Recently I've been wondering about whether people were going to partially attribute the inconvenient timing of the recent cyclone in Burma to bad kamma (the Pali word for the more common Sanskrit word karma) on behalf of the regime there. The first mention that I've seen so far has been in this article entitled Analysis: Little chance for May 10 Burma referendum in the Bankok Post:
Than Shwe chose the May 10 date because it was "an auspicious date" and because it has allowed little time for opponents to organise campaigns against the referendum, said Win Min.
Now Than Shwe will need to decide whether the stars have spoken against his divine plan.
"Many people are saying this (cyclone) is a bad omen for the regime, and punishment for their crackdown on Buddhist monks last September," said Win Min.
Some things that are important to note here:
- "And what is the result of kamma? The result of kamma is of three sorts, I tell you: that which arises right here & now, that which arises later [in this lifetime], and that which arises following that. This is called the result of kamma." -AN 6.63
- "There are these four unconjecturables that are not to be conjectured about, that would bring madness & vexation to anyone who conjectured about them. Which four? [The third one:] "The [precise working out of the] results of kamma..." -AN 4.77
- On the causes of things: "Bile, phlegm, wind, a combination, Season, uneven, harsh treatment, and through the result of kamma as the eighth." -SN 36.21
So as we can see here, it's impossible to really say for sure. The precise working out of kamma is like speculation on the origin of the universe in that it's one of the four imponderables. Additionally, not everything that happens happens because of kamma. I can't seem to find the sutta (please post a comment if you know it) but the results of kamma can also occur due to things that one did millions of years ago in a previous life, for example, which is probably why kamma is so imponderable.
So, it's not really possible to say for sure if the cyclone is the result of bad kamma of the current ruler(s) in Burma, and not everything that happens is due to kamma. Also, I believe that it's possible for a large event like this to be due to kamma for some people and not others. For example, even if Than Shwe's experience of this cyclone is the result of his bad kamma, it does not mean that the innocent victims of the cyclone were experiencing the result of their bad kamma. (I can't find the scriptural reference for this, but essentially results of kamma are a matter of experiencing phenomena and not necessarily shared by everyone in an event. There is no group kamma. If anyone can provide references please help me out here.)
Regardless though, I'm sure many people will continue to speculate that this is a result of negative kamma on behalf of the regime and that this will play a role in politics.
Things in Burma were already bad enough for the people there before this natural disaster. I hope the people of Burma will somehow find some happiness and freedom from dukkha during this difficult time, and I am glad that they do have what little happiness they may somehow still be experiencing in spite of the difficulties.
As for the regime there, "All beings are owners of their kamma, heirs to their kamma." So even if this cyclone wasn't it, they're going to be experiencing the results of their negative actions someday.
6 comments:
Considering the relationship between merit and legitimation of rule in Southeast Asia, when a disaster on national scale happens, it stands to reason that people might start to wonder if the merit of the ruler has run out, requiring a new ruler. In a way, it is precisely because we don't know the inner workings of karma that ideas like this are so workable; a natural disaster could be caused by an otherwise good king's eon-old bad karma coming to fruition. Who knows? People will always speculate, I suppose...
Sorry but youre really out there.
How the heck could this ever be caused by karma? Even if you believed in karma and if it worked this way, 10,000 innocent people lost their lives. These people are not regime heads.
I think you really need to think about the small place in the universe your religion truly exists in and think about how people through history have been blaming natural disasters on people they dont like. You blame the regime. Jerry Fawell blames gays and secularists.
Honestly, if you think this way you should be ashamed of yourself and wonder where you went wrong in life to even be saying these things in public. I hope you never have to experince first hand what a real disaster is like. If you do you'll see theres no reason to weather systems, just molecules internacting with one another and credulous people like you trying to make "sense" of it all.
Seems that our foolish "random visitor" jumped to conclusions and didn't read the article since he's attributing things to it that are actually the opposite of what it said! The article itself, written before his comments, refutes his own statements. I have to wonder if he even read past the headline. Even though the comment is arguably spam, I think I'll leave it there anyway since I have little reason to feel threatened by false bigoted statements, and it's kind of amusing to anyone who did read the article.
lotus_in_the_hills: "In a way, it is precisely because we don't know the inner workings of karma that ideas like this are so workable; a natural disaster could be caused by an otherwise good king's eon-old bad karma coming to fruition. Who knows?"
Here's the thing though. The results of kamma are actually about the experiences of the person who took the action. It seems to me that the cyclone itself is simply one of those natural events that occurs due to "change in season" or something as mentioned in the quoted suttas.
However, what was chosen by a human was the date of the referendum! In fact, there's good reason to believe that the date was specifically chosen for less than honorable reasons, meaning that theoretically this blameful action should have some negative consequences at some point for the person who took it.
So what is more believable is that the coincidence between the referendum and the cyclone might have been caused by kamma. After all, if the date had been set later into the future as it should have been then it wouldn't have coincided with the cyclone. Thus part of the coincidence, unlike the cyclone, clearly had human action as input and was arguably partially caused by a human even if there's no obvious way he could have known about the cyclone.
Anyway, this is all just me talking about what might or might not make sense in terms of Buddhist philosophy, and what the political implications are. Seems like even if we can show that according to Buddhist philosophy it isn't possible to tell if the cyclone was caused by kamma, people are going to speculate that it did anyway and this is going to have political consequences.
Now, had this cyclone occurred during a time when people were happy with the government, I have to wonder if they'd be speculating in this manner.
Sorry, I think I didn't word my response clearly enough, which led to random visitor's reaction. As Robert has already pointed out, there's no way for any of us to know whether people's deaths in the cyclone were or were not caused by one thing or the other. I am certainly not making any such claim.
What I meant to say was that, historically, because of Southeast Asian rulers taking up the model of the cakkavatin, the universal monarch at the center of his own microcosm, the welfare of the kingdom and the legitimacy of a king's rule are intertwined in a uniquely Buddhist way. If there was disease, if there is famine or some other disaster, that lent credence to the idea that the ruler's merit was failing. What appears to be the issue Robert is taking up is to what extent this kind of outlook can be located within canonical Buddhist doctrine.
Thanks lotus, that's basically it. I'm curious about what people in SE Asia reportedly believe and what the canonical texts seem to suggest makes sense (which probably doesn't agree with "folk Buddhism").
I'm going to make another post where I'll be more explicit and try to avoid misunderstanding, but it's very difficult to get into the technical details of the philosophy especially if the reader doesn't understand ontology (objects) vs. phenomenology (phenomena). In the Pali Canon, kamma is described in terms of individual experience of phenomena rather than something that say creates objects.
Kamma is kind of painful to talk about due to the finer points of the philosophy, the complexity, and popular misunderstandings like "if you kick a dog then one day a dog will run up at random and bite you" which are contradictory to the pali texts.
I can't really answer this from the perspective of someone in Asia or as someone who grew up with folk beliefs because I grew up in the fiercely materialist secular West which would dismiss any claims to a non "scientific" way of looking at this. It's interesting to think about the possibility of kamma playing a role in this, but as you and the Buddha have said, it's really all just speculation in some ways. It's interesting to ponder but I don't know if one could ever come to a conclusion about whether or not kamma played a role unless one was fully enlightened.
Post a Comment