et.al. 1988:664–5)
A case, perhaps, of sharp practice where others’ karmic credit is concerned! Or consider beliefs associated with the common undertaking of performing commemorative rites (śrāddha) for one's dead. It is generally believed that, by these rites, the preta, i.e. the soul of one's departed relative awaiting the karmic resolution of its post-mortem fate, is in some manner given a ghostly body and fed, which grants it (temporary or eternal) peace. In any case, by a transaction of karma, viz. the accruing or transfer of merit, and/or the annulment of demerit, accomplished by the śrāddha rite, the departed is enabled to cease being a preta. A great many Hindus from all walks of life continue to believe that it is very important to perform the rites for the dead (for both their own peace and that of the preta). It is quite undesirable to have unappeased pretas wandering about; they tend to cause trouble in the human world, especially for their relatives.
There is no generally accepted explanation about the karmic link between appeased or unappeased souls of the departed and their rebirth. This is another grey spot in the logic of transmigration. Yet it does not stop people from believing both (a) in pretas and the need for the śrāddha rites, and (b) in the law of karma and rebirth. Many practical anxieties are thus assuaged, even if on occasion undetected or unresolved intellectual tensions remain.
Thus, for some, śrāddha rites may be one way of doing away with or reducing the impact of past karma. There are also other ways that are believed to exert joint or independent efficacy in this respect. Often, in theistic traditions, God is brought into the picture in this context. Generally, in bhakti sects, it is believed that selfless devotion to God wipes away one's accumulated (saṃcita) karma. The love of the deity, which may mean either God's love for the devotee or the devotee's love for God, overcomes all, even the vice-like grip of the law of karma. Some devotees believe that this love of God may be coupled with specific rituals that can destroy past karma, without building up a fresh supply.10
But in so far as the selfless love for God has not been attained, and one abides by a somewhat egoistic morality, e.g. by importuning the deity for favours such as success in various ventures, good health, long life, etc., the law of karma and rebirth becomes an expression of the divine justice and mercy: divine justice because it is God alone who can fashion a world that becomes the appropriate arena for enabling everyone's karmic fruit to be dispensed, and divine mercy because He continually invites the individual to embrace an other-regarding or selfless way of life (where ‘the other’ includes the deity) that will result in the annulment of accumulated karma. But for other Hindus, who may not believe in a Supreme Reality that is personal, it is the fire of self-realization (para-jñāna, para-vidyā), coupled with a selfless morality that consumes the burden of accumulated karma. So, one way or another, one need not be cowed by the apparently inexorable outworking of the law. Fate in the form of karma does not necessarily reign supreme.
Though it is the case that some bhaktas or devotees of God have, in the transports of their devotion, expressed a desire for rebirth as humans in this world so as to continue to experience the sweetness of yearning for their divine Beloved – a mark of the kind of devotion to God known as viraha bhakti, viz. ‘the devotion of separation’ from the Beloved (see Chapter 15) – generally rebirth is never presented in Hinduism as something to be desired for such reasons as love for life in this world. On the contrary, notwithstanding its positive features and pleasures, life in saṃsāra is usually characterized as fundamentally sorrowful, and as such, undesirable. One's goal should be liberation (however this may be described) from the seductive thrall of this world. The Gītā says that this world is inherently ‘the abode of sorrow’ (8.15); the sage Ramana Maharshi has described it as a ‘wild and terrible forest’ and a ‘prison’, and who can forget the plaintive cry in a hymn invoking Kṛṣṇa, attributed to the great theologian Śaṃkara, about the tedium of repeated birth? I give the Sanskrit first so as to evoke the sentiment of rebirth's wearisome repetitiveness embedded in the resonance of the words:
Punar api jananaṃ, punar api maraṇam,
Punar api jananī-jaṭhare sayanam,
Iha saṃsāre bahu dustāre,
kṛpayāpāre pāhi, murāre!
‘To be born again, and to die again,
To lie in the womb of a mother again,
Here in the great travail of saṃsāra!
Save me, [Krishna], in your boundless mercy!’
(See Zaehner 1961:232)
The wise person realizes that even our earthly pleasures harbour the seeds of their own decay, for as soon as we are gratified we become subconsciously fearful that the reason for our gratification will be snatched away. Worldly pleasure can never engender lasting happiness. In short, like the inseparable twins, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, sukha or pleasure and duṣkha or pain are two sides of the same coin, with duṣkha dominating the relationship. True happiness or ānanda, on the other hand, is self-sustaining; it is the mark not of self-gratification but of selfless living.
But this sorrowful nature of saṃsāra does not entitle us to seek to manipulate our karma by shortening our life for selfish reasons. Thus, resorting to suicide to escape adverse circumstances is generally regarded as reprehensible (though there may be strong reasons to mitigate censure of the act and its karmic recompense). Suicide in a dharmic cause, however – an act of rescue, or in battle, or perhaps through suttee for some authorities – has been regarded as praiseworthy, generating good karma or even karma's annulment, depending on circumstance and the purity of intention of the act. For Hindus there is such a thing as timely and untimely death. In this context, we must respect our own and others’ maturing karma and seek to overcome undesirable aspects of it only by dharmic means. It is not permissible to perform undharmic actions in the name of fate or karma. The latter may not override human responsibility. The Caraka Saṃhita, a fairly early authoritative medical text (200–600 C.E.), declares:
If all life-spans were fixed [irrevocably by the decrees of karma/fate, irrespective of the consequences of human deeds], then in search of good health none would employ efficacious remedies or verses, herbs ... oblations ... fasting .... There would be no ... anxiety about falling from mountains or [into] rough, impassable waters; and none whose minds were [considered] negligent ... [There would be] no violent acts, no actions out of place or untimely .... For the occurrence of these and the like would not cause death if the term of all life were fixed and predetermined ... Undertaking to employ the stories and thoughts of the great seers regarding the prolongation of life would be senseless. Even Indra could not slay with his thunderbolt an enemy whose life-span was fixed.
(Quoted from Weiss in O'Flaherty 1980b:95)
We have a strong endorsement here of the validity of the way the human psyche (and to some extent that of animals) functions, and the manner in which the law of karma and rebirth works must be accommodated to this context. In other words, the decrees of karma and the freedoms of dharma need not be incompatible.11
Let us now consider an underlying presupposition for Hindus of the doctrine of karma and rebirth: that of the dualistic nature, philosophically, of sentient being. In this respect, some adaptation or other of what became the classical Sāṃkhya view of the self is generally implied. We have already provided a sketch of this view in Chapter 9;here let us amplify it with the theory of karma and rebirth particularly in mind.
For most religious Hindus, the centre of gravity of the human person lies squarely in the person's spiritual component, in the ātman or puruṣa, rather than in the prakritic or psychophysical complement that generates the body and its psychical life as well as the personality of the individual (see Chapter 9). It is the spirit that gives the human being its intrinsic worth, sustains the psychophysical dimension, and is destined for ultimate immortality. Hence our everyday awareness of personal identity, informed as it is by personal names (‘I am so-and-so’), dimensions
and complexions of the body (‘I am short/tall/dark/fair’), memory-experiences (‘My father/mother is/was so-and-so’; ‘I come from this village/city/country’; ‘I have done this or that in the past’), and various hopes, fears, expectations etc. that arise through a complex network of relationships with other beings, viz. all those features of awareness that go to make up our personal identities and give us our self-image as a psychophysical ego, is to a large extent a false centre of consciousness. This is because it is a function of our prakritic or ‘material’ component and as such is provisional and transient – hardly the basis of ultimate fulfilment. The psychophysical complement of our beings has a borrowed value, a value derived from the sustaining and essentially unchanging transcendent spirit within.
But the psychophysical ego, the everyday ‘I’, is not entirely a false centre of consciousness because, in experiencing it, we also experience – though for all but enlightened souls this is a more or less implicit and confused experience – our ‘true self’, namely, the integral awareness of the sustaining ātman within. Only enlightened souls enjoy a continuing state of discernment between the real centre of their beings which is spirit, and the ‘material’ construct, which is the psychophysical ego. As such, they live not through the ego, which grows typically through self-centred desire (tṛṣṇā) by assimilating everything and everybody in some way to itself, but through the expansive and egoless nature of spirit. For the enlightened, the ego – a necessary pivot of everyday experience – becomes a more or less transparent focus for the presence of the spirit within. Every selfless act is a spiritual act, every selfish act is unspiritual. And, as we have seen, salvation is attained by selfless action (niṣkāma karma).
To say that spirit is the valorizing principle, the centre of gravity, of human personhood, does not necessarily mean that matter and the body are to be despised. No doubt, there is a strong ascetic current, in which bodily and material goods are somewhat denigrated, running through traditional post-Saṃhitā Vedic Hinduism. But both in Hindu theology as a whole and on a more popular basis, there have been strong counter-currents. Tantric cults, we have seen, ritually use bodily products and processes, sometimes in unconventional contexts, as a means to spiritual fulfilment, accompanied by various theologies to explain this. In the Vedāntic tradition, the medieval theologian Rāmānuja's thought provides a famous example of an attempt to rehabilitate to a significant extent the post-Śaṃkara Advaitic denigration of the body. A key feature of Rāmānuja's theology is the idea that the world is the divine Being's ‘body’, the latter understood in the special sense of something that the deity brings into being and sustains, providentially indwells and nourishes, and enables to serve the divine ends. Rāmānuja's distinctive system of philosophical-theology has been called Viśiṣṭādvaita – ‘the non-duality of separate beings’ – in Western terms, a kind of ‘panentheism’ (‘[the indwelling of] all being in the deity’) (Carman 1974; Lott 1976; Lipner 1986a).
On the whole, however, the Hindu attitude to the body is ambivalent, and it is the human female body that typically symbolizes this ambivalence. On the one hand, woman's body can symbolize creativity, service in a higher cause, fertility, fidelity, nourishing power, protectiveness, and so on. These positive qualities are usually attributed to woman (and the Goddess) in her wifely and maternal roles. On the other hand, the female body can also symbolize the power to destroy what has been created, lustfulness and seduction, and hence deceit and spiritual delusion, not to mention worldly travail (in so far as by giving birth woman becomes the doorway to future suffering). These negative connotations are often associated with woman (or the Goddess) as independent of man or outside his control. No doubt some of these connotations arise from traditional male perceptions of womanhood, and they have their complex socio-cultural repercussions in male and female Hindu psyches. Much has been written on this matter, and it would be too much of a digression to discuss it here. We note finally that the idea of the body as an enabling, if frail, instrument of the soul, replaceable in each new birth, is given wide popularity through songs (including religious songs such as bhajans, etc.), films, novels, and so on in Hindu culture.
Finally, we may ask, who or what is the agent of karma and rebirth in the context of this dualistic model of the person? Is it the spirit (ātman/puruṣa) acting through the prakritic, essentially non-conscious psychophysical ego, or is it the psychophysical ego itself? Hindu thought has embraced both positions. Thus in traditional Advaita and Sāṃkhya, for example, the ātman can never be the agent or subject of karma and rebirth; the unenlightened individual is deluded into thinking that this is the case, and it is part of the process of enlightenment to ‘see through’ this delusion. In fact, it is the ego that is responsible for producing karma. Salvation entails the dissolution of the ego together with its karma, leaving the ātman/puruṣa to continue its unchanging and now unfettered existence. For Rāmānuja, however, the ātman is a genuine agent (kartṛ) and subject of mundane experience (bhoktṛ), acting through the psychophysical ego, though the unenlightened individual is deluded as to the nature and scope of this composite agency (Lipner 1986a: Chapter 4). Salvation consists, in part, in the dissolution of the false ego, and in part, in a sense of ‘I-consciousness’ that subsumes and sublates in some way all the particular first-person awarenesses of an individual's previous lives.
Note, however, that death for either stance entails not only the destruction of the visible body, but also the dissolution or at least occlusion of the empirical ego (‘I-image’) of a particular embodiment. What endures each death in a particular series of rebirths is spirit conjoined to what is called the ‘subtle body’ or liga śarīra. It is the subtle body of each individual that distinguishes and identifies a particular chain of births as belonging to that individual rather than to any other, and that links one birth in a particular series with the next. The subtle body is an entirely prakritic or non-conscious substrate, the insensible repository of all the memory-traces and accumulating karma of a particular karmic series. In the case of an impending birth into this world, a particular subtle body (to which the spirit is regarded as ‘attached’) finds a suitable couple through whose reproductive union its maturing karma can receive appropriate corporeal expression. The growth of a new human individual involves the development of a new empirical ego, a new sense of ‘I’.
If this is the case, in what sense may a particular individual be said to be responsible for the (past) karma of its karmic successors? In other words, can I say that I am suffering the consequences of what the same ‘I’ did in a previous life? Not in any obvious sense. For my ‘I-awareness’ in this life as Julius Lipner with its multi-layered complement of personal history is clearly very different from the self-image of a karmic predecessor (of which I have no recollection). Even when people have claimed to recollect a previous life – and there are numerous instances of this (see Stevenson 1974) – they invariably claim to have been someone else. This is the point of rebirth. This is to say that my moral and other agency in this life as Julius Lipner is quite different from my putative agency in a previous life, or indeed, in a future rebirth. This makes the whole question of accountability, moral or otherwise, for actions supposedly done in another life a very problematic one. Believers in rebirth tend to overlook this when they say, usually quite glibly, that they or others are suffering or enjoying, or will suffer or enjoy, the karmic recompense of what has been done by ’them’ in a previous existence.
In fact, it seems that the doctrine of karma and rebirth, which tends to be absorbed uncritically in the culture as a ‘gut-belief’, is a device resorted to in order to plug holes in a basically rational understanding of the universe. When other rational explanations for events prove to be inadequate or unsatisfactory, fate/karma steps in as an answer. Why is this suffering happening to me or to other apparent innocents seemingly out of the blue? When other explanations (the decree of a good God, inability to apportion blame) fail, fate or karma (which
has the semblance of personal responsibility) appears to make sense. What will happen to me if I behave in a particular way morally, knowing as I do that the wicked in my experience of the current life are often not held to account and the good seem to suffer undeservedly? A sense of moral order, of fair play, invokes the inexorable, recompensing law of karma (and rebirth). In short, the doctrine of karma and rebirth – with or without the aegis of divine providence – is a characteristic Hindu way of papering over the cracks in a rational appraisal of a universe regulated by predictable laws, whether these be physical, mental, moral or spiritual. This is why, for practical purposes, it is a doctrine rather than a theory, although philosophical minds, as we have seen, have attempted to make a theory of it.12
It is a common fallacy that belief in karma and rebirth is universal among Hindus (including religious Hindus). In fact, surveys have shown that, though the belief is widespread and deeply entrenched, there is a significant minority that finds the belief doubtful or unconvincing. These doubters can be found among the ‘uneducated’ in Western terms or in the context of a folk Hinduism in which belief in a causal relationship between karma and rebirth is tenuous to say the least (see, e.g. Ayrookuzhiel 1983: Chapter VI), as well as among those who have been exposed to some degree of Western education (see, e.g. Gosling 1974). There are strands of Hinduism in which it is believed that recompense for good or bad deeds is generally meted out in the present life. In the Manasā Magal, discussed in an earlier chapter, this view prevails, though there is also recourse to the rebirth doctrine.
A number of Hindus attribute a symbolic significance to the belief in karma and rebirth. Thus, they say, it may not literally be true that rebirth takes place in order to expend such a thing as accumulated karma in the sense discussed in this chapter, but speaking in terms of karma and rebirth is a potent way of symbolizing the responsibilities that one generation of human beings bears towards succeeding generations. Current ecological sensitivities give point to this interpretation. The child becomes the father of the man in a new sense, for are we not reborn in our children who will have to face the consequences of our moral, social and environmental decisions – the ‘karma’ we have created – in the lives and the world that they inherit from us?
Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) Page 48