Common human experience proves that evil almost always generates evil and so it is more likely that one will accumulate new karma instead of getting rid of the karma of past lives. Instead of adopting a passive attitude when facing the hardships of life (the actual effect of past karma), humans almost always react with indignation, and so accumulate a constantly growing karmic debt. Normally it is supposed that the person who is living out the consequences of karma should do it in a spirit of resignation and submission. By virtue of their present misfortunes the reacting effects of their past will be thereby worked out, and they will be in a position to attain the Consummation of Incomparable Enlightenment (Diamond Sutra 16, emphasis mine).īut who will actually work out the effects of one's past? A new distribution of the five aggregates? Or who will actually attain enlightenment? How could this process render perfect justice? Perfect justice for whom? For an illusory personhood that disappears at physical death?Ģ) A second objection concerns the actual possibility of attaining liberation from karma and reincarnation. If it be that good men and good women, who receive and retain this discourse, are downtrodden, their evil destiny is the inevitable retributive result of sins committed in their past mortal lives. In Buddhism, where the very idea of a self who transmigrates is rejected, the idea of sowing and reaping is even more absurd. (Actually this saying is taken from the New Testament, Galatians 6,7, but there it has a different meaning.) According to the reincarnation mechanism one person sows and another one reaps, since no personal characteristics can be preserved from one incarnation of the impersonal self to the next. Therefore natural disasters, plagues and accidents that affect innocent people cannot be explained away as being generated by karma.įor this reason, the saying "a man reaps what he sows" is falsely used as a way of expressing one’s reincarnationist ideas. This mechanism, of one person accumulating karma and another bearing the consequences, is rather unfair, fundamentally contradicting the idea of realizing perfect justice. The new person will bear the karma produced by the previous persons inhabited by the same self. In order to realize this, a new person is born each time the self enters a new human body. If not, the self is forced to enter a new illusory association with personhood until all fruits of past lives are consumed. If, at the moment of death, there is no more karmic debt left, the separation of the self from the illusory involvement with the physical and psycho-mental world is permanent, and this represents liberation. The impersonal self ( atman or purusha) which reincarnates has nothing to do with suffering it is a simple observer of the ongoing psycho-mental life. 102)Īlthough it may seem that the mechanism of karma and reincarnation is the proper way to realize social justice, there are two main objections which contradict it:ġ) As long as suffering (or the reward for good deeds) can be experienced only at a personal level (physical and psychical), and a human being ceases to exist as a person at physical death, it implies that another person will actually bear the consequences dictated by the karma of the deceased person. (Swami Shivananda, Practice of Karma Yoga, Divine Life Society, 1985, p. The law of compensation is inexorable and relentless. He will have compensation in his next birth. If the wicked man who daily does many evil actions apparently enjoys in this birth, this is due to some good Karma he must have done in his previous birth. He will have his compensation in his next birth. If the virtuous man who has not done any evil act in this birth suffers, this is due to some wrong act that he may have committed in his previous birth. According to karma, there is no forgiveness for the "sins" of the past, but only accumulation of karmic debt, followed by paying the consequences in further lives. This would explain all inequalities we see among people, comfort those who cannot understand their present difficult condition and also give hope for a further better life. They will manifest as good or bad happenings and circumstances, with mathematical exactitude, so that everything one does will be justly punished or rewarded, at both a quantitative and a qualitative level. It says that karma and reincarnation provide the perfect way to realize justice in our world, by rewarding all one’s deeds and thoughts in further lives. B) Past-life recall as proof for reincarnation Ī more important argument for reincarnation is of a moral nature.
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