What does one know upon being born? According to the Yoga sutras of Patanjali, nothing is known, except for the fear of death. “For even a child just born trembles at the sight of a murderous thing” says the verse, and this suggests that this fear of death comes from a previous life-time. Just as one can only fear fire if one has once been burned, so one can only fear death if one has once before died. This suggests that the fear of death is deeply embedded in soul of one who has just recently died and been reborn.
Why is it, then, that no other fears or memories reside in the soul of the one reborn? Is it only “murderous things” that make children tremble, or is it perhaps simply anything loud and/or unfamiliar? In fact, most children under about two seem to not bat an eyelid at death, blood and gore, seemingly not recognizing it as anything out of the ordinary. The argument seems opportunistic. One could equally argue that due to the proximity of the experience of death, the soul is familiar with and therefore not scared of death until it forms an attachment to life. The underlying assumption is that going through the experience of death will leave one fearful. By analogy, though, if one is afraid of jumping into dark water, once one leaps in and dives under, will that fear not subside? Thus, going through death should cause a cessation in the fear of death, not vice versa.
If we accept transmigration, then we must ask why all beings do not fear death. Transmigration requires all beings, from a cooking pot[1] to a priest to fear death, as the knowledge is stored in the soul, and even the cooking pot has a soul. On the assumption that a cooking pot does not fear death, we then have to limit this theory to all sentient beings, thus bringing us to the Buddhist thesis.
Buddhist tradition rejects the soul. The physical and the mental are all lumped together as being purely matter. In the Buddhist view, every second matter changes and particles are in motion. The theory suggests that a person is not a stable entity, not even in one lifetime, and that can not see the same person twice. Just as the saying goes “You can’t step into the same river twice” – so the Buddhist philosophy views the world. When analyzing the theory of self, this seems problematic. The people around a person do not become unrecognizable from one moment to the next.
However, this philosophy asks one to think of oneself as being composed of particles that affect each other, just like billiard balls bouncing against each other on a table. This applies to both physical as well as mental matter.
Since the particles of the psyche and body are constantly in a state of flux, it is as though one dies every moment and is reborn in every moment. This may seem disturbing and lacking in continuity. However, the Milindapanha explains that although a fire passing from one torch to the next may not be same fire, the two flames are still necessarily causally linked. As long as nothing drastic happens, the particles of matter that form a person will not have been greatly affected so as to render a person unrecognisable
However, in certain circumstances, drastic circumstances do happen. Perhaps the person’s consciousness is destroyed, and the matter of the psyche is propelled to the mind of a developing foetus. Perhaps the leg is amputated, and this deteriorates, causing plants to grow, food to be consumed, and another person being nourished. No soul is needed in this chain of causality, and thus, causality without a soul. Everything is intrinsically connected, and thus, there is no need for a soul to be the carrier of karma – whether good or bad. Looking back to the billiard ball analogy – the angle at which one ball hits another determines the course that next ball will take.
This analogy of billiard balls may support a criticism of the theory of karma, though. It seems that if we are nothing but billiard balls, be it in the Hindu or Buddhist account, then this is terribly deterministic, and we really have no control over our own lives and futures. It may seem that life and all that will come to occur is all pre-decided by events that we no longer remember or connect ourselves with.
In either account, unless one is conscious, one truly is like that billiard ball. However, an unconscious being cannot accumulate karma, but only burn it off precisely by being bounced around like that billiard ball. Once there is sentience, the only thing that Karma can control is circumstance. Perhaps a person can not control the gust of wind blowing a window open, causing the house to flood with rainwater. However, a person can determine whether to stand and watch one’s possessions swept away, or to take a bucket and scoop away the water. A sentient being, then, in both accounts, has the power to propel itself in any direction, with the weight of past Karma as a springboard only.
It is the decisions that a sentient being makes, then, that cause positive or negative turns in this and future lives. It can then be argued that in fact, the theory of Karma does not take away one’s control of a lifetime, but rather, that it means that control is not only present in this lifetime, but extends to consequent lifetimes. It means that one can perform actions in this lifetime as to influence the outcome of a future life. In a famous Thai television series, a man is reborn homosexual as a result of inadvertently (through his actions) causing the death of his wife and two mistresses in a previous lifetime. His rebirth is a result of having caused so much suffering due to lust for women. Instead, he is born with no desire for them. In this lifetime, he has accounts to settle with the people who surrounded him in the previous lifetime. How he chooses to move from here is his decision and will determine his next life.
[1] On another note: The cooking pot also ‘suffers on flames’ for its negative karma. However, fire does not in any way damage a cooking pot, the way fire damages a human being. If water is the element of a fish, then is not fire the element of the cooking pot? If the fish is not suffering from being under water, then I don’t see why the cooking pot is suffering for being on the fire.
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