IB World Religions 1.2.2. the Human Condition: Atman, Samsara and Karma Notes

1.2.2. The Human Condition: Atman, Samsara and Karma

Atman and jiva

1. Hindus describe a human being as more than a body and a personality. What is most real in a person is the atman (the self or soul), and Hindus hold that it was never born and does not die.
2. The Upanishads, the philosophical layer of the shruti (heard, that is revealed) texts, return again and again to the question of what the atman is. Their answers set the terms for almost everything Hindus later say about the human condition.
3. Many Hindus relate the atman to Brahman (ultimate reality). The Chandogya Upanishad's formula tat tvam asi (you are that) is read as saying that the innermost self and ultimate reality are not two separate things.
4. What is not the atman is the jiva (the ego and body, the individual as it appears and acts). Hindus teach that people ordinarily mistake the jiva for the whole of themselves.
5. This distinction sets up the whole Hindu diagnosis. The problem with human beings is not usually described as wickedness but as misidentification, a person taking the changing part for the real one.
6. Because the atman is held to be unborn and deathless, Hindus do not treat death as the end of a person. It ends one body, and the question that matters is what happens next.

The round of samsara

1. Hindus call the round of birth, life, death and rebirth samsara (the cycle of life, death and reincarnation). It is described as beginningless, so no life within it counts as the first.
2. Samsara is not pictured as a line that ends in a final judgment. It is closer to a wheel, in which one body is set down, another is taken up, and the atman carries on.
3. Rebirth is not limited to human bodies. Traditional teaching includes animal and divine births, which is why Hindus commonly speak of a human birth as rare and valuable rather than as the normal case.
4. Hindus generally speak of the atman as bound to this cycle rather than blessed with it. Samsara is a situation to be solved, and the solution is treated in the next article.
5. The cycle also carries a practical weight in family life. Funeral rites, the antyeshti, treat the body as something surrendered while the atman moves on, and shraddha rites offer food and water to ancestors thought to be still travelling.
6. What keeps the round turning is not fate or divine decree in most Hindu accounts. It is action, and that brings in karma.

Karma and its fruits

1. Karma means action, and it also names the law of cause and effect by which actions produce results. Hindus use it to explain why one atman takes one birth and another takes a very different one.
2. Karma is not only outward behaviour. The intention behind an act, and the state of mind it is done in, are treated as part of what makes the karma.
3. Right action is said to build punya (spiritual merit or holiness) and wrong action to build pap (sin or demerit). Hindus teach that both bind the atman to further births, because both are debts the cycle has to settle.
4. In most Hindu accounts the process is impersonal. No god sits keeping a ledger, and results ripen the way a seed produces the plant belonging to it, though theistic schools do add that Ishvara (God as Lord) oversees the whole arrangement.
5. Karma is not treated as a private matter. Hindu teaching holds that bad karma corrupts the wider order, so how ordinary people act is said to have consequences for the world and not only for themselves.
6. The doctrine is therefore both weight and hope. It explains a person's present circumstances, and it also means that what a person does now is what shapes the future.

Maya and attachment

1. Maya names the illusory forms of the created world, the way things present themselves as solid, separate and worth holding on to.
2. Maya is not usually the claim that nothing exists. It is a claim about perception, that the world is misread as a field of permanent selves and permanent objects.
3. The chain Hindus describe is short. Maya produces attachment, attachment produces desire, desire produces action, and action produces the karma that produces the next birth.
4. The Upanishads and the Vedanta schools call the root misperception avidya (ignorance). It is not a shortage of information but a mistaken identification of the self with the body and its wants.
5. The gunas, the three qualities of created nature called sattva, rajas and tamas, are used to describe how material existence colours a person's mind and behaviour. A life dominated by one guna is said to look and feel quite different from a life dominated by another.
6. Hindus meet maya in practice through disciplines of detachment, from fasting to meditation, which train attention away from what is passing.

Advaita and bhakti readings

1. Hindus do not agree about what the atman finally is, and the disagreement changes how the human condition is described.
2. Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual school associated with Shankara, teaches that atman and Brahman are identical with nothing left over. On this reading the human problem is avidya alone, since a person already is what they are searching for and does not know it.
3. Vishishtadvaita, the qualified non-dualism associated with Ramanuja, teaches that the atman is real and distinct, related to Brahman as a body is related to the soul that governs it.
4. On that second reading the problem is not ignorance only. It also includes separation from a personal God, so the human condition is described in relational terms.
5. Bhakti traditions, devotional movements centred on Vishnu, Shiva or the Goddess, generally follow this second line. Devotees speak of themselves as belonging to a Lord, and of ordinary life as estrangement from someone who can be loved.
6. The two readings agree on the frame even so. Both hold that the atman is caught in samsara through karma, and both describe the trouble as misperception rather than crime.