Listen to the talk here
My relief that the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic is at last being subjected to international justice has a personal dimension. My father’s family were Jewish victims of the Nazis and my grandfather died in Sobibor Concentration Camp, so I feel a particular resonance with accounts of Central European genocide. Most chilling for me, and most reminiscent of the Nazis, was the cool deliberation behind the Srebranica massacre when the state turned its power on Bosnian Moslems killing 8,000.
My relief may sound rather un-Buddhist if you consider Buddhism to be essentially passive, focusing on meditation rather than action and relying on karma as a kind of mystical justice system that ensures wrongdoers get their just deserts. But the Buddha’s teaching of karma has been badly misunderstood both in the West and in the popular religion of many Buddhist countries. The Buddha started with the principle that actions have consequences and wanted to understand how the actions we perform now affect the future. He saw that we constantly shape and reshape our experience depending on how we act, and the moral dimension, for Buddhists, starts with observing that the choices we make mould the kind of people we become. Every time I act generously, I become a little more likely to do so in the future and therefore experience the happiness that goes with being a generous person. The converse is true of cruelty, hatred and so on. The real meaning of karma is that the choices we make determine the kind of person we become. ‘Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.’
From this perspective, our every word, thought and deed has a moral weight, and the whole of life is an ethical arena. That’s a powerful incentive to act ethically oneself, but what of those who don’t share this perspective? A leader who’s ordered an atrocity may well be morally warped as a result, but such people also write the laws, run the police forces and frame the ideologies that justify their actions and let them get away with them. The malevolence of the Nazis who killed my relatives was matched only by their conviction that they were acting for the good.
That’s where others must intervene, and those who impose justice from without need precisely the sort of ethical awareness that is fostered by seeing the moral or karmic effects of actions for both oneself and others. Notwithstanding the popular view, karma doesn’t mean that one should sit back passively and let destiny take its course. It’s a call to action.
I would grant every thinker a stipulation. If Sangharakshita and other Western Buddhists had started out by saying “We’re going to change the traditional meaning of karma, for practical communicative reasons. From now on in our discourse it no longer means a system of cosmic justice, but just the way that our choices have consequences that shape our characters”, then I would have some sympathy, even if I couldn’t quite see how the use of the term ‘karma’ would help any communication in the West.
However, they have not done this. Instead, as your article illustrates, they claim to know the “real” meaning of karma. They have not abandoned the “misunderstood” traditional view of karma as cosmic justice, but merely repackaged it so as to make karma appear more palatable to a Western audience. Karma is explained to newcomers in the terms you have just given above, but as they progress and have increasing investment in the group, then the traditional metaphysical trappings of karma turn out to be still attached to this re-interpretation. The cosmic justice system is still there, but its “real” meaning, whenever the going gets tough, is said to be just moral consequences within experience. Thus at the same time Western Buddhists seem to manage to believe on the one hand that Buddhism only appeals to experience, and also on the other that everyone gets their just deserts, and it would be a good idea to believe in rebirth if we could only get over our sceptical Western conditioning and manage it, even though these beliefs are incompatible both philosophically and practically.
I’m afraid there’s only one word to use to describe this way of proceeding, which I have arrived at not hastily, but only reluctantly after 20 years experience of Western Buddhism – and that’s dishonesty. Newcomers are given a frankly misleading idea of what Western Buddhists believe about karma. You can have a reformed Buddhism to help the Western public, or you can hang onto a belief in karma, but you can’t have it both ways and insist that the Western public will really be helped by a belief in karma, when what they need is just a recognition that the effects of their actions often shape their characters.
What’s more, I think that the discussion of the effects of his actions on the psyche of someone like Ratko Mladic needs a more serious and realistic framework than can ever be offered by karma. Use the term ‘karma’ in this connection and people will immediately assume that Mladic will get his just deserts. But will he? Even if he gets a life sentence from the ICC, he may remain blithely unaware of the full effects of his actions on others for the rest of his life. It will not necessarily result even in mental suffering, and it is just a gross over-simplification of the complexity of moral effects to assume that this is inevitable. And how could we ever judge what is in any sense ‘just’ or the proportionate effect of previous choices? Mladic may change completely and no longer ‘deserve’ his punishment, or, of course, die long before he experiences that suffering. I’m sure that Mladic is experiencing the effects of his actions on his character, but whether they are painful in anything like proportion to those actions only he knows, and we are in no position to assert any universal laws about what his experience or that of anyone else is like.