IB World Religions 2.1.2. Samsara, Kamma, Maya and Rebirth Notes

2.1.2. Samsara, Kamma, Maya and Rebirth

Samsara and its realms

1. Samsara literally means wandering on, and Buddhists use it for the cycle of birth, death and rebirth in which they hold all unenlightened beings are caught. It is the situation the whole Buddhist path exists to end.
2. The tradition treats the cycle as beginningless. No first moment is proposed and no creator is held to have started it, so there is nothing outside the process for a being to appeal to.
3. Buddhist cosmology maps samsara as lokas, thirty-one planes grouped into three realms, running from hell states through the animal and human worlds up to very long-lived heavenly rebirths.
4. Even the highest of those rebirths is held to be temporary. A god in Buddhist cosmology eventually exhausts the good kamma that produced the birth and falls back into the cycle, which is why the human birth is prized as the one best suited to practice.
5. Tibetan paintings of the Wheel of Life put the whole scheme into one image: realms of rebirth in the spokes, the Three Poisons at the hub, and the wheel gripped in the jaws of Yama, the lord of death.
6. What Buddhists want from the doctrine is motive more than information. Samsara is described in detail so that the point of the path is unmistakable, and the point is getting out.

Kamma, intention and vipaka

1. Kamma (Sanskrit karma) means action, and Buddhists use it for the principle that intentional action produces results, in this life and in lives to come. They describe it as a regularity of action and result with nobody administering it.
2. The Pali Canon narrows the word sharply. It is cetana (intention) that the Buddha calls kamma, so an act done without volition carries no kammic weight.
3. The result has its own name, vipaka (ripening). Buddhists use the vocabulary of seeds and fruit deliberately, since a seed needs time and the right conditions before anything grows from it.
4. Kusala (wholesome) actions, rooted in generosity, kindness and clarity, are held to ripen pleasantly, while akusala (unwholesome) actions rooted in greed, hatred and delusion ripen painfully.
5. Theravada commentary is careful to say that kamma is only one order of causation among several. Weather, biology and the ordinary workings of the mind have their own niyamas (natural orders), so a Buddhist is not obliged to read every misfortune as a kammic verdict.
6. Nobody operates the process. Buddhists describe no judge, no sentence and no ledger keeper, which is why the doctrine is closer to a natural regularity than to a system of reward and punishment.
7. Kamma is also held to be workable. Fresh wholesome action, and above all the training of intention itself, can weaken what old action would otherwise bring, which is exactly what makes the path worth walking.

Rebirth and what continues

1. Buddhists distinguish rebirth from reincarnation, and the distinction follows directly from anatta, the teaching that there is no permanent self. What continues from one life to the next is a process rather than a passenger.
2. Reincarnation in its ordinary sense needs a soul that leaves one body and enters another. Buddhism denies precisely that, so on the Buddhist account nothing unchanging travels between lives.
3. The Pali term is punabbhava, again-becoming. What continues is a stream of conditioned mental and physical events, causally linked, with no owner riding inside it.
4. In the Milindapanha the monk Nagasena is asked whether the one who is reborn is the same person or a different one, and his answer is neither the same nor another.
5. Theravada orthodoxy holds that rebirth follows death immediately, joined by patisandhi-vinnana, the rebirth-linking moment of consciousness.
6. Vajrayana teaching describes an intermediate state instead, the bardo, and the text known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead is read aloud to guide the dying person through it.
7. Tibetan Buddhism turns the doctrine into an institution through the tulku system, in which a child is recognised as the continuation of a particular teacher's stream of consciousness, the Dalai Lama being the best known case.

Maya, avijja and moha

1. Maya means illusion, and Buddhists use it for the deceptive appearance of solidity and permanence that ordinary experience presents. They treat it as the misreading of experience that keeps the wheel turning.
2. The term carries heavier weight in Hindu thought, where it names the illusory character of the created world. The sense shifts when it crosses into Buddhist usage, and it is worth watching that shift.
3. Buddhist texts more often reach for avijja (Sanskrit avidya: ignorance) or moha (delusion), and all three name a way of seeing rather than a thing seen.
4. The illusion is quite specific. Things that arise and pass are taken as lasting, and processes with no owner are taken as belonging to a self.
5. That misreading is what makes craving feel reasonable to the one who craves, which is why Buddhists put ignorance at the head of the chain of causes rather than somewhere in the middle.
6. Mahayana texts press the point hardest. The Diamond Sutra closes by telling readers to view every conditioned thing as a dream, a bubble, a shadow, a dewdrop and a flash of lightning.
7. Buddhists hold that enlightenment extinguishes maya, and with it the ignorance that supplies craving and kamma with their fuel.

Punna and merit-making

1. Punna (Sanskrit punya) is merit, the accumulated good of wholesome action. Merit-making is where the doctrine of kamma becomes a weekly routine for most lay Buddhists.
2. In Theravada countries dana (giving) is the main channel. Laypeople place food in the bowls of monks on the morning alms round and support the monastery with money, labour and land.
3. The exchange runs both ways. Laypeople supply material support, monks supply teaching, and both sides are understood to gain by it.
4. Merit is also made at set occasions. At Kathina, at the close of the rains retreat, whole communities combine to offer new robes to a monastery.
5. Theravada teaching has usually set different targets for the two groups. Monastics aim at nibbana, while lay Buddhists more often aim at a favourable rebirth from which practice will be easier.
6. Merit can be given away as well as gathered. In pattidana the good of an action is dedicated to dead relatives, which is why merit ceremonies cluster around funerals and around memorial festivals such as the Japanese Obon.
7. Mahayana practice widens the gesture. Rituals commonly close by dedicating the merit of the act to all sentient beings rather than to named individuals.

The three ideas together

1. The three ideas answer one question in three connected parts. Buddhists rarely teach samsara, kamma and maya as separate topics, because each one supplies what the next needs.
2. Maya, the misreading of experience, makes craving look sensible. Craving produces intentional action, action ripens as kamma, and kamma projects the next birth within samsara.
3. Laid out that way, the sequence also shows where it can be cut. Remove the ignorance at the head of it and nothing further along has anything left to run on.
4. The scheme leaves a real puzzle that Buddhist thinkers have debated for centuries: how a tradition that denies a permanent self can also transfer merit to a named dead relative.
5. The usual answer is that the recipient is a continuing stream of conditions rather than a soul, and that much of the merit lies in the giver's own generous intention.
6. What the doctrine produces in practice is moral seriousness without a judge. Buddhists hold that what a person does matters enormously and that nobody anywhere is keeping the score.