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Non-Western Philosophy

Karma & Human Freedom

Utkarsh Chawla tells us why we’re in the moral Goldilocks zone.

What makes a human life distinctively human? Buddhist thought answers this question in a cosmological vein. Herein humans are one among numerous forms of life that inhabit the universe. These categories of life are far broader than those modern biology has to offer us. Each form of life has its own radically different embodiment, lived-world and circumstances of existing. And yet, Buddhist texts stress, the human form of life provides the greatest opportunity for spiritual and ethical development. This renders human life particularly precious. Discussions gesture at a particular freedom available to humans that is simply unavailable to other kinds of beings. In this article I will be meditating upon the nature of this freedom: just what makes a human life so uniquely free? After introducing some traditional Indian Buddhist cosmological narratives (shared by Himalayan Buddhism), I will try to flesh out what seems to be at the heart of human life as conceived by Buddhist thought, drawing on the views of the seminal 4th-5th century CE Indian philosopher Vasubandhu. My argument draws heavily from Sonam Kachru’s philosophical reconstruction of Vasubandhu’s views of mindedness, as found in Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism (2021).

Mandala 19th century Public Domain

The Buddha speaks of ‘three marks of existence’. The first mark, impermanence (anitya), speaks to the transient nature of all existents. We would be hard-pressed to find a thing which hasn’t changed at all: physical things break; our bodies age and die; and complex systems evolve. Furthermore, this transience holds within it the possibilities of stress and dissatisfaction (duhkha), the second mark of existence; palpable when our lucky streaks end and our fortunes turn. Because of impermanence we are never completely at ease; always vaguely fearful of some impending change or loss just round the corner. It is also due to impermanence, that a single unchanging essence or ‘self’ (anātman, the third mark) that anchors us can never be found. Only selfless phenomena – rapidly changing thoughts, emotions, habituated complexes of action-reaction and bodily sensation form dense patterns of interaction which unendingly propel our lives forward. This is of course at the heart of the idea of samsāra (literally, ‘wandering around’); an endless cycle of birth and rebirth. Unlike other Indian philosophies, and in keeping with the third mark anātman, Buddhism considers these dense patterns of interaction enough to keep driving this cycle. No immortal soul that transmigrates from one life to the next is required.The kind of actions committed by an individual in one lifetime conditions the formation of a specific consciousness in the next, similar to how a single flame appears to ‘travel’ from one wick to the next, even though one candle is simply lighting another, and another. When an individual performs actions out of greed, hatred, or delusion, negative, painful results are engendered in this lifetime or future ones. By contrast, virtuous karma, motivated by generosity, lovingkindness, and wisdom, produces positive, pleasant results. Because no unchanging essence, self or soul is being carried forward; the current predicament we find ourselves in can only be understood in light of patterns of the past—not just our own but to the history of action and reaction committed by individuals in previous lives to whom we are karmically linked.

The Buddhist Cosmological Narrative

Buddhists paint vivid depictions of different forms of life: hungry ghosts at the peripheries of our world, or subterranean hell dwellers, for example. Such portrayals challenge modern sensibilities, but we must resist allegorizing these narratives. For millennia, Buddhists have considered them literally true. To uncover just how Buddhism has thought about human life, we would be well served to take these portrayals seriously.

Buddhist cosmology speaks of three realms. Beings in the realms of form and of formlessness exist in subtle kinds of meditative absorptions for aeons, comparable to inhabiting a deep, dreamless sleep. Here, we are more interested in the remaining realm of desire and their denizens: hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, long-lived gods, and humans. Hell beings are those who in previous lives committed extreme acts of violence or hatred, who now find themselves in a variety of torturous and inhospitable subterranean environments. For example, in the ‘reviving hell’, beings are born on a floor of burning embers, with a variety of weapons at hand. As the hellish beings find their bearings, the sight of others with weapons drives them into a murderous rage, convinced that they are beholding their mortal enemies, so mass brawling and rioting spontaneously erupts. Once all the beings have maimed and murdered one another, by the force of their karma, these beings are again revived, so that they can once again repeat the entire spectacle, again and again. Meanwhile, beings reborn in the eight cold hells find themselves stranded in extremely cold climates without any clothes. Yet while torturous living in each hell is said to go on for an extremely long time, Buddhist texts stress that it is not eternal. As the karmic potentials responsible for the hellish experience exhaust, the hell being is reborn in another realm, and the cycle of samsāra continues.

Hungry ghosts (pretas) are those who in previous lives consistently acted out of avarice and greed. In one story, an extremely petty brahmin who throws a tantrum when his wife gives the first portion of a delicious meal to a humble begging monk before serving it to him or other brahmins, is reborn as a hungry ghost. Pretas are described as having long thin necks and pin-hole sized mouths while also having large, distended bellies. They have enormous appetites – a reflection of their history of greed – and yet have no way of satiating their hunger: their tiny mouths render consumption extremely painful, and when they do ingest food, the length and constriction of their throats means the food takes forever to reach their bellies. Furthermore, a preta’s environment constantly plays tricks on it, perpetually frustrating it: if a thirsty preta were to spy a source of water faraway, by the time they get closer, the ‘water’ would reveal itself to be repugnant filthy sludge. Even when the brahmin-turned-hungry-ghost is given food by a person who takes pity, the food instantaneously turns to inedible chaff for the frustrated preta.

Meanwhile, beings who often commit non-virtuous action out of confusion, stupidity, or ignorance, are eventually reborn into the animal realm. Animals suffer precisely because of their lack of intelligence, being ruled by instinct and oppressed by a fearful environment. Wild animals are in constant fear of being eaten by other animals, and routinely outsmarted by hunters. Domesticated animals, meanwhile, are made into beasts of burden, or exploited for their eggs, fur, skin, or flesh. They are powerless to respond, being dependent on their human masters or fearful of brutal punishment. And as these animals grow old, they are either abandoned, or sent to the butcher to be turned into meat.

Because of the extreme suffering these various beings endure, the above realms are called ‘unfortunate destinations’ (durgati) for rebirth. However, with a godly (deva) rebirth, we are presented with a ‘fortunate’ (sadgati) destination. But the fortunate destinations aren’t above suffering either – especially the suffering born from impermanence.

Individuals who have in previous lives have practiced moral virtuousness, such as being generous and charitable, are reborn into the deva realms. While such activity is preferable to overt non-virtue, the texts have much to say about how it usually falls a long way short of the ideal. Ideal virtuousness is a kind of spontaneous ethical engagement with the world which lacks self-consciousness tied to either egotism or subject-object duality. But virtuous actions impelling a godly rebirth are invariably laced with subtle (or not-so-subtle) self-concern, such as, a feeling of pride in one’s ethical discipline, or holding tacit hopes of being rewarded when one performs an act of charity. Even individuals who display seemingly selfless compassion might still involuntarily conceive the situation as a ‘doer’ who helps a ‘recipient’. This is a kind of dualistic perception of reality that ultimately brings about a subtle self-preoccupation which renders the virtue imperfect.

Mask for the Tsam ritual dance © Pierre André Leclercq 1995 Creative Commons 4

The gods, born as a result of imperfect virtue, continue their preoccupation with self-gratification. They’re pampered with every imaginable comfort and luxury, residing in palaces, seated on thrones encrusted with jewels, and serviced by large retinues of attendants. Their bodies are always in perfect health, and they never age. If this were not enough, different gods have other favourable endowments. The caturmahārājika gods, for example, have the ability to make pleasant things appear the second they think of them. The nirmānrati gods, meanwhile, can endlessly entertain themselves using their power to conjure up illusory forms. Yet the gods are not above the fact of impermanence. After long periods of time, the gods’ virtuous karma – the force behind their comfortable experience – starts to run out. At first, the deva’s sublime physicality seems to give way: they start to smell; they lose their innate glow; their clothes become tattered. Their thrones starts to feel uncomfortable. Then, their retinues, rather insubordinately, start to avoid them. Finally, such gods becomes filled with a sense of anxiety and unease. As they review their lives, they’re struck by the conspicuous absence of any virtue or attempts at spiritual cultivation. The deva starts to fear the worst: a bad rebirth. Indeed, when the god eventually dies, they’re reborn in a lower realm, frequently as an animal, precisely because of the absence of any kind of virtue done during their godly lifetime.

Finally, we turn to human rebirth. A human rebirth is described as being impelled by ‘middling virtue’; less virtuous than the karma impelling a godly rebirth, but more virtuous than that behind the three unfortunate rebirths. This gives human rebirth a mix of good and bad characteristics. Unlike the gods, humans do suffer in injury, sickness, ageing; and yet humans do not suffer as unrelentingly as animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings. This makes human life neither overwhelmingly blissful nor fraught with unending torment. In this way, in the space of variations of life, human rebirth seems ‘fine-tuned’ for ethical and spiritual development. Were it any less comfortable, spiritual and ethical development would not be possible, and were it any more comfortable, the impetus for spiritual and ethical development would be absent. This points to the human world having just the ‘right’ amount of adversity, misfortune, and suffering, as the decisive factor in making human life ‘precious’. The world offers just enough hardship to afford the individual rich opportunities to renounce self-centered myopic projects, for more meaningful projects of spiritual and ethical development.

Traditional descriptions then tantalizingly touch upon the idea of human freedom. One such exposition reads:

“Used well, this [human] body is a ship to liberation,
Otherwise it is an anchor in samsara.
This body is the agent of all good and evil…
It is as humans… and not as gods, that every one of the thousand Buddhas of this age has attained, or will attain, enlightenment.”
(Enlightened Courage, Dilgo Khyentse, 2006, p.15)

Two strong claims are outlined here. Firstly, it’s claimed that human rebirth allows for multifarious possibilities for living. One such mode of living is the kind of shallow, unreflective life which keeps one anchored to the unending cycle of highs and lows, successes and losses, birth, death, and rebirth. Another corresponds to a reflective life of ethical virtuousness. Secondly, it’s in this life form and not any other that all the enlightened Buddhas arise.

Such terse descriptions hint at a rich account of human freedom. To uncover this account we will now turn to Vasubandhu’s work; and to understand Vasubandhu’s conclusions we will revisit the godly form of life, to examine how the gods might be unfree.

Why the Gods are Not Free

What’s striking about the godly lifeworld is the conspicuous lack of virtue displayed by the gods. One might ask why this is so: after all, even in the absence of hardship or obstacles, and the presence of great affluence, virtuous actions should be possible. Furthermore, this would go a long way in prolonging the comfortable circumstances the gods so enjoy.

I would like us to consider a possible explanation for this which speaks to the structural conditions underlying a godly life. Let’s think through an example of some virtuous action, such as helping someone. Always preceding a virtuous action is an encounter with the unpleasant. When we chance upon someone hurt, injured, or in need of help, their situation perturbs us, affecting us sometimes quite viscerally. With supporting conditions, this brings forth in us an intent to resolve, alleviate, or soothe, which leads to the virtuous act. One such supporting condition is a sense of duty; itself supported perhaps by the implicit view that when we do good to others, our kindness is rewarded, maybe not immediately, but in the long run. Another supporting condition could be a sense of compassion focused on the object itself rather than how we stand to gain. In both cases, self-focus is either strongly or weakly displaced, if only temporarily.

Let’s contrast this with the kinds of objects chanced upon by the gods in their situation, the emotional affects these evoke, and the actions consequently drawn forth. The narratives continually mention objects and beings that delight the gods, and the gods responding appropriately by fully enjoying these beings and objects. What I’m slowly walking towards is an idea concerning the tight pairing of a being’s mind and the world it experiences. This is the idea Vasubandhu’s working with, which I’ll explain through the language of affordances.

Following James Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), an ‘affordance’ is what the environment offers to an organism or furnishes for an organism based on the organism’s own history of action and the kind of being it is. For instance, a chair affords sitting to a human because humans have a history of sitting. For a chimpanzee, the same chair does not afford sitting in the same way: to the chimp, the chair presents like an odd tree-like structure that affords climbing or using as a launch pad to jump from, or obstacle to go around. This is because the chimpanzee is the kind of being with a history of climbing, jumping, or averting obstacles, but not sitting on chairs.

For Vasubandhu, a similar idea is at play through ethically significant action – that is, through karma. A being’s karmic history not only conditions the being’s embodiment and psychology, it also draws out aspects of its environment that correlate with the being’s history of action, which present as affordances to the being. This is why hell beings with a karmic history of extreme violence perceive a hell filled with their enemies ever-ready to attack. Their environment affords being perceived in that way and so solicits a narrow, context-specific set of actions perfectly correlated with the nature of that perception – flying into a rage. Because the godly rebirth is impelled by uniformly virtuous karma, the fruits of that karma are uniformly pleasant. A pleasing body and environment can only evoke delight and solicit constant vain merrymaking and enjoyment. This is why structurally the gods are not free to commit virtue.

The Case for Human Freedom

In the fourth chapter of his compendium the Abhidharmakośa (Treasury of the Abhidharma), Vasubandhu rehearses a question and answer aimed squarely at the human rebirth:

“The variety of the world arises from the actions of living beings. But… how does it happen that actions produce at one and the same time pleasing things – saffron, sandalwood, etc. – on the one hand, and bodies of quite opposite qualities on the other?

The actions of beings whose conduct is a mixture of good and bad actions produce bodies resembling abscesses whose impurities flow out through the nine gates, and, in order to serve as a remedy to these bodies, they also produce objects of pleasing enjoyment, colors and shapes, odors, tastes and tangibles.”

(trans. Leo M. Pruden, 1991, Vol.2, p.551)

Vasubandhu asks what kind of karma produces a world where exquisitely pleasing aromatics like saffron and sandalwood can be found, while also producing beings with bodies which are unpleasant; drawing on a Buddhist trope that the human body is deeply repugnant. The ‘nine gates’ of the body – eyes, ears, nostrils, anus, urethra and sweat pores – are sites that routinely need cleaning, and the body (rūpa) as a whole is acutely susceptible to decay, deformation and disintegration (ruppati) by ageing, sickness and the elements. Vasubandhu is asking what karmic history produces such mixed results? The answer, unsurprisingly, is a karmic history of mixed virutous action; action which, while not uniformly virtuously, nonetheless tends towards net virtue.

Such a point might not seem particularly insightful until we realize that this need not be the case. Recall the hungry ghost rebirth, underpinned by uniformly non-virtuous action, where the environment affords perpetual frustration rather than even the remote possibility of gratification: the hungry ghost feels enormous hunger and thirst, but food and drink are not easily found; or if a preta were to seek out shade during the day, he’d immediately be burned worse than if he stood out in the open. This is not the case with the human form of life. The human world is karmically constituted to bring into view objects, beings, and generally, states of affairs, that can be pleasing, and offer respite to the human condition. But, crucially, since the human rebirth is not conditioned by uniformly virtuous action, it can just as easily bring into view unpleasant objects and beings. The human world therefore becomes a field of great complexity. In this way it is fundamentally different from the life-worlds of either the gods or of the lower realms. Mixed virtuous action underpins a field of great heterogeneity and diversity, pertaining to the kinds of things chanced upon, the kinds of affect they inspire in us, and the variety of actions they solicit from us. In a nutshell, this heterogeneity of experience guarantees our freedom to act in a variety of ways – why we are ultimately more free than other forms of life, which have a much smaller domain of possible action.

How should such freedom be used? Well, under certain conditions, the human project could easily become an exercise in avoiding the unpleasant and associating with the pleasant; of seeking out that which consummates desire (however temporarily), and discarding that which doesn’t. When this happens, as the texts warn us, human life becomes an anchor keeping one tethered to the spectacle of samsāra. On the other hand, under special conditions, the human project can be transformed into one which focuses on ethical and spiritual flourishing and turns its back on mundane values. This can happen when, say, an individual dismisses nihilism or materialism, when they inhabit circumstances that allow for ethical conduct, and when they have access to a liberative philosophy. Traditional texts list a series of supporting conditions necessary even after one has gained a human rebirth before one can use one’s freedom in spiritually and ethically rewarding ways. They include not having the wrong view (such as nihilism or materialism), having the right livelihood, being born in a land where one has access to a liberative path, etc. And the texts tell us, when this refocusing on ethical and spiritual flourishing happens, the preciousness of one’s human rebirth is actualized – turned from a mere possibility into a concrete reality.

Conclusion

With its rich tapestry of ideas, Buddhism provides a unique answer to the question of what it means to be human. At the heart of this analysis is the idea of a moral freedom – the freedom to act ethically or unethically – afforded to humans by the constitutive conditions of the human world, mixed virtuous action. These conditions thus give rise to the human capacity for both good and bad, virtue and non virtue. The human birth then becomes an inflection-point of sorts: on the one hand, it may lead straight to the paradise of the devas, or to the pain of the lower realms – depending on the karma one sows here and now. On the other hand, it takes one either towards the good life of ethical perfection, or to the tepid mundane complacency that keeps one wandering around.

Utkarsh Chawla has a Master’s degree in Buddhist Studies from Rangjung Yeshe Institute, Kathmandu University. His research focused on classical Yogacara thought and its resonance with modern fields such as phenomenology. He also spent a year studying Classical Tibetan and Sanskrit, at Nalanda University and Delhi University.